It shouldn’t show you as online in discord/slack, but it should be downloading messages/etc so that when you do come online you don’t have to wait for it to sync with all your cloud services.
Also - consider those cloud services might not necessarily be available when you come online — maybe you open your laptop on an airplane and don’t want to pay for a satellite connection. When things are working well a modern operating system with modern services and background processing will have downloaded everything while it was “sleeping”.
My experience is mostly with Macs - which draw something like 0.5 watts while “sleeping” in an active state that is still downloading emails/etc. It also does backups in that mode (if you run the right backup software), so if someone sends you an email it’s almost immediately backed up even though your computer is sleeping. They can perform intensive tasks like AI image processing on your photo library as well, though that won’t run on battery power.
Keep in mind the 0.5 watt load doesn’t run continuously - so even at that relatively high power draw it can run for weeks on the smallest battery (even a phone battery).
Macs also have antitheft features, including network connectivity, that run even whey they are fully powered off. As far as I know they can run for months even if the battery is “flat”. Pro Tip: If you want to steal a Mac… disconnect the battery before taking it to your lair…
I’m not knocking the idea of running various maintenance tasks while the computer is asleep. The original post mentioned installing updates, and I agree that and your ideas make a lot of sense. It’s not even a very new idea — I seem to remember the Wii would download updates using its ARM processor while the console was asleep.
OP specifically mentioned “discord or slack showing [them] online”, and that’s the use case I was questioning.
I do think that, even for legitimately useful uses, I’d still want the ability to turn it off. No matter how low the power draw, there may be times when I need to stretch my battery life a little longer, and I’m in a better position to know and plan for that than the OS is.
It shouldn’t show you as online in discord/slack, but it should be downloading messages/etc so that when you do come online you don’t have to wait for it to sync with all your cloud services.
Also - consider those cloud services might not necessarily be available when you come online — maybe you open your laptop on an airplane and don’t want to pay for a satellite connection. When things are working well a modern operating system with modern services and background processing will have downloaded everything while it was “sleeping”.
My experience is mostly with Macs - which draw something like 0.5 watts while “sleeping” in an active state that is still downloading emails/etc. It also does backups in that mode (if you run the right backup software), so if someone sends you an email it’s almost immediately backed up even though your computer is sleeping. They can perform intensive tasks like AI image processing on your photo library as well, though that won’t run on battery power.
Keep in mind the 0.5 watt load doesn’t run continuously - so even at that relatively high power draw it can run for weeks on the smallest battery (even a phone battery).
Macs also have antitheft features, including network connectivity, that run even whey they are fully powered off. As far as I know they can run for months even if the battery is “flat”. Pro Tip: If you want to steal a Mac… disconnect the battery before taking it to your lair…
I’m not knocking the idea of running various maintenance tasks while the computer is asleep. The original post mentioned installing updates, and I agree that and your ideas make a lot of sense. It’s not even a very new idea — I seem to remember the Wii would download updates using its ARM processor while the console was asleep.
OP specifically mentioned “discord or slack showing [them] online”, and that’s the use case I was questioning.
I do think that, even for legitimately useful uses, I’d still want the ability to turn it off. No matter how low the power draw, there may be times when I need to stretch my battery life a little longer, and I’m in a better position to know and plan for that than the OS is.