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Most Game Console Power Draw Comes From Time Spent Idling
hypnosec writes "Springer Science and Business Media has discovered that during 2010, almost 70 per cent of the overall power draw of the world's consoles was thanks to idling. This total came to over 10.8 TWh of energy, equating to well over a billion dollars in wasted power. The biggest culprit for the trio of main consoles of this generation was the PlayStation 3, with its first edition having an active power draw of 180 watts and an idling draw of 167. As the report states, the Xbox 360 wasn't much better however, with active/idle draws of 172/162w respectively. Both of those consoles have got far better with their hardware revisions, more than halving the idle power consumption, but the Wii has been ahead of the curve the whole time. Its active/idle power draws were as low as 16/11w. The only real difference with the Nintendo console was whether its WC24 was enabled or not. With it on, standby power jumped from 2w to 9w."
1. Mario, Zelda, GT5
2. No PC in my living room, thanks
3. No PC in my house, in fact (by the old-school Windows/Linux definition of "PC").
4. No upgrades once I've bought a games device.
5. As few patches as possible (although my PS3 and 3DS both break that rule)
6. Biggest screen in the house is (just) our living-room television. It cost substantially less than the next biggest (a 27" Cinema Display) but is just fine for games. Games in the house, work in the home office. Separation of work and home life maintained. Games with my wife (oh, be quiet), work alone.
7. I'm not interested in FPS games (see 1 above).
8. My computers (all Macs) are for work or media. They're optimised for that purpose (many cores, resilient storage [some fast, some slow, all redundant and available], mucho-RAM, video cards that support Aperture/Final Cut Pro X) and run my software very nicely (Xcode, NetBeans, iTerm, vim, ssh, Aperture/FCP/Lightroom, Cisco AnyConnect). My console runs its software really well (GT5 mainly, plus LBP2), out of the box. No conflicts between the two, ever. No rebooting or tweaking the video settings to make things work, just pick up the controller and play, or grab the keyboard and work.
So that's eight ways a console is better for me and absolutely makes sense for me. I'm "locked-in" to the extent that I can use/buy any software I want for my Mac (even Windows software should I be insane), but I have to play the games that some publisher produces for my console of choice. I have "missed' precisely zero PC games. So where's the lock-in?
YMobviouslyV.
yea and all Frenchmen smell bad, and all Brittan have bad teeth, and all Germans are shit eating psychopaths, do us all a favor and the next time your on one of your walks, just jump off a bridge