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Comment by sieve | Hacker News Reader

My dad is extremely irritated with Android TVs as a concept. He just wants to watch something and complains about it taking a few minutes on startup to even show the screen where can can select YouTube.

He does not understand that it is just like a phone. Unless you keep it on standby (which he does not want to do: wastes power), it will boot, slowly, till all the subsystems are up and running. The low powered processors, the low speed ssds, and minimal RAM makes everything worse.

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Your dad is right to not understand that. There is zero reason for any appliance to take longer than a second to turn on from zero power. Even complex systems can use fast boot techniques (i.e. hybernation) to power on quickly without any power draw while idle. All it takes is developers who care and/or consumers who demand better.

Ans that's why devices have standby from which they wake up instantly. That's the technique you're talking about.

If you stubbornly decide you're smarter than that, then wait I guess?

No that's not standby. Standby requires constant power. Fast boot does not.

Which is an implementation detail with practically no power use on a modern SoC and significantly better than wearing out flash memory in a couple of years.

It's an "implementation detail" that has a very significant effect on startup times and thus user experience. Practically no power use (even if true, which often it isn't) is still power use and there are many other reasons for not having devices powered when not needed (fire safety, lightning resistance, cybersecurity concerns).

There is also no reason to wear out flash since you only need to update the fast boot image when things actually change.

Modern bloated systems use a non-volatile equivalent of a resume from standby, for a cold start. The do a true cold boot, than save an image of RAM to flash, and load that on subsequent cold boots, without a need for a powered standby.

To his credit, there's no technical reason that a processor running tens of billions of instructions per second couldn't immediately respond to menu inputs on the next frame.

Sure, the network might add a perceptible delay, but but the interface could load right away and populate the videos titles and thumbnails as they load.

At least show him how to use SmartTube, that will improve his experience by a lot.

Modern TVs use a max of 5 watts on standby. Does he think it's higher? Maybe a watt-meter plug is a simple solution (or it may make him obsess about the power usage when turned on!)

4.9 watts too much.

It's more along the line of 0.5 to 0.75W on standby for modern OLED TV like the LG C5.

Good job at missing the point. Try to comment with a little bit more effort and substance on HN.

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