How the Xbox’s default “instant on” feature could harm the environment

NRDC: Default Series S/X option responsible for 3 million tons of CO2 by 2025.

Read the whole story

 

[SplatMan_DK]

My fridge draws orders of magnitude more than that and it, too, is on all day long. Not to mention the rack of servers in my homelab.

https://www.bosch-home.co.uk/product-li ... 875043033/ - mine uses 275kWh a year. Or 31Wh per hour. So around double the 15Wh Xbox instant on uses.

The homelab servers are most likely an extravagant waste (in terms of energy) but a fridge solves a practical purpose.

It doesn't matter how many other appliances use more than the Xbox. The point is that the XBox uses that energy while idling, so it is effectively 100% wasted. Like running the aircon at max with all the doors and windows open.

Waste is waste is waste.

 

[tgx]

I pulled my 32 bit Genesis out of the attic the other day.
Plugged it in and slammed in a cartridge. It was instant on.
If I did the same with any current system it would blather on
for hours about updates and then probably fail to work at all
since every service would be deactivated by now. Sorry, modern
gaming is pure e-waste.

 

[SraCet]

...

In missing my point so completely, you validated it.

Like most things, this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Not everything has to be antagonistic in discussion.

You cannot tell others how bad they are, when you refuse to admit you’re also complicit. The degree to which does not matter.

I’m suggesting acknowledgment. Not forsaking the effort.

Who are you talking about? Who in the world is "refusing to admit that they're also complicit" in wasting power?

I'm sure everybody reading these comments would readily admit that they waste some amount of power in the name of convenience.

Now that that's settled, can we have your permission to complain about the people and things that waste vastly more power than other people and things?

 

[ChronicAnalysis]

10 Watts... So as much as a Clock Radio.

 

[Chuckstar]

Because it isn’t difficult to keep ones house close to the “low” temperature without using air conditioning. You close the windows and curtains in all the rooms in the daytime when it is warm and open them at night or in the early morning when it is cold and let the breeze cool the house. I have done it successfully many times with my house when it has got up to 35 degrees - albeit only for a few days here rather than all summer.

Maybe building standards are higher here to make that possible, but then given lots of the US has a continental climate (and therefore more extreme temperatures) that they’d have better standards than here where the Atlantic ocean moderates the temperature.

Bear with me a moment.

Given the rise in popularity of wireless charging and the inherent wastefulness of the technology, this article seems hypocritical.

Who here hates this feature with Xbox, but wirelessly charges their device(s)?

The reaction I’m guessing I’ll get, in addition to downvotes, is that the power loss is micro in comparison. It doesn’t count.

So where’s the line?

If you’re invested in conservation and environmental concerns, but waste energy purely for convenience, complaining about this is hypocritical.

I’m not suggesting you can’t use a technology or feature. I’m saying the concept of “do as I say, not as I do.....because mine is a small thing and so convenient. But yours is so *bad* ”........ undermines your complaint.

Your comments translates to me as, "Give up, stop trying, you cannot change anything with your little efforts to save energy so why bother?" An attitude that will surely help us solve this problem.

Yes, it will. Because it doesn't matter. Decarbonizing the supply is what matters. Concerning yourself with whether you leave devices on is foolish. You could spend that time and energy on actually doing something about the problem instead.

Wind and solar energy aren’t 100% carbon free. Americans using twice the energy of Western Europeans because they have pointlessly oversized cars and don’t know how to build or run houses in an energy efficient way still uses a lot of excess energy and creates excess carbon.

"... albeit only for a few days here rather than all summer..."

In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about. Don't worry, we already knew.

 

[real mikeb_60]

I really don't mind. I love that my PS4 Pro is ready in a few seconds. My PC is always on as it renders, downloads, and makes avaliable my own files to all other devices that I own (cloudsync). I had to cool my media center, so those fans run constantly too as it was overheating in summer.I buy cars that get a little over 5mpg, commonly dipping below that. If you want to be eco friendly, go for it. Me? I want access and speed now.

A century from now they will be cursing our generation for our laziness, meaninglessness and impatience that has in turn made their lives much worse. But at least you didn't have to wait 30 seconds for a game to boot up.

Does MS still use spinning rust in the XBox?

Have to ask, because after replacing the boot drive in a couple of PCs with SSD, cold startup times are less (discounting POST time) than warm start used to be with Win10. A 15-yr-old homebrew with Gigabyte motherboard, 8G RAM, and Intel Core2 Extreme (pre-i-series Core), after POST, cold-starts in <30 sec to login prompt. Similar in a 10-yr-old ASUS laptop (1st gen i-5), after choosing Win10 from the Grub menu. For my purposes, that's "instant on" - would only be faster if resuming from sleep. Before the SSD, similar timings were a minute or more. FWIW, Linux Mint starts (always a cold-start; no partial-hibernation fiddles) in 15-20 sec on the laptop after choosing it from the Grub menu.

FWIW, the more annoying timing is shutdown. Win10 even with SSD typically takes more than 30 sec to finish shutting down (power light off; screen goes black quickly). Mint is more like tick ... tock ... off most of the time.

 

[GottaSaySomething]

This'll probably never get read and I should have said it before, but it just occurred to me

Patents may play a small part - for example codecs for video are patented to fuck - imagine the energy saved by hardware decoding? It wouldn't surprise me if "downloading from alternate data source [internet] while in a low power state" existed.

