I still don't understand how Windows could possibly have become so bad at sleeping. Both desktops and laptops have a tendency to wake up at weird times and then never go to sleep. This stuff used to work. What happened?
I believe, although I'm not 100% sure, that in addition to turning on the computer without the user consent, it also puts the machine in a strange state where it's neither on nor off.
According to the spec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstantGo, it's allowed to suck up to 7.5% of battery every day. As a matter of fact, my Surface device would lose more than 5% every day, and I'd find odd periods of wakeup in the sleep log (when the machine was supposedly fully shutdown).
My old iMac was constantly waking from sleep for online tasks because of the (on by default) Power Nap feature introduced around the same time as InstantGo. By the time I paid any attention to it my HDD had ~500.000 head park cycles which also lead to its early demise. Ended up using it with an external SSD which was a massive boost in performance anyway.
The introduction of S0ix, a.k.a. pretend to sleep.
Why? So that apps can communicate with the Internet while the machine is in sleep mode, or do periodic wakeups for other reasons. Another attempt to shoehorn the smartphone paradigm into desktops/laptops.
"Modern Standby" requires that power draw (and thus thermals) is comparable or lower to S3.
It's less about telemetry etc. (you could do it with age old ACPI timers), it's about people complaining laptop doesn't boot immediately from sleep when they open the lid - but also that on a system where power management support is heavily tested (read: not Linux) "Modern Standby" has less moving parts and is harder to break.
I used to review laptops for a living and it's baffled me for a decade how Windows is still so bad at this. Last Windows laptop I had was an XPS 13 and I resorted to turning it off to avoid the "heat the bag" problem. M1 MacBook Air is basically the only laptop 95% of people should buy (assuming they can afford it)
I second the MacBook Air M1 and recommend it to about everyone that can run a Mac. What a great piece of hardware. Honestly it just works, is super fast and doesn't even have a fan.
Windows desktop refuses to even let the monitors sleep if it detects eg game controllers such as Heusinveld Sprints (pedals).
It's truly notoriously bad. I suppose it's designed that way to ensure a game won't black screen, but how hard would it be to make it a bit smarter? Ie when VSCODE or Terminal has focus, allow sleep.
Long discussion of these issues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952, but the short version appears to be that Intel removed "S3 Sleep" from recent chips, at Microsoft's behest, in favor of a mode that is supposed to be able to wake up while nominally sleeping in order to get emails, texts, and that sort of thing. Except this mode doesn't seem to work properly and instead seems implemented in such a way as to frustrate people into choosing AMD or Apple.
