Smartphone manufacturers sometimes tend to go out of the way by incorporating environmentally friendly features, but in some cases, it might tend to backfire. And it’s not mainly due to the motive behind that feature, but rather its method of implementation. And this is exactly what’s going on with Apple’s newly introduced Clean Energy Charging.
Apple shouldn’t have enabled Clean Energy Charging by default
With iOS 16.1 update, Apple has silently rolled out and enabled [by default] the Clean Energy Charging feature on every iPhone. So when you connect your device to a charger, it will get a forecast of the carbon emissions in your local energy grid and would then use this information to charge your iPhone when there is cleaner energy production. However, it hasn’t gone too well with many users, and that is completely understandable.
First off, many have voiced their concern that they are witnessing extremely slow charging speeds after enabling this feature. Then the fact that Apple decided to enable this feature by default without letting the user decide on the same only made the matter worse. Moroever, the limited awareness of this functionality and a lack of transparency on their part didn’t help its cause either.
As a result of this, their device now takes a couple of additional hours to get fully charged as opposed to earlier times when this feature wasn’t introduced. In this regard, Apple has said that it uses the Optimized Battery Charging feature to learn your charging habits and then make use of Clean Energy Charging accordingly on your iPhone.
In other words, this feature will only kick in under those circumstances wherein “you spend the most time and regularly charge your iPhone for long periods of time, such as your home and place of work”. While it makes sense up to an extent, but most users are not comfortable in slow charging their device every time they are at work or home because there’s a term known as an emergency situation that might arise at either of the two locations [well, these are the only two locations one spends most of their time].
So a much better approach would have been to introduce this feature but keep it disabled. Just let the user know of the benefits involved and they could enable and disable it as and when they deem it fit. With that said, we should at least thank the Cupertino giant is giving us granular control over this feature and not taking a dogmatic approach, something that has become a common trend with most tech behemoths.
So if you believe that you could take a slight break from saving the world’s ecosystem, then go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging and turn off Clean Energy Charging so that you could reclaim the lost glory aka your device’s actual charging speed.
On that note, I round off my opinionated post. If some or even most of you aren’t in line with my thoughts, then I completely welcome and respect your opinion. But I would really appreciate it if you do let me know your point of view as well in the comments.
