How Much Does it Cost to Charge the iPhone 6?

With the iPhone 6 now out in full force, many users are curious what kind of battery life they’ll get with the new device. However, users seem to ignore the most important factor when it comes to charging their iPhone 6’s battery: Cost.

As you may know, electricity isn’t free, and it’s costing you every time you need to plug in your iPhone 6 to charge it up. But how much exactly is charging your iPhone 6 costing you? It turns out, very little.

According to a study conducted by Opower, it costs an average of just $0.47 per year to charge that iPhone 6. Of course, even that calculation could be a bit too high. The study says that the math is based on charging your iPhone 6 from 0% to 100% once every day. However, that’s usually not accurate to how most users charger their smartphones. With that said, it’s safe to assume that the cost to charge an iPhone 6 is even cheaper than $0.47 per year.

How is something like this calculated, though? It’s pretty simple, as the iPhone 6 charges from 0% to 100% in about two hours, which uses around 10.6 watt-hours of energy. Then, just multiply that by 365 days and you get 3.83 kilowatt-hours that’s used in one year of iPhone 6 charging.

 

From there, take the average cost of electricity in the US, which is about $0.12 per kWh), and you get $0.47 per year. It’s certainly not rocket science to figure out.

However, this only accounts for the 4.7-inch iPhone 6. For the iPhone 6 Plus, it costs around $0.51 per year to charge, which is just a nickel higher than its smaller brethren.

For comparison, the iPhone 5 costs around $0.41 per year to charge. That’s incredibly low for an electronic device that you use every day, but thanks to the ability for smartphones to operate on such low power due to the advancements in technology, charging them up barely takes any energy at all.

Laptops and desktop computers, on the other hand, are a slightly different story. A laptop uses around 14-times more electricity per year than a smartphone, while a desktop computer uses around 49-times more electricity.

Of course, the iPhone 6 comes with support for faster charging using an iPad charger. All iPhone 6 models come with the normal 5W 1A wall charger, but it turns out you can charge your iPhone 6 faster than the 5W charger could, and it’s thanks to support for Apple’s 10W 2.1A iPad chargers.

In the past, you could technically charge your iPhone 5s or iPhone 5 using the larger iPad chargers, with the false notion that more output from the larger charger would allow for faster charging. However, the iPhone is designed to only pull in enough juice that will adequately charge it, meaning that using a larger iPad charger wasn’t really worth it in the long run.

With previous iPhones, it was recommended to charge them with their included 5W charger, mostly because using any kind of larger charger wouldn’t really help a whole lot, due to the reasons stated above, and some experts even claimed that charging your phone with a larger charger could damage your phone’s battery over time. However, it looks like the iPhone 6 can use iPad chargers without a problem.

Granted, the iPhone 6 will charge just fine using a 5W charger, but it seems that users will finally get real benefits from using a larger 10W iPad charger.