According to a report by Opower, an energy efficiency company, Apple’s new iPhone 5 doesn’t cost a whole lot to charge per year. It is estimated that iPhone 5 owners will spend about 41˘ in an entire year charging their iPhone 5. This is very inexpensive, but 3˘ more per year than it would cost to charge an iPhone 4. The iPhone 5 also costs less to charge in a year than the competing product, the Samsung Galaxy SIII, which is estimated to cost 53˘ per year to charge.
In case you’ve been slacking on your lithium-ion rechargeable battery studies in school, Apple’s engineering teams have been increasing the capacities of the batteries in Apple’s devices so they can hold more juice. This allows Apple to advertise great battery life even with demanding technology like 4G LTE, increased memory, and more CPU and GPU performance. The greater capacities ultimately mean using more electricity to charge the battery.
These numbers assume charging from 0-100% each time, once a day, while the devices are turned completely off. They’re very unbiased numbers, but they probably aren’t as realistic as we would like to hope, since most people don’t let their batteries drop to 0% before charging and don’t fully power down their devices to charge them. Another factor is that some people leave their devices in standby mode more than others and some just drain the battery every couple of hours through constant hardware usage, such as GPU-intensive gaming.
The chart from Opower also includes some interesting statistics regarding how the cost of charging the iPhone 5 compares to other kinds of electrical devices throughout the course of a year, such as televisions, computers, and game consoles.
Sources: Opower via MacRumors
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