Apple and the Environment

At Apple, we design our products to be productive and energy efficient. They let you get your work done at home, in school, or at the office while saving you money on your energy bills and conserving our precious natural resources.

Designed to consume less

Energy consumption during product use is one of the most significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions from 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 U.S. 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 Energy Efficiency of 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, by using components that require less power, and by using power management software to modulate the energy consumption of these components according to the task. Apple employs all three methods to maximize energy efficiency.

We believe efficiency should be the norm. Apple computers ship with power management enabled, meaning that a low-power sleep mode automatically activates 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 to operate at reduced processor speed to save even more energy. All 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 iMac and the current iMac.
• Mac mini consumes as little as 13W when idle, less than half the power consumed by a typical* light bulb, making it the most energy-efficient desktop computer in the world.
• Using only 13W when on, MacBook Air consumes the least amount of power of any Apple portable or desktop computer in production.

• * Based on an incandescent 60W light bulb.