 

[Ruefus]

...

In missing my point so completely, you validated it.

Like most things, this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Not everything has to be antagonistic in discussion.

You cannot tell others how bad they are, when you refuse to admit you’re also complicit. The degree to which does not matter.

I’m suggesting acknowledgment. Not forsaking the effort.

Who are you talking about? Who in the world is "refusing to admit that they're also complicit" in wasting power?

I'm sure everybody reading these comments would readily admit that they waste some amount of power in the name of convenience.

Now that that's settled, can we have your permission to complain about the people and things that waste vastly more power than other people and things?

Sure.

 

[etinin]

In my opinion, this is just about an attempt to gain attention/publicity, not about really saving the environment. For starters, in a highly developed economy, home energy consumption is significantly lower than industrial usage. As far as I'm aware, in the U.S., for instance, the share of home power consumption corresponds to about 40% of total energy usage. And seriously, I think everyone can agree that it is much more acceptable to waste a little energy in the name of convenience at home than to throw away energy at an industrial scenario (correct if I'm wrong, but I don't think a factory needs stuff like an Xbox)

In other words, about 60% is drained by industrial and commercial usage. According to official figures (EPA), about 30% of industrial and commercial energy consumption is wasted. If you worried about these and stopped trying to hold home users as fully responsible for saving the environment, you could probably save almost half of all energy usage.

It's not that we want power hogs, and I remember very clearly the my Xbox Series X offered me BOTH OPTIONS when I first started it. Instant power on mode is VERY useful, allowing you to play on your Xbox remotely for instance (you can't power on your Xbox from your cell phone and start streaming in energy saving mode, since it probably won't be connected to the internet et cetera).

The number of devices that drain more than that to do absolutely nothing useful, ranging from microwaves in stand by to TVs and computer monitors powered off, is simply ABYSMAL. But no advocacy groups would gain any publicity from that because it will be a lot harder to get meaningful data from the countless device models out there, including many from lesser known brands which will probably not care at all for the bad publicity.

The Xbox offers instant-on mode during initial setup and talks about its advantages. It really offers value for that, automatically updating software and enabling remote control features. I think technology has come so far to allow for users to have a little convenience in exchange for a little power usage. The real problem is when we start talking about devices which consume power for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Sure, I bet they could do better and use less energy for instant-power on mode, but the scale of the problem is much smaller than what is stated by this article.

Why would a battery charger consume significant amount of power when there's no batteries? Electric toothbrushes? Even TVs, it's not like you're gonna do anything relevant from afar and they don't really update themselves in standby mode, despite having significant energy consumption. And even if you were to update anything on them, it wouldn't amount to the multi-gigabyte downloads which can take long times with a game console. Downloads on these consoles can be really big, and you can actually mitigate some of this energy consumption with instant-on mode because you can install something on your Xbox, turn off your console, and the download will proceed. If you have energy saving mode, you have no choice but to keep your console on even if you're not really playing it, and that would consume about 7 times the energy consumption of instant-on mode.

 

[etinin]

I really don't mind. I love that my PS4 Pro is ready in a few seconds. My PC is always on as it renders, downloads, and makes avaliable my own files to all other devices that I own (cloudsync). I had to cool my media center, so those fans run constantly too as it was overheating in summer.I buy cars that get a little over 5mpg, commonly dipping below that. If you want to be eco friendly, go for it. Me? I want access and speed now.

A century from now they will be cursing our generation for our laziness, meaninglessness and impatience that has in turn made their lives much worse. But at least you didn't have to wait 30 seconds for a game to boot up.

Does MS still use spinning rust in the XBox?

Have to ask, because after replacing the boot drive in a couple of PCs with SSD, cold startup times are less (discounting POST time) than warm start used to be with Win10. A 15-yr-old homebrew with Gigabyte motherboard, 8G RAM, and Intel Core2 Extreme (pre-i-series Core), after POST, cold-starts in <30 sec to login prompt. Similar in a 10-yr-old ASUS laptop (1st gen i-5), after choosing Win10 from the Grub menu. For my purposes, that's "instant on" - would only be faster if resuming from sleep. Before the SSD, similar timings were a minute or more. FWIW, Linux Mint starts (always a cold-start; no partial-hibernation fiddles) in 15-20 sec on the laptop after choosing it from the Grub menu.

FWIW, the more annoying timing is shutdown. Win10 even with SSD typically takes more than 30 sec to finish shutting down (power light off; screen goes black quickly). Mint is more like tick ... tock ... off most of the time.

With the kind of NVMe that the Xbox Series X has, Windows 10 doesn't really have any problem turning off (or on, for instance). With my NVMe PCI-e drives, my computer takes 10-15 seconds to power down, about the same as it takes when I'm using Fedora Linux. Booting to Linux also doesn't seem to be perceivably slower than booting into Windows (unless you make an unfair comparison such as having Windows with bitlocker and unencrypted Linux).

Actually, there is no way to properly control my Dell Laptop fans if I use Linux LUKs encryption with keys stored on the TPM, since it required secure EFI chain and the (unofficial) fan driver uses features not available in secure boot mode and won't work even if you self-sign it. So, booting into Linux takes longer because I have to manually type my password, while Windows can read the decryption keys from the TPM. Of course, it's mostly Dell's fault for not providing drivers, but we're talking about real world scenarios here and I can't work if my laptop keeps overheating.

