An off switch doesn't convince me more though. If the company really wants things always on, they could easily wire the hardware off switch to a software off switch and elevator-close-button it.

In fact, even a non-nefarious company might do that so a sudden power loss doesn't cause data corruption.

> are they really off?

When my iPhone's battery is depleted the screen goes blank. If I try to turn it on, an empty battery logo appears and it says "Find My enabled" underneath. So, I assume not.

And Bluetooth ...

Pretty annoying that my closed laptop, that's in another room, can drift in and out of being "found" by my bluetooth headset and stop music playing.

Sorry, the following rant is only tangentially related.

New Windows sleep (""sleep"") states are bewildering.

My S/O's new laptop only supports "S0" or "Modern Standby"[0]. It can sit there closed up in its deepest supported level of "sleep" and have its fans spinning and keyboard backlight lit while downloading updates or whatever else it deems important.

Sure, introduce something like S0 and spend time improving it. Try to "perfect" it like how Apple has seemingly perfected its low energy use modes on its devices. It will probably take MSoft 10 more years. But don't also artificially restrict the use of other sleep states. On the new laptop it is supposedly a hardware restriction, but I'm guessing it's more just some firmware toggle (IIRC some laptops have had S1-3 re-enabled via firmware updates, but I'm not entirely sure now).

Edit: it seems that MS has patched a bunch of regedit tweaks that used to allow re-enabling more sleep states[1], though it depends on exactly what laptop model you are on as well I suppose.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/power/system-... [1] https://superuser.com/questions/1179987

Note that the charge controllers for many lithium cells have volatile state memory--the current draw is minuscule but it's there and if the state memory is lost the battery is bricked.

The battery will shut down when the voltage reaches a cutoff, not when it is truly depleted.

Me too, for more than a decade. I never trust anything that could not be physically unpowered. Long before IoT, IPMI and smart-stuff attacks became a thing. The more I learn about hw/sw implants the less I believe in device security. (

On the iPhone it's a security feature that it still can be tracked if turned off or the battery is (almost) empty. So that's one of the aspects.