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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

Why don't you just make low power consumption a permanent feature?

Exactly. I recently discovered that my iPhone on battery-saving mode is awesome, and now I put it on that mode even when its 100%, so it holds longer. Everything works fine. I havent found anything wrong. Apple should mak that mode the default mode. Battery-saving mode should be default on all things.

There are of course things like screen brightness or gaming performance that dont mix well with the above, but thats fine. Leave the brightness alone, and resume the battery-saving mode after the game is closed.

So basically, default mode should be battery-saving mode. Performance mode should be used automatically when a fame or something is running. And make a new battery-saving mode which is the default mode plus the low brightness, no games, no wifi, no whatever mode.

Am I missing something?

> So basically, default mode should be battery-saving mode.

The default mode is already a battery-saving one, you can get an impression of a non-battery-saving mode by playing a game continuously, your battery will get run into the ground in 2~3h.

> Am I missing something?

Low Power Mode is not about downclocking the phone and trying to sip power, it's about disabling a number of features which can already be disabled individually, but which (as far as Apple is concerned anyway) most users want/use:

* animated transitions

* automatic mail fetch

* Hey Siri

* background app refresh

* automatic downloads

* wifi association/roaming

* night shift

In essence, LPM makes the smartphone less smart to try and last a bit longer. If these are smarts you don't need, you could disable them all along.

It's also setting display brightness a bit down.

It does a lot more than lower brightness and cap clock speeds, it also disables night-shift and screws with all of the background process and predictive fetching, etc which the OS does.

I guess it does, since it saves so much power compared to running without the battery-saving mode. Still, I haven't noticed anything not working as expected, in my daily use.

You would get much of the benefit without a special mode by disabling background app refresh, location services and periodic mail fetch.

Often there are tradeoffs. E.g. when I put my phone in powersaving mode the dimmed screen is very hard to read in bright sunlight. My browser not processing background tabs might be a useful feature sometimes, but when I'm listening to music on Youtube it would be a real inconvenience.

Desktop Safari doesn't have a 'power saving mode' and it consumer less power than Chrome. Apparently MS Edge is the same (I don't use Windows so I can't know). These browsers don't have user-visible tradeoffs, they're just more power efficient.

Or is this just a case of Chrome being really really unoptimised and power hungry?

I have no idea about specific browser implementations. I know I perceive Safari and Edge as less responsive than Chrome, which could easily be due to tradeoffs they make for power consumption.

It's really frustrating how much the web, software, and computers in general are being gimped for everyone just to support the "mobile" segment of the market.

Nothing is being "gimped" for the benefit of laptops, and paying attention to power consumption (direct or indirect) benefits pretty much everything.

Sometimes I try to squeeze more battery time from my old laptop, and I look for processes hogging the cpu. Invariably I see Firefox consuming 30-40% cpus and I have to hunt down those misbihaving tabs that, even idle, keep the cpu awake.

The reality is that today saving power matters everywhere. On mobile and laptops means a longer lasting battery and/or lighter device; on a desktop and laptop it means a quieter machine; on the datacenter, power usage is probably the most important cost today.

Even on desktops or when laptops are plugged in we should concern ourselves with power usage. If something can be optimized for power usage, it should be.

Electricity isn't free.

Because not everyone uses a battery powered device.

"Longer battery life" can be restated as: a lower ambient temperature for your room/office; less CPU cooler fan noise; a lower power bill; the ability to pack more servers per rack in a co-lo environment (yes, servers run browsers–headless ones, for spidering/scraping); etc. It can even be restated in terms of extra performance, when you consider technologies like Intel's Turbo Boost.

Even if power use is a minor concern for desktops, it would be good to program with energy consumption in mind :>

Network utilization, CPU usage, memory, disk usage, energy consumption. Lots to focus on...

I would expect that lower power use is highly correlated to low CPU/GPU use, which can be beneficial for other reasons than reducing power use.

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