With my Xbox Series X, if I reboot it, it takes about 30 seconds to fully power down and turn back on. I don't find it significantly slower than Linux, and unless you set it to offline mode, it has to connect to Microsoft's servers and authenticate you to your MS account. Nowadays, the Xbox and Playstation are basically computers and they behave as such.

 

[azazel1024]

So if my math is right, 9 watts for 24 hours for 30 days represents about 6.5 KW of electricity in a month to sit unused.

In my apartment I use around 200kwh of electricity per month in the winter, so that represents about 3.25% of my electricity use, even if I never turn it on.

Doesn't sound like a lot, but that's just one device. Do that with 2 more devices that draw 9 watts, and I'm talking about 10% of my monthly electricity use in a month. That won't make much of a difference financially, since the electricity rates where I live are around 5c/kwh, but in terms of actual electricity usage and emissions, it all adds up.

People may write stories like this off as "yeah but that's not really that much electricity" but it all adds up.

Not to quibble, but are you paying an actual 5c/kwh? A lot of people see the generation cost and don’t factor in transmission fees.

I pay a $10 a month connection fee. Then I am billed at 7.1c/kWh for generation and 4.2c/kWh for transmission. So my real cost is 11.3c/kwh.

Most people I know see the cost on their bill, but don’t look closer at the cost break down as of course their utility wants to only mention generation cost in big font.

 

[raxx7]

In my opinion, this is just about an attempt to gain attention/publicity, not about really saving the environment. For starters, in a highly developed economy, home energy consumption is significantly lower than industrial usage. As far as I'm aware, in the U.S., for instance, the share of home power consumption corresponds to about 40% of total energy usage. And seriously, I think everyone can agree that it is much more acceptable to waste a little energy in the name of convenience at home than to throw away energy at an industrial scenario (correct if I'm wrong, but I don't think a factory needs stuff like an Xbox)

In other words, about 60% is drained by industrial and commercial usage. According to official figures (EPA), about 30% of industrial and commercial energy consumption is wasted. If you worried about these and stopped trying to hold home users as fully responsible for saving the environment, you could probably save almost half of all energy usage.

It's not that we want power hogs, and I remember very clearly the my Xbox Series X offered me BOTH OPTIONS when I first started it. Instant power on mode is VERY useful, allowing you to play on your Xbox remotely for instance (you can't power on your Xbox from your cell phone and start streaming in energy saving mode, since it probably won't be connected to the internet et cetera).

The number of devices that drain more than that to do absolutely nothing useful, ranging from microwaves in stand by to TVs and computer monitors powered off, is simply ABYSMAL. But no advocacy groups would gain any publicity from that because it will be a lot harder to get meaningful data from the countless device models out there, including many from lesser known brands which will probably not care at all for the bad publicity.

The Xbox offers instant-on mode during initial setup and talks about its advantages. It really offers value for that, automatically updating software and enabling remote control features. I think technology has come so far to allow for users to have a little convenience in exchange for a little power usage. The real problem is when we start talking about devices which consume power for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Sure, I bet they could do better and use less energy for instant-power on mode, but the scale of the problem is much smaller than what is stated by this article.

Why would a battery charger consume significant amount of power when there's no batteries? Electric toothbrushes? Even TVs, it's not like you're gonna do anything relevant from afar and they don't really update themselves in standby mode, despite having significant energy consumption. And even if you were to update anything on them, it wouldn't amount to the multi-gigabyte downloads which can take long times with a game console. Downloads on these consoles can be really big, and you can actually mitigate some of this energy consumption with instant-on mode because you can install something on your Xbox, turn off your console, and the download will proceed. If you have energy saving mode, you have no choice but to keep your console on even if you're not really playing it, and that would consume about 7 times the energy consumption of instant-on mode.

When the EU wanted to reduce standby power consumption of devices, it didn't force manufacturers to replace the standby feature with a physical switch.
Instead it simply passed a law which set reasonable achievable limits for standby power.

You want to use Xbox's remote play feature. That's cool.
But it can be implemented differently.
For example at setup time instead of having the "energy saving" vs "instant on" choice MS could implement a "Enable Remote Play? This will increase idle power consumption" choice.
That probably will drastically reduce the number of people who choose it.

Better yet MS could have added the necessary hardware that allows the console to be remotely woken for remote play.

Instead you go into a butt hurt fueled whataboutism rant.

 

[etinin]

In my opinion, this is just about an attempt to gain attention/publicity, not about really saving the environment. For starters, in a highly developed economy, home energy consumption is significantly lower than industrial usage. As far as I'm aware, in the U.S., for instance, the share of home power consumption corresponds to about 40% of total energy usage. And seriously, I think everyone can agree that it is much more acceptable to waste a little energy in the name of convenience at home than to throw away energy at an industrial scenario (correct if I'm wrong, but I don't think a factory needs stuff like an Xbox)

In other words, about 60% is drained by industrial and commercial usage. According to official figures (EPA), about 30% of industrial and commercial energy consumption is wasted. If you worried about these and stopped trying to hold home users as fully responsible for saving the environment, you could probably save almost half of all energy usage.

