A few months ago a company did a study in which they compare the annual prices paid by consumers for charging various electronic products in their homes, and the iDevices had a very low charging price. The iPad 3 requires $1.36 to charge for a year, an iPhone 4 requires $0.38, and now we find out that the annual loading price of one iPhone 5 it is only $0.41. The price is low and is even lower than what is needed to charge a Samsung Galaxy S III, the Asian terminal costing a user $0.53 per year for charging, but this is because it has a larger battery.
Even if we consider just the 170 million iPhone 5's that are projected to be sold globally in the next year, their aggregate electricity requirements are nothing to sneeze at. The collective annual electricity consumption of the iPhone 5's sold within 12 months will be equivalent to the annual electricity usage of 54,000 US households (roughly equivalent to the size of Cedar Rapids – the second largest city in Iowa). That's just for one smartphone model over one year.
The study calculated the price of kilowatt/hour at 11.8 cents and of course the result is just to show us how little we pay to charge these devices. It is interesting, however, that even large electronics do not require a lot of money annually to be charged, but what is more interesting is that an XBOX 360 consumes more current than a PC or an ordinary TV, a sign that there are some components hidden there that are not quite so gentle with nature.
