EU Energy labelling will apply to phones and tablets from June 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: EU Energy labelling will apply to phones and tablets from June 2025

#81

Post by myrmidon » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 11:28 AM UTC

hn_throw2025 wrote: post #77

myrmidon wrote: post #3

Nice page! I'm extremely happy about efforts like this. You might argue that the EU is a sprawling, wasteful bureaucracy and you would not be wrong, per se, but they made a lot of useful laws that just simply make the world a better place. Having standardized chargers for phones and laptops is SUPER nice and would never have happened without intervention IMO. The only equivalent for US "useful, average-citizen friend…

Yay for the energy label! We replaced our old tumble dryer with a modern one. The ones we had to choose from all have the energy sticker and fall into a similar band. Choose a programme, wait a couple of hours, and bam! You can go from wet to still damp, just like that. In other news, manufacturers game the system.

Sure. But even if this would be a full tradeoff between product performance and energy use (which it really isn't, you can typically eliminate a lot of power consumption without impacting performance at all in domestic appliances), than that would be already an improvement:

Without any energy labeling, the manufacturer has basically no incentive to provide any comparable information on energy use (especially if his device is subpar at it), and it's impossible for consumers to make informed decisions when buying (and very easy for extremely wasteful trash-products to get sold).

It also would be very appealing to just waste a ton of electricity for marginally better performance, because wasted electricity costs the device manufacturer nothing.

Re: EU Energy labelling will apply to phones and tablets from June 2025

#82

Post by gessha » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 12:22 PM UTC

dns_snek wrote: post #79

gessha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. The numbers go the opposite way if you check household prices. Are prices in Germany anomalous due to them putting their eggs in the Russian gas basket? Countries with nuclear power plants seem to have lower electricity prices (who would've known). US $0.18/kWh [1] DE $0.44/kWh [2] EU $0.32/kWh [2] [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 [2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-ex…

Regarding [1], do these numbers include other charges that appear on the electric bill (e.g. distribution, fixed fees) and all local taxes?

Yep, if you Ctrl+F for taxes you get

> All fuel prices include applicable Federal, State, and local taxes

Re: EU Energy labelling will apply to phones and tablets from June 2025

#83

Post by nottorp » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

dns_snek wrote: post #80

nottorp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should be a lot more de minimis exemptions from the whole CE marking system. There are a lot of EU wide requirements that create barriers to entry. Before Altman's scareware campaign to "regulate" "AI", there was: Exhibit 1: https://pcengines.ch/recycle.htm See the blurb about not being able to sell direct to customers in the EU. [Think the company has shut down or is shutting down, possibly because of that t…

> [Think the company has shut down or is shutting down, possibly because of that too.] It looks like they're shutting down because megacorporations don't want to support small business endeavors, which is perhaps the most critical barrier to entry if you want to do anything in this space. https://pcengines.ch/eol.htm > After a long production run, AMD will accept last orders for the SOC used in our apu2/3/4/5/6 board…

Hmm. That may be an AMD "feature".

Considering I have a pretty decent router board on my desk, waiting to be set up, just with an Intel processor. Made by some shop in China. I've had a friend do my research so I don't know if it's a big or small shop, but what's the likelihood they order CPUs by the million?

https://www.toptonpc.com/product/12th-gen-intel-i3-n305-n100...

But then, that thing won't run passively.

Re: EU Energy labelling will apply to phones and tablets from June 2025

#84

Post by nottorp » Fri, Apr 25, 2025, 3:45 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #68

nottorp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much charging infrastructure China has built inside their borders for their cheap EVs. In the EU, everyone who could afford an EV probably already has one. The rest will buy what they can afford and can charge.

> everyone who could afford an EV probably already has one Obviously not: this depends on the price of EVs, which is a constantly moving target and is determined by .. the import tariffs I just mentioned. Not to mention that cars have a long product lifecycle. I could afford an electric car, I have a space to park it, but for the time being I'm using my elderly petrol car because my annual mileage is low. https://www…

> EV tech has changed a lot in that time.

Sort of. They came out with some tiny city cars that are cheaper but everything else has maintained and increased price.

Where's my cheap all electric mini suv with awd [1] that i can take for a holiday when i rent a cabin in the woods without worrying if i can make it up there and make it back home?

Where are the charging stations on the way to the mountains and back? How much of my weekend do i need to sacrifice for charging time instead of hiking?

[1] I have one. Just gas guzzling.

Re: EU Energy labelling will apply to phones and tablets from June 2025

#85

Post by palata » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 9:27 AM UTC

bzzzt wrote: post #16

wiz21c wrote: post #13

In the shop in my town, they sell televisions. Led ones, oled ones, big screen, the usual stuff. They have about 50 models. All have energy labels C or worse. No A, no A+, no B... Once there was an A one but the picture quality was horrible. I'm happy to be more conscious, but someone is working against the scheme: I don't have a real choice...

There's the law of conservation of energy. If you want a nice bright big screen there's no way around consuming a lot of electricity. If your baseline is a 32 inch LED screen it's not surprising a 65" OLED will have a worse energy label. Seems most people want that nice TV more than a small, dim picture that uses less energy.

I don't think anyone says that a big TV should require the same energy as a paper sheet.

But if someone can manufacture a big TV with a third of the energy used for the average big TV, surely there is something that can be improved.