> Consumer PCs and laptops spend most of their time idle
Not when Windows gets its grubby mitts on them. I will frequently hear the fans spin up on my Win10 laptop when it should be doing nothing, only to find the Windows Telemetry process or the Search Indexer using an entire fucking CPU core.
It's like with cars - better performing drive trains (et al) is used to increase the power envelope instead of lowering fuel consumption, since that leads to more sales allegedly.
It really isn't. I have a pocket-sized device that would utterly thrash a supercomputer from a couple of decades ago, and it goes a day or two on a 20Wh battery. Going full blast it'll consume maybe 25-30W, which is less than the idle power consumption of far less powerful devices from not all that long ago.
Incidentally, cars are also a lot more fuel efficient these days than they used to be.
