Sure, there are things that make sense to do in the background. The example of installing updates was a good one. But I was asking specifically about the example that was given of making you appear online on a chat service, because I just can’t see the use case for that.
For a phone I’m are more likely than not to have with me, I could understand. But for a laptop, and especially for a desktop, if the machine is asleep, I’m not at it. Why is it great for a computer I don’t have with me to show me as online in discord or slack?
My employer already requires that I live within a 45 minute commute.
There were even digital cameras that used floppies to store the photos they took.
I’m not knocking the idea of running various maintenance tasks while the computer is asleep. The original post mentioned installing updates, and I agree that and your ideas make a lot of sense. It’s not even a very new idea — I seem to remember the Wii would download updates using its ARM processor while the console was asleep.
OP specifically mentioned “discord or slack showing [them] online”, and that’s the use case I was questioning.
I do think that, even for legitimately useful uses, I’d still want the ability to turn it off. No matter how low the power draw, there may be times when I need to stretch my battery life a little longer, and I’m in a better position to know and plan for that than the OS is.