When you want to turn your toaster off, you just flip the switch. There is no concept of putting your toaster to sleep or in hibernation. Computers, though, must move around a lot and survive on batteries, so we have all sorts of fancy power-saving techniques.

Across all operating systems, perhaps especially Ubuntu, boot times are falling like a rock. Granted the test linked before was both unscientific and performed on fairly nice hardware, but the time it takes the computer to get through the BIOS is almost as long as it takes for the operating system to boot. In other words, the total time from power button to web browser/any application is becoming very small.

As all of this happens, do we still need sleep, suspend, and hibernate or are computers just on/off devices? Have computers finally become just appliances?

I don’t think that we have quite reached either stage in computing yet, but I think we are on track for both. Soon there will be little reason to put your computer to sleep when it is just as fast to hit the power switch. As far as becoming an appliance, geeks will probably always have non-appliance computers, but devices such as netbooks and the CrunchPad are essentially just appliances.

We’re not quite there yet, but sooner than we think we may arrive at a point where most computers are just another appliance.

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