Apple and the Environment

At Apple we not only design our products to be efficient in the office or at home, but also to be energy efficient. This saves you money on your energy bills, while saving us all from using more of our precious natural resources.

Designed to consume less

Energy consumption during product use is one of the most significant contributors to CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions in Apple products. That’s why one of our key goals in product design is to create products that are energy efficient. Lower power consumption reduces energy bills and mitigates the environmental impact associated with greenhouse gas emissions from power generation plants.

Our goal is to meet or exceed the standards set by several programs:

• The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ENERGY STAR® program, of which Apple was a founding member
• The California Energy Commission appliance efficiency regulations
• The European Union Code of Conduct on Efficiency for External Power Supplies

Efficiency out of the box

There are three ways to reduce a product’s energy consumption: by using power supplies that are more efficient, using components that require less power, or by using power management software to modulate the energy consumption of these components according to the task. Apple employs all three to maximise energy efficiency.

We believe efficiency should be the norm. Our computers ship with power management enabled, meaning that a low-power sleep mode will automatically activate if there has been no user activity for 10 minutes. Mac OS X allows your computer to rapidly scale processor performance to optimize energy use depending on how much work the processor is doing, or operate at reduced processor speed to save even more energy. Each of our systems also ship with highly efficient power supplies as a standard feature.

Apple’s continuing efforts to improve energy efficiency have led to a number of notable successes. For example:

• Improvements in CPU power management and the migration to LCD (liquid crystal display) technology enabled a power savings of 92% in sleep-mode and a 73% decrease in off-mode power consumption between the first generation and the current iMac.
• Mac mini consumes as little as 25W when on, less than half the power consumed by a typical¹ light bulb, making it one of the most power efficient desktop computers in the world.
• At only 13W when on, MacBook Air consumes the least amount of power of any Apple portable or desktop computer in production.
• Since 1998, Apple has cut the off-mode power consumption of power adapters used with our portable computers by 82% in a no-load situation:

1998-2005 data for 45W adapters; 2006-2007 data for 60W MacBook and 85W MacBook Pro adapters.

1. Based on an incandescent 60W light bulb.