I was surprised, but this calculation checks out. Wild. This really points to the scale of influence that large companies have, especially considering this is < 0.1% of typical household electricity consumption. Consider then that household electricity consumption is not the complete picture - add in cars (both ICE and electric being ~ICE/4), food production, etc, and you see both how much energy we use and how much single entities influence this amount. According to the internet, google data centers are ~1 million households (I saw 15TWh/yr), so 1% efficiency improvements are a small town worth of electricity. At they same time, they claim 3m household savings due to Nest, wow.

At Apple’s scale a more worthwhile problem is reducing ewaste and reusing what’s available. For instance, not designing their overpriced devices to kill themselves regularly.

This is still nice, mind you, but hiring competent designers and setting up reusable designs is a far more important problem. One they’re not willing to touch.

They were throttling CPUs to literally extend the life of the phone. They did it so your phone could still run reliably with an old battery which would otherwise need to be replaced.

> Note a year ago they settled a lawsuit about throttling CPUs with updates on older iphones for the same purpose.

Why do people spread this sort of stuff? Apple have never settled anything related to a “play” to intentionally shorten the lifetime of a phone.

Batterygate extended the life of individual handsets with degraded batteries that were out of warranty. These handsets were rebooting due to the battery until Apple brought out an update that throttled them after the next brownout, and replacing the battery brought the handset back to full speed. Why go to all that trouble if you wanted to sell another phone?

I never understood the use of the phrase "virtue signalling" until I realised that the people using it literally don't believe that the problem and/or the solution exists.

So, imagine that you didn't believe that the earth was warming, or that humans contributed to that, or that we can't do anything to change that if it was the case, etc. etc.

Clearly anyone bringing attention to these so-called facts or proposing or implementing alleged solutions to the non-existing problem isn't actually achieving anything. They're just signalling virtue to others in their confused tribe.

Same with racism, sexism and any other fictitious problems that don't exist and that therefore don't have solutions. You can't fix problems that don't exist hence pretending the problem or a solution to it exists is just "virtue signalling".