In the olden days, our gizmos had electro-mechanical power buttons. When the thing was turned off, no power was sent to it.
Nowadays, things have changed with the advent of electronically-controlled everything – including things like washing machines.
You can even look at the specs of most gizmos these days, and you’ll see two power ratings: Max power consumption, and “Sleep” power consumption.
Puters haven’t been off-off for a long time now. Smartphones are also never really off in many cases, and neither are smart TVs.
In and of itself, that’s not really a problem… Until certain agencies and groups and hackers decide to exploit these “features” to do evil things.
Mind you, this is nothing new. Smartphone hacks to turn phones on remotely and spy on their owners have been around for at LEAST ten years. Dumbphones are no different!
And there ya have it!
Yes!…….I am a power supply design engineer and I have been aware of this for many years. Anything for which the power switch has no mechanical “clunk” to it is probably not completely off.
Especially anything which you can turn on with a remote control. That function requires a radio or optical receiver which draws power all the time. In terms of “off” power draw, think that my cable set top box is a prime offender.
If you want to know that an AC powered device is really off, plug it into a power strip which has a mechanical switch and turn off that switch. I do that in a number of places in my house.
Very informative video, thanks. I suppose iPhones are also never really off. Do we know what Apple is harvesting? Or what Google can collect from an iPhone?