It's not that we want power hogs, and I remember very clearly the my Xbox Series X offered me BOTH OPTIONS when I first started it. Instant power on mode is VERY useful, allowing you to play on your Xbox remotely for instance (you can't power on your Xbox from your cell phone and start streaming in energy saving mode, since it probably won't be connected to the internet et cetera).

The number of devices that drain more than that to do absolutely nothing useful, ranging from microwaves in stand by to TVs and computer monitors powered off, is simply ABYSMAL. But no advocacy groups would gain any publicity from that because it will be a lot harder to get meaningful data from the countless device models out there, including many from lesser known brands which will probably not care at all for the bad publicity.

The Xbox offers instant-on mode during initial setup and talks about its advantages. It really offers value for that, automatically updating software and enabling remote control features. I think technology has come so far to allow for users to have a little convenience in exchange for a little power usage. The real problem is when we start talking about devices which consume power for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Sure, I bet they could do better and use less energy for instant-power on mode, but the scale of the problem is much smaller than what is stated by this article.

Why would a battery charger consume significant amount of power when there's no batteries? Electric toothbrushes? Even TVs, it's not like you're gonna do anything relevant from afar and they don't really update themselves in standby mode, despite having significant energy consumption. And even if you were to update anything on them, it wouldn't amount to the multi-gigabyte downloads which can take long times with a game console. Downloads on these consoles can be really big, and you can actually mitigate some of this energy consumption with instant-on mode because you can install something on your Xbox, turn off your console, and the download will proceed. If you have energy saving mode, you have no choice but to keep your console on even if you're not really playing it, and that would consume about 7 times the energy consumption of instant-on mode.

When the EU wanted to reduce standby power consumption of devices, it didn't force manufacturers to replace the standby feature with a physical switch.
Instead it simply passed a law which set reasonable achievable limits for standby power.

You want to use Xbox's remote play feature. That's cool.
But it can be implemented differently.
For example at setup time instead of having the "energy saving" vs "instant on" choice MS could implement a "Enable Remote Play? This will increase idle power consumption" choice.
That probably will drastically reduce the number of people who choose it.

Better yet MS could have added the necessary hardware that allows the console to be remotely woken for remote play.

Instead you go into a butt hurt fueled whataboutism rant.

So, you're talking about a simple change in text, which might actually be good, but I can't say what % of people are unable to understand the meaning of the current text and would make a different choice.

As for the dedicated hardware, I can't say for sure but there's probably some dedicated hardware that takes care of instant-on. Else, it's highly unlikely they would've been able to reduce so much energy consumption with a simple firmware update.

It's not a rant, it's not as if the financial impact was too significant for the average consumer either way. It's just that to blame any specific product is just plain simple reductionism and all.

I know many people believe MS is evil and all, but it's not like present-day MS is any worse that other multinational companies of the same standing.

There are some figures on the internet claiming that present-day TVs, which are a lot dumber, consume about 5w when off and there are a lot more of TVs around than Xboxes. Yet, I don't see anyone complaining about those, even though I'm pretty sure that their global carbon footprint is a lot worse.

 

[raxx7]

There are some figures on the internet claiming that present-day TVs, which are a lot dumber, consume about 5w when off and there are a lot more of TVs around than Xboxes. Yet, I don't see anyone complaining about those, even though I'm pretty sure that their global carbon footprint is a lot worse.

Your Google-fu is weak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Watt_Initiative

EU has a 1 watt legal limit for appliance standby power since 2009.

While the USA doesn't have a general mandate the Federal agencies are required to buy low standby power products.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/femp/low-st ... r-products

As you can see not only "someone" complained, "someone" actually got some results.

 

[SraCet]

In my opinion, this is just about an attempt to gain attention/publicity, not about really saving the environment. For starters, in a highly developed economy, home energy consumption is significantly lower than industrial usage. As far as I'm aware, in the U.S., for instance, the share of home power consumption corresponds to about 40% of total energy usage. And seriously, I think everyone can agree that it is much more acceptable to waste a little energy in the name of convenience at home than to throw away energy at an industrial scenario (correct if I'm wrong, but I don't think a factory needs stuff like an Xbox) ...

Everything adds up.

It's generally understood that replacing a 60W incandescent light bulb with a 7W LED light bulb is a good thing, even though that one incandescent bulb, by itself, wasn't ruining the environment.

 

[mohnish82]

Seems Xbox team didn't have any acceptance tests for power efficiency. Harware engineering teams should make it part of their process.

So I say, send it back to the engineering team to fix the lousy power consumption figures. With various heterogeneous multi core solutions mainstream now, they should be able to figure it out. An optimal ARM processor could be used for the "uber-important-to-some" "background-game-updates"!

 

[Eraserhead]

Because it isn’t difficult to keep ones house close to the “low” temperature without using air conditioning. You close the windows and curtains in all the rooms in the daytime when it is warm and open them at night or in the early morning when it is cold and let the breeze cool the house. I have done it successfully many times with my house when it has got up to 35 degrees - albeit only for a few days here rather than all summer.

Maybe building standards are higher here to make that possible, but then given lots of the US has a continental climate (and therefore more extreme temperatures) that they’d have better standards than here where the Atlantic ocean moderates the temperature.

