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PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption
- SQL2219 5y agoanother link: https://www.dell.com/community/Customer-Care/Shipping-restrictions/m-p/7986582 https://www.dell.com/community/Customer-Care/Shipping-restri... "This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled."
- h2odragon 5y agoSmuggling opportunity! Having legalized weed was a major blow to the unorganized carriage trade, I guess this counts as stimulus for that all important sector of the economy.
- pmoriarty 5y agoWould it really be smuggling (ie. something you could go to jail for if you did it)? If someone took some new laptops with them in their carry-ons or checked luggage when they flew from one state to another, or even acted as an official courier, would that be illegal?
- jlarocco 5y ago> If someone took some new laptops with them in their carry-ons or checked luggage when they flew from one state to another, or even acted as an official courier, would that be illegal? If their plan is to sell them when they arrive then it probably is illegal.
- pmoriarty 5y agoWhat if they were already sold but were just getting delivered?
- h2odragon 5y agoSee http://www.themanitoban.com/2015/03/the-toilet-wars/23367/ http://www.themanitoban.com/2015/03/the-toilet-wars/23367/ for some previous similar situations
- ashtonkem 5y agoSmuggling a subpar gaming machine is a pretty dumb way to get in trouble, assuming anyone cared to check.
- wrycoder 5y agoThis is like banning a Bugatti Veyron (worldwide production about 30 per year) because the gas mileage is too low. Priceless Puritans.
- neolog 5y agoThis is a $1100 computer, not a $2M car.
- JoshTriplett 5y agoIt makes a lot more sense to ban a car (regardless of price) for polluting the environment we all breathe and contributing to global warming, than it does to ban a computer that uses power the end user pays for by the kilowatt.
- neolog 5y agoCar end-users pay for petroleum too. Anyway the laptop is probably not actually banned. Dell's probably trying to hit a threshold for eco tax benefits or something.
- bradlys 5y ago> It makes a lot more sense to ban a car (regardless of price) for polluting the environment we all breathe and contributing to global warming, than it does to ban a computer that uses power the end user pays for by the kilowatt. What? That makes no sense. Unless you're off the grid and using solar - where do you think the electricity from your outlets comes from? People still pay for the car and the gas - just like you do for the electricity that is result of work that pumps shit into the air too.
- JoshTriplett 5y ago> where do you think the electricity from your outlets comes from Power generation sources that can and should be made cleaner. And those sources can be made cleaner regardless of how much individuals use (and pay for). > People still pay for the car and the gas - just like you do for the electricity that is result of work that pumps shit into the air too. An individual's selection of vehicle directly affects carbon emissions in a way that can't be mitigated in a society-wide fashion. Electrical power generation, on the other hand, can get cleaner without the end user changing anything. So it makes more sense to have regulations about the carbon emissions on a car. A laptop doesn't have carbon emissions directly, it just uses electricity, so at a societal level that seems better managed by improving electricity generation.
- dn3500 5y agoAnyone know the actual rules? Is it a hard limit on the amount of power a home computer can consume, or is it something more subtle like a limit on the power when its idling?
- gizmo686 5y agoFor California: https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Document/IEEDE2D64EF7B4F168C0E85379828A8C2?viewType=FullText&originationContext=documenttoc&transitionType=CategoryPageItem&contextData=(sc.Default) https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Document/IEEDE2D64EF7B4F168... See tables V-6 and V-7
- irjustin 5y agoMostly V-7 it looks like. What's insane is trying to find this information directly on california gov website. all the links are broken.
- MrStonedOne 5y agothe link isn't broken, its just chrome blocking the pdf because its not on https but the src site is.
- irjustin 5y agoReally? I can't get to the original CEC announcements. From this article: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/16/505856155/california-is-first-state-to-set-energy-efficiency-limits-for-computers https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/16/505856155... They cite: https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2016publications/CEC-400-2016-010/ https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/2016publications/CEC-400-2016-010/ Searching the website for anything related to `computer` on the CA website doesn't give me the thing I'm looking for which is that table V-7 on a gov source (not a lawyer's website).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
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- pengaru 5y agoIs this basically just because of adopting newer "energy star certification" junk, and some of these devices just haven't been certified to comply to the new standards yet? Obviously they're not singling out these specific laptops...
- Tempest1981 5y agoI'm guessing it's due to inexpensive power supplies, maybe "Bronze" vs "Gold" electronics?
- gjsman-1000 5y ago20 years from now: “This PC cannot be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA because the ability to run unsigned code makes it an environmental and digital weapon.”
- seiferteric 5y agoHome built PC's will be considered "ghost computers" and will also be banned.
- busymom0 5y agoHome built PC's are a threat to our democracy. They endanger minorities and are a National Security Threat. They must be strictly regulated and all such weapons of war must go through a 6 month delay period, 21 year old age minimum, licensing, background checks and must be registered with the federal government. Cosmetic features like RGB lighting or mice which improve targeting of the on screen cursor must be banned for all citizens. And the RAM must be limited to 8GB only because no normal person needs more than that. Thousands of kids get addicted to computer gaming each year. We must implement common-sense PC control to save lives.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago“Home built PCs allow the use of crypto mining software and cryptocurrencies, which facilitate tax evasion and money laundering. We haven’t had this problem on computers which require signing… “ - Future Senator
- underseacables 5y agoI have my mining rigs going 24 seven. Luckily we have very cheap electricity and it’s proving to be quite profitable.
- da_big_ghey 5y ago"Moms demand action for common sense computer control"
- panny 5y agoGood. It's time Silicon Valley cared about TDP the way auto makers have to care about gas mileage. Tighten the screws.
- cbozeman 5y agoAutomakers shouldn't be caring about gas mileage. YOU should. If you want to drive a 50 MPG Prius, do it. If you want to drive a 12 MPG PowerStroke Diesel V-10 Ford F-350, do it.
- neolog 5y ago> Automakers shouldn't be caring about gas mileage. YOU should. I'm not an expert in cars, automakers are. They can do a better job.
- mcswell 5y agoI doubt the engineers can do a significantly better job, given the technology they have to work with; it's not their fault. Everyone could be tooling around in 60mpg Priuses, but they--the drivers--choose not to. (Disclaimer, I drive a Prