SumnerH said:
By far the most common thing to break on my phones (and, hell, laptops as well) is the charging connector. On my iphone it was the thing that finally got so bad I had to replace the phone. Adding even 10% to the life of a phone would probably dwarf the environmental impact of the efficiency loss of charging.
Just from my own experience, I haven't had a connector stop working on a phone since my LG enV. That includes two BlackBerrys (Storm and Tour), the Motorola Droid, and iPhones 4, 4S, 5, and 5S. Is refurbishing a phone really that carbon-intensive that most all phones should essentially leak power just to prevent charger connectors from
potentially breaking? I would guess connector failure is exceedingly rare, anyway. Generally when a charging connection is failing is because there's dust buildup in the slot. Also, don't a good amount of Android phones come with a charge port cover anyway?
Now I am not implying this is Apple's motivation, but merely asking why we are so wasteful just for the sake of making something already convenient even more so. With hundreds of millions of 1440 mAh+ batteries being charged, the amount of energy being wasted adds up. I also think that this is the issue with most (relatively) nascent technologies, and I don't think there's a rush by Apple to bring it to market until it's past that extended beta stage.