Bear with me a moment.

Given the rise in popularity of wireless charging and the inherent wastefulness of the technology, this article seems hypocritical.

Who here hates this feature with Xbox, but wirelessly charges their device(s)?

The reaction I’m guessing I’ll get, in addition to downvotes, is that the power loss is micro in comparison. It doesn’t count.

So where’s the line?

If you’re invested in conservation and environmental concerns, but waste energy purely for convenience, complaining about this is hypocritical.

I’m not suggesting you can’t use a technology or feature. I’m saying the concept of “do as I say, not as I do.....because mine is a small thing and so convenient. But yours is so *bad* ”........ undermines your complaint.

Your comments translates to me as, "Give up, stop trying, you cannot change anything with your little efforts to save energy so why bother?" An attitude that will surely help us solve this problem.

Yes, it will. Because it doesn't matter. Decarbonizing the supply is what matters. Concerning yourself with whether you leave devices on is foolish. You could spend that time and energy on actually doing something about the problem instead.

Wind and solar energy aren’t 100% carbon free. Americans using twice the energy of Western Europeans because they have pointlessly oversized cars and don’t know how to build or run houses in an energy efficient way still uses a lot of excess energy and creates excess carbon.

"... albeit only for a few days here rather than all summer..."

In other words, you have no idea what you're talking about. Don't worry, we already knew.

Why exactly can’t you use exactly the same techniques with a bit of active cooling to top off? I mean you can build a house that’s designed from the ground up to be cooled passively (e.g verandas and pocket blinds).

Plus you should be used to warmer temperatures than the UK so really if you can actively cool it to 28 that should be sufficient - so if it’s 30 min/45 max active cooling should need to reduce the temperature by 2-3 degrees.

(PS even if you are only paying 10 cents a kWh this has the potential to save hundreds of dollars a year in energy)

 

[OllieJones]

I sure wish articles like this would go a bit beyond the obligatory "US national average of 10.8¢ / kWh.". In many markets where Ars readers live the cost is over twice that much. Here in Massachusetts it's 24.9¢. I have a quick and dirty rule saying " $2 / year for each watt. "

The phantom draw of the little stuff, like GFI outlets and idle gaming rigs, adds up. Visible outfits like Microsoft need to set an example.

But at the same time running a clothes dryer, making a bitcoin transaction, or driving a BEV use many orders of magnitude more power.

 

[j00ce]

I’m all for an “all of the above” approach to minimizing energy waste in general, and carbon emissions more particularly, but keep in mind that annual carbon output is measured in the gigatonnes. So this is somewhere below a rounding error in the carbon problem.

The article is a bit sensationalist - they're taking a calculation for 4 years worth of power usage, and then summarising that as "the equivalent of a year's operation for a large power plant".

I suppose "25% of a large power plant's annual standard operating capacity" doesn't sound quite as terrifying.

I guess the problem is that while it's a fair lump of energy that's being wasted in aggregate, individually, it's tiny. And the cost of getting tools to monitor and/or minimise said waste far exceeds the benefits.

Personally, I'm currently living in a flat which has token meters for gas and electric [*], so I'm hyper-aware of how much it costs to run things. Since you can literally watch the pennies burning when cooking or turning the heating on

And things do add up. Leaving the PC on 24/7? That'll be 12p a day. Turning the heating up a degree? That's an extra 30p. And so on. Leaving the neon light in the kitchen on? 8p. And so on.

Admittedly, my energy bills are a tiny fraction of my earnings, so I could quite happily leave All The Things switched on. Hell, at least in winter, all the heat from said devices would help to slightly reduce the cost of heating

But I'm treating it as a game of sorts - what's the best balance between convenience, cost and ecological impact. And the fact that I'm saving a bit of money each month is always nice, too!

[*] Thankfully it's all fairly modern; they're using digital "smart" meters, so you can pay and/or monitor usage online. And I'm not really planning on living in the flat long enough to justify the time/hassle of getting new meters installed and switching to monthly billing...

 

[SpartanSig]

The article conflates the S and the X.

Don't we all

 

[gorman]

I see many attempts to justify this, put this into proportion... It's normal.

I guess the problem remains that we still believe we can go on as we've always had in the past 50 years or so. How to solve this? Until energy costs so much as to disincentivize its use, I think we will never solve it. Consumers habits don't die for any other reason.

If a certain amount of energy costs X and I can afford X... I'm gonna use it if I perceive the need for it. And companies do their best to make me perceive such a need. All companies, all consumers.

I'm no nihilist but I can't see a way out unless energy costs go seriously up, while we convert our energy production to 100% sustainable sources. Then, and only then, they should go down.

Having said that, sure... if there's waste that's easily solvable, why not? I personally have switched all lightbulbs to LED. I unplug all appliances I don't use (oven, microwave, TV). It's slightly annoying but I try to do what I can. But I'm painfully aware this is so far from being enough... :-(

 

[Khaaannn]

No comments on the "Instant On" feature of BILLIONS of TVs all over the world?

This XBox "Feature" is single drop of rain in the Energy Ocean compared to that.

Sheesh. Get a Grip.

 

[dimathiel]

These guys need to take a marketing class. The average consumer doesn’t understand kwh. You need to show it as $ per month extra. Otoh the amounts talked about here probably won’t add much to the average electric bill.

