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 is one of the most significant environmental impacts a computer or electronic device produces over time. That’s why one of our key goals in product design is to create products that are energy efficient. Lower power requirements not only reduce energy bills, they also lower demand and mitigate waste, thereby helping to reduce the environmental impacts associated with C02 and other 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 two ways to reduce a product’s energy consumption: by using components that require less power or by using power management software to modulate the energy consumption of these components. Apple employs both techniques 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 optimise energy use depending on how much work the processor is doing, or operate at reduced processor speed to save even more energy.

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 88% in sleep-mode and a 73% decrease in off-mode power consumption between the first generation and the current iMac.
• The Mac mini consumes as little as 25W when on, less than half the power consumed by a typical⁽¹⁾ light bulb, making it one of the most power efficient desktop computers in the world.
• At only 10W 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 70% 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.