Electricity is currently quite expensive. Some Apple fans wonder how relevant it is to charge their iPhone every day? After all, the devices are constantly connected to the power grid, the batteries are getting bigger and the power packs are getting more and more powerful. We calculate for you what it really costs to charge a new iPhone 14.
Spoiler: The consumption of your gadgets is often completely overestimated. Just because they’re always plugged in doesn’t mean they use a lot of energy.
How much does iPhone charging cost me?
If you want to know what it costs you to charge your iPhone battery every day, you only have to take the capacity of the battery as a basis – which Apple specifies with two units: Wh and mAh. Specifying the Wh or watt hours makes more sense for our purposes; when specifying the mAh, the number of voltages would also have to be taken into account.
According to Chinese government database the battery of the iPhone 14 offers exactly 12.68 Wh, the iPhone 14 Plus and iPhone 14 Pro Max both store 16.68 Wh and the iPhone 14 Pro 12.38 Wh. For comparison: A Macbook Air has a battery with 52.6 Wh (4,561 mAh) – with which the device can also last up to 18 hours.
To get the cost of charging, all you have to do now is multiply the number of watt-hours used by your electricity price.
| model | battery capacity |
|---|---|
| iPhone 14 | 12.69Wh |
| iPhone 14Plus | 16.68Wh |
| iPhone 14 Pro | 12.38Wh |
| iPhone 14 Pro Max | 16.68Wh |
The calculation: Since it is difficult to calculate changing charging processes, we are assuming an extreme case to simplify things: The battery of your iPhone is always completely empty after a day and is fully charged again in the evening.
(In practice, you will probably get by with fewer charges. If you charge your battery for two days, the costs are halved. How often you charge your battery can be found under the Battery setting if necessary. The 10-day overview shows you how often the battery was charged in the last few days.)
Unfortunately, power packs and batteries only achieve a moderate so-called efficiency of around 70 percent – almost 30 percent are lost, but have to be paid for. So if you want to fully charge a battery with 12.68 Wh (iPhone 14), 16.48 Wh are actually consumed. Our calculation for the two large models results in 16.68 x 1.3 = 21.68 Wh. The duration of the charging process is not relevant, it is only about the costs of these 16.48 Wh or 21.69 Wh. At 37.30 cents per kWh, this is 37.30 cents x 0.01648 kWh.
iPhone 14: The entire charging costs accordingly 0.6 cents per day and at one daily charging, the costs add up to 2.24 euros per year.
iPhone 14 Plus & 14 Pro Max: The entire charging costs accordingly 0.8 cents per top-up or 2.95 euros per year.
Charging your iPhone wirelessly? Unfortunately this is one especially inefficient charging method. The power packs and batteries achieve a moderate efficiency of around 60 percent when charging wirelessly – around 40 percent are lost, but have to be paid for.
When it comes to the electricity price, we are guided by an examination of the BDEW (Federal Association of Energy and Water Industries), which in an electricity price analysis for last July came to a current average price of 37.30 cents per kilowatt hour (your electricity price can of course be cheaper or more expensive – you can see your individual price in your contract, around to do the calculation based on your data).
Why is the power consumption so low?
Despite hundreds of charging processes per year, the costs are surprisingly low, so little money can be saved here. The reason for this is the efficient technology that smartphones use. To save weight and space, every component is designed for low power consumption and a smartphone takes every opportunity to fall into a power-saving mode. For example, an iPhone CPU only runs at full clock for a few seconds for a computing task and immediately reduces its performance again after the calculation.
Current best price: Apple iPhone 14 Pro 128 GB in black
Keep an eye on power guzzlers
It’s rather amazing how much electricity other household appliances consume. Use an oil radiator like that TRRS1225 by Delonghi, it consumes a whopping 2500 watts at full power, which consumes 25000 Wh or 25 kWh for 10 hours of use per day. As a result, even with only 10 hours of full load, it costs 9.33 euros per day or almost 300 euros per month – an iPhone Max consumes at most 3 euros per year. As a rule, it is old electrical appliances that put a strain on your electricity bill – for example the old refrigerator or the elegant designer floor lamp. Of course, you can also monitor the consumption of these “large consumers” with an ammeter, which most radio-controlled sockets can do. the smart socket Eve Energy even supports Homekit. But what you should know: In our experience, the measurement results of these radio-controlled sockets should always be viewed with some skepticism. Especially with devices with low power consumption such as an Apple Watch or an iPhone, only an expensive RMS wattmeter actually provides reliable data.
Conclusion
Charging an iPhone will cost you less than a single coffee-to-go per year, this is made possible by the efficient technology of current smartphones. Financially, energy-saving techniques such as low screen brightness or energy-saving mode are of little use to you. After all, your iPhone already uses every trick to enable long battery life. You don’t even have to do without wireless charging – this charging version will cost you maybe forty or fifty cents more per year.
Tag: iphone design, iphone 14, apple iphone, iphone release