 

[johnt007871]

And I'm just looking into having my Xbox One on 24/7 to save power (and switch on time).

The reason - instead of having power to the other devices enabled by turning the TV out of standby - I'd use the Xbox to power the other devices.

Am I in a minority - sure, but these sorts of articles are annoyingly shallow.

The point is that the default should be OFF not ON, and turning it on should come after a page warning people that they will be using a significant amount of energy to save a few seconds.

Advanced users with specific needs like yours would still be able to go into settings and enable it, but changing the default to OFF might save 1 billion kWh a year.

Also consider states like California with power supply issues. Changing millions of Xboxen to stop using so much power would help with that.

Microsoft should fix this.

If the option is between shiny cool feature and saving the planet businesses will pick shiny cool feature, everytime.

 

[fknuckles]

Bear with me a moment.

Given the rise in popularity of wireless charging and the inherent wastefulness of the technology, this article seems hypocritical.

Who here hates this feature with Xbox, but wirelessly charges their device(s)?

The reaction I’m guessing I’ll get, in addition to downvotes, is that the power loss is micro in comparison. It doesn’t count.

So where’s the line?

If you’re invested in conservation and environmental concerns, but waste energy purely for convenience, complaining about this is hypocritical.

I’m not suggesting you can’t use a technology or feature. I’m saying the concept of “do as I say, not as I do.....because mine is a small thing and so convenient. But yours is so *bad* ”........ undermines your complaint.

I wireless charge my phone once a day, twice at most on rare occasions, For a total of what? 20W a day maybe

My xbox series S is consuming 9w an hour all day.

Reading this article made me disable instant on because I think I can live with that inconvenience, especially since i have a fast, uncapped cable Internet connection -- not too painful to wait 30 minutes for updates about once a month. It doesn't mean I also have to stop wireless charging.

If my situation changes, I'll flip the setting back. Good to have the choice.

 

[raxx7]

Reading this article made me disable instant on because I think I can live with that inconvenience, especially since i have a fast, uncapped cable Internet connection -- not too painful to wait 30 minutes for updates about once a month. It doesn't mean I also have to stop wireless charging.

If my situation changes, I'll flip the setting back. Good to have the choice.

Even if you set to energy saving it will still wake itself up and download updates if they exist. So you're not actually adding any inconvenience on that front.

The most pressing need for the "Instant On" mode is Remote Play.

 

[real mikeb_60]

So if my math is right, 9 watts for 24 hours for 30 days represents about 6.5 KW of electricity in a month to sit unused.

In my apartment I use around 200kwh of electricity per month in the winter, so that represents about 3.25% of my electricity use, even if I never turn it on.

Doesn't sound like a lot, but that's just one device. Do that with 2 more devices that draw 9 watts, and I'm talking about 10% of my monthly electricity use in a month. That won't make much of a difference financially, since the electricity rates where I live are around 5c/kwh, but in terms of actual electricity usage and emissions, it all adds up.

People may write stories like this off as "yeah but that's not really that much electricity" but it all adds up.

Not to quibble, but are you paying an actual 5c/kwh? A lot of people see the generation cost and don’t factor in transmission fees.

I pay a $10 a month connection fee. Then I am billed at 7.1c/kWh for generation and 4.2c/kWh for transmission. So my real cost is 11.3c/kwh.

Most people I know see the cost on their bill, but don’t look closer at the cost break down as of course their utility wants to only mention generation cost in big font.

My electric bill does a full breakdown. *Everybody* gets charged the connection fee (about $23 now, going up in fall to $25). If you have net usage (after solar credits), you also pay various taxes and fees. The usage and solar credits are variable items, and the only things you can actually control. Usage and credits (for now, as long as net metering survives) are TOU, varying from a low of just under 10c/kwh (winter overnight, with EV charging credit) to just under 30c/kwh (summer evening peak). That's very much on the low side for California, and maybe even competitive with the rest of the US. Where's it 5c?

Yes, with TOU, the utility "buys low" at off- and mid-peak times, then "sells high" during the peak when solar production is low to none. You can manage that with batteries, but they are expensive and need replacement at least once during the life of the solar system that's feeding them; so batteries are still of limited usefulness for average consumers. That could change once net metering ends (possibly this year in my area, certainly by the early 2030s; in California), replaced by a fixed wholesale rate for feed-in credit.

 

[Ruefus]

Bear with me a moment.

Given the rise in popularity of wireless charging and the inherent wastefulness of the technology, this article seems hypocritical.

Who here hates this feature with Xbox, but wirelessly charges their device(s)?

The reaction I’m guessing I’ll get, in addition to downvotes, is that the power loss is micro in comparison. It doesn’t count.

So where’s the line?

If you’re invested in conservation and environmental concerns, but waste energy purely for convenience, complaining about this is hypocritical.

I’m not suggesting you can’t use a technology or feature. I’m saying the concept of “do as I say, not as I do.....because mine is a small thing and so convenient. But yours is so *bad* ”........ undermines your complaint.

I wireless charge my phone once a day, twice at most on rare occasions, For a total of what? 20W a day maybe

My xbox series S is consuming 9w an hour all day.

