There were devices that consumed 80 watts in standby. I have a cabinet full of equipment including my cable modem, a computer (server, no monitor) with 8 mechanical hard drives. The idle current is 76 watts or so. How could something be so high?
Also, if we’re talking consumer tech from the 1970’s or 1980’s, I think it’s twofold.
Firstly, the market cared more about “time to wake up” than about power usage. People had fewer devices, they were (relatively) more expensive, and people were used to fully switching off stuff, so standby power usage wasn’t seen as a big issue.
Secondly, the tech itself didn’t exist. Nowadays, your power supply has a CPU that knows how much power your hardware needs and can optimize for it. Then, you would be lucky if your hardware had a switching power supply.
CPUs didn’t have power states. If you were lucky, you could halt them and have them start again on interrupt. Hibernation didn’t exist, so in computers you’d have to power RAM, anyways. And because of that, OSes didn’t bother with the complex task of properly powering down peripherals when going on standby.
However startup time would be minimal - a couple of seconds - compared to warmup for the CRT, which would usually be at least 10 seconds before it would look settled. But I recall devices generally being much faster to start up. A C64 would boot to READY prompt in 3 seconds. The penalty for turning off completely and needing to wait for boot was small, and for computing devices, wait time was dominated by loading, not booting. You might have to wait for a rewind with a VCR, and you'd certainly wait for tape loading on devices in the C64 class. Consoles with cartridges didn't take long to boot up and load though.
Here's a teardown of a 2015 macbook pro charger that includes a Texas Instruments MSP430.
https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surp...
From Wikipedia. Emphasis mine.
I wondered how much power it could really save because it was a DVR with a spinning hard drive that would always record the last 30 minutes of the current channel even if you didn't set it to record anything explicitly.
So I measured it while on and also in "power savings mode" where the video output was off.
14.5W when on and 14.0W when in "power savings mode"
What a joke.
A software upgrade that saves 3% across hundreds of thousands of people doesn’t seem that pointless in the aggregate.
edit: additionally tvs that don’t turn off are in some cases of limited utility.
this isn't standby and is a good way for your vintage amp to become defective
Everything from the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's...
Remember in europe we have a lot more old stuff - especially old houses that are family owned for 100+ years tend not to have things replaced often unless they're unrepairable.
Even modern class D amps can be 30+ watts when not playing anything tho.
The much more standard class AB still uses 25% with no output, 100 W idle would be a stereo 200 W amplifier. Or a 5x 80 W surround amplifier.
Servers usually have out of bands management builtin and that's on all the time, even if management network is not connected. Should be just few watts tho