Response to Joseph Crawford

With yesterday’s launch of Power Manager 3.6 behind us, the wait begins for feedback and comments.

This launch was the first time we used PRMac alongside our normal press release distributors. PRMac appears to have widened our immediate audience.

A new commenter was Joseph Crawford. Regrettably not the most positive response. Joseph made a number of factual errors and oversights that I would like to address.

“However I am not sure what computer lab would leave all of the computers on overnight.”

Joseph questions how many computer labs leave their computers on overnight. It is fair query and one that has attracted academic research.

The research is based on office and school environments and shows that “ [o]n average, only half of all computers and monitors are turned off at night.”

Personal experience has taught me, even within technology companies, staff leave on their computers and monitors overnight.

Power Manager directly addresses the problem by removing the need to train and then remind staff repeatedly to turn off equipment at night.

“If you shut your computer down there is no way for it to monitor the time and trigger events such as wakeup. If you are already shutting the computer down at night, how is this supposed to help you save money? I believe that they are misleading people by not disclosing that to the public.”

Joseph Crawford claims we are misleading the public. A charge I am sorry to hear and glad to counter.

I am happy to introduce Joseph to a great feature that has been part of the Mac architecture for over ten years. Macs have the ability to switch themselves on from the off power state. To put it another way, when you shut down your Mac, you can schedule the hardware to start it up again in the future.

This is different from waking from sleep. The power consumption of sleeping versus power off differs - with sleep requiring more energy. How much difference depends on your Mac and its configuration. Again, research we publish on our site goes into depth about this topic and is worth reading.

With regard to the energy that can be saved by a user who regularly shuts down their Mac, I believe it is minimal, and that Power Manager is best purchased for its other benefits. :-)

“This is something that would be better priced at $10 (USD) per copy or even released as open source software.”

Joseph’s closing paragraph highlights an attitude to software and digital content that feels all too common.

It is a tough lesson to learn and personally it was difficult to accept, but the value of a product is determined by the problem it solves, or pleasure it provides, and not the cost of production.

“After reading the site I have not even tried a demo yet but I do plan to.”

Joseph, when you are enjoying the demonstration be sure to check out the command line support, AppleScript, and cool Login Window notifications. Hopefully we can convert that rant into a rave tag!