Reading this article made me disable instant on because I think I can live with that inconvenience, especially since i have a fast, uncapped cable Internet connection -- not too painful to wait 30 minutes for updates about once a month. It doesn't mean I also have to stop wireless charging.

If my situation changes, I'll flip the setting back. Good to have the choice.

We (humans in general) have a tendency to point out what's wrong with others and never turn that same lens on ourselves. I'm as guilty as the next person.

It was not my intent to suggest people should stop wirelessly charging. Just recognize the inherent hypocrisy. Will it move the needle? One person? No. But we're not talking about just one person here.

Hope that makes some sense.

 

[Ruefus]

...
Perhaps because at-idle, the Xbox is far more powerful than a Switch at full-song.

And you don't see that as a huge problem?

At idle, things would ideally take no power, because they're idle.

Then your definition of the word idle is different from mine. To me - idle means on, but not under load. Your interpretation equates to 'off'.

To me, when my car engine is idling in the driveway, it's not under load, but consumes enough energy to operate when called to.

At idle, an A1 Abrams gas turbine is using a LOT more energy than my car. But it's still at idle.

Given the orders of magnitude differences between a Switch and an Xbox Series X, it's not difficult to fathom why the same may be true.

Unless the word idle is synonymous with off. Then, you're correct.

 

[fknuckles]

Bear with me a moment.

Given the rise in popularity of wireless charging and the inherent wastefulness of the technology, this article seems hypocritical.

Who here hates this feature with Xbox, but wirelessly charges their device(s)?

The reaction I’m guessing I’ll get, in addition to downvotes, is that the power loss is micro in comparison. It doesn’t count.

So where’s the line?

If you’re invested in conservation and environmental concerns, but waste energy purely for convenience, complaining about this is hypocritical.

I’m not suggesting you can’t use a technology or feature. I’m saying the concept of “do as I say, not as I do.....because mine is a small thing and so convenient. But yours is so *bad* ”........ undermines your complaint.

I wireless charge my phone once a day, twice at most on rare occasions, For a total of what? 20W a day maybe

My xbox series S is consuming 9w an hour all day.

Reading this article made me disable instant on because I think I can live with that inconvenience, especially since i have a fast, uncapped cable Internet connection -- not too painful to wait 30 minutes for updates about once a month. It doesn't mean I also have to stop wireless charging.

If my situation changes, I'll flip the setting back. Good to have the choice.

We (humans in general) have a tendency to point out what's wrong with others and never turn that same lens on ourselves. I'm as guilty as the next person.

It was not my intent to suggest people should stop wirelessly charging. Just recognize the inherent hypocrisy. Will it move the needle? One person? No. But we're not talking about just one person here.

Hope that makes some sense.

Fair enough.

The article didn't strike me as guilt-tripping though. I personally learned something I didn't know and acted differently. Call me a lazy environmentalist.

I see waste (and recycling) as particularly low hanging fruit in the effort to be more green. I'm sadly not much more motivated than that.

 

[wunderbar]

So if my math is right, 9 watts for 24 hours for 30 days represents about 6.5 KW of electricity in a month to sit unused.

In my apartment I use around 200kwh of electricity per month in the winter, so that represents about 3.25% of my electricity use, even if I never turn it on.

Doesn't sound like a lot, but that's just one device. Do that with 2 more devices that draw 9 watts, and I'm talking about 10% of my monthly electricity use in a month. That won't make much of a difference financially, since the electricity rates where I live are around 5c/kwh, but in terms of actual electricity usage and emissions, it all adds up.

People may write stories like this off as "yeah but that's not really that much electricity" but it all adds up.

Not to quibble, but are you paying an actual 5c/kwh? A lot of people see the generation cost and don’t factor in transmission fees.

I pay a $10 a month connection fee. Then I am billed at 7.1c/kWh for generation and 4.2c/kWh for transmission. So my real cost is 11.3c/kwh.

Most people I know see the cost on their bill, but don’t look closer at the cost break down as of course their utility wants to only mention generation cost in big font.

Yeah, I'm not going to show my actual electricity bill, but in my jurisdiction the cost of energy was 4c/kwh last month plus 1c/kwh for transimisison fees.

Now, there's a lot of extra going on in the bill as my actual electricity usage comprises only half of my actual bill. The other half is mandatory, fixed "adminitration" fees and the like. It's real dumb. I could literally cut my electricity usage in half and my electricity bill would drop from $60/month to about $54/month. Energy conservation is not a financial consideration for me, it's a "this is better for the planet" consideration.

The actual electricity rate is so cheap here because where I live most of our generation is fossil fuel, with natural gas and coal being the two most common. I'd gladly pay triple the price per kwh if it was clean energy, but that is not the current state. Prices do go up during summer when there is more electricity demand from air conditioners, I've seen it get as high as 12c/kwh. Last month was probably the lowest rate I've seen, it generally hovers around 6-7c/kwh in the winter with the transmission fee included.

 

[Jason T. Miller]

Are you really saying that during its normal boot is uses 72000% as much power as during normal running? That'd do more than dim the lights

That depends. As the proud owner of an IBM POWER server that spins its menagerie of multiply-redundant fans in full-tilt "airplane mode" through much of its ~15 minute "fast boot"* IPL to prevent the array of 15 kRPM "large form factor" hard drives from cooking the 4.7 GHz CPUs before power management has a chance to kick in, I'm not so sure.

Then again, that box consumes more power "shut down"** than my (full-tower, dual socket, 3 GPU, half a dozen SSD, dual spinning HDD) Z820 ESXi workstation uses in normal day-to-day operation, so it's probably not a representative example (nor something I keep plugged in when not in use!).

* IBM's terminology; traditional "slow boot" IPL with full POST takes the better part of an hour.

** Read: merely plugged in and waiting from an IPL command from the front panel or Web interface, and sufficiently un-powered that, IIRC, even non-hot-swappable internal components can be safely swapped out (but don't quote me on that, as it varies from model to model).

 

[Gerash]

The reason I've been keeping my console on Instant on is when I need to play a game, say, once or twice a week I don't want to wait for a multi gigabyte update. However given the amount of energy waste I switched it back to the energy saver mode

 

[raxx7]

The reason I've been keeping my console on Instant on is when I need to play a game, say, once or twice a week I don't want to wait for a multi gigabyte update. However given the amount of energy waste I switched it back to the energy saver mode

It will still download updates even in energy saving mode.

 

[Vaguedreams]

The article conflates the S and the X. Do they really draw the same on idle?

I don't see why they wouldn't. It's in sort of a sleep mode and the only real difference between them is the amount of RAM (that I can think of) while idling. I don't even think that really matters as most of the instant on stuff is on it's persistent storage.

 

[Null_Space]

The article conflates the S and the X. Do they really draw the same on idle?

I don't see why they wouldn't. It's in sort of a sleep mode and the only real difference between them is the amount of RAM (that I can think of) while idling. I don't even think that really matters as most of the instant on stuff is on it's persistent storage.

more RAM and the processor die for the Series X is much larger (almost double).

And yes, you'd think they'd be able to gate off all the extra while idling, but apparently they're not gating as much as you'd think in general (hence this whole conversation).

 

[John.Flick]

The real story here is how bad Windows 10's sleep has become on the desktop, and how impossible it is to debug what might be preventing sleep.

I'm having a lot better luck after a motherboard and cpu upgrade and fresh windows install, but I give it 2-3 months before I'm back to having sleep issues again.

I've never had a single issue with Ubuntu 20.04 sleep since going to a dual boot configuration some time ago either so its not strictly a mobo bios issue that's for sure.

 

[MontyPython]

To put that 78 kWH into perspective, the average US household consumes a little over 10 MWH per year.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

To put that 10MWH inperspective, except for a few countries in Europe the average EU household consumes around 4MWH per year.
https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publication ... lling.html

It’s kind of hard to compare on just gross numbers. Nowhere in the U.S. is as poor as Romania or Poland, for instance. Climate makes a huge difference (Californians aren’t particularly low energy users in other ways, but the climate requires relatively little heating/cooling compared to many others). Also depends on whether electric is used for heating (as opposed to natgas or fuel oil).

Even rich people in Britain only use 4-5 MW a year.

Britain's climate is largely much milder compared to large portions of the US. Your houses are probably much smaller as well (on average). We have large portions of our population living in areas where AC/Heating is actually a requirement not to die.

 

[nivedita]

To put that 78 kWH into perspective, the average US household consumes a little over 10 MWH per year.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

To put that 10MWH inperspective, except for a few countries in Europe the average EU household consumes around 4MWH per year.
https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publication ... lling.html

It’s kind of hard to compare on just gross numbers. Nowhere in the U.S. is as poor as Romania or Poland, for instance. Climate makes a huge difference (Californians aren’t particularly low energy users in other ways, but the climate requires relatively little heating/cooling compared to many others). Also depends on whether electric is used for heating (as opposed to natgas or fuel oil).

Even rich people in Britain only use 4-5 MW a year.

Britain's climate is largely much milder compared to large portions of the US. Your houses are probably much smaller as well (on average). We have large portions of our population living in areas where AC/Heating is actually a requirement not to die.

In the long run, it's a lifestyle choice to live like that. There's no particular reason why it would be impossible for Americans to live in reasonably-sized homes in temperate climates, rather than McMansions in deserts and snowfields.

 

[Glaciered Fire]

To put that 78 kWH into perspective, the average US household consumes a little over 10 MWH per year.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3

To put that 10MWH inperspective, except for a few countries in Europe the average EU household consumes around 4MWH per year.
https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publication ... lling.html

It’s kind of hard to compare on just gross numbers. Nowhere in the U.S. is as poor as Romania or Poland, for instance. Climate makes a huge difference (Californians aren’t particularly low energy users in other ways, but the climate requires relatively little heating/cooling compared to many others). Also depends on whether electric is used for heating (as opposed to natgas or fuel oil).

Even rich people in Britain only use 4-5 MW a year.

Britain's climate is largely much milder compared to large portions of the US. Your houses are probably much smaller as well (on average). We have large portions of our population living in areas where AC/Heating is actually a requirement not to die.

In the long run, it's a lifestyle choice to live like that. There's no particular reason why it would be impossible for Americans to live in reasonably-sized homes in temperate climates, rather than McMansions in deserts and snowfields.

yes, there's no reason why people shouldn't go to live where the government tells them and take whatever job they're given. there's a name for that system