The impact of changing the time of day one charges their phone is so miniscule, even when scaled up to billions of people/devices. A bigger impact would be, say, not upgrading to a new iPhone every year. Not buying/leasing a new car every 2-3 years. Etc.
Perhaps Apple should not offer new iPhone models each year? That would be quite the statement if they would do that. It would force longer upgrade cycles upon consumers.
It's true. One year of phone charging equals barely a few miles driven in an electric car. There's a lot of potential in shifting consumption, but it would be a lot more effective to just send out a push notification for when to turn on your dryers.
But the upgrade cycle isn't a problem, either. The problem is putting an old, perfectly usable phone in a drawer when you get a new one. As long as you put the old phone back into circulation, you can upgrade yearly without consequences. Then someone else will get the used iPhone instead of a cheap Android. Making phones last longer is both the producers and the consumers job.
If you put something that works in a drawer until it's obsolete, you're flushing the manufacturing resources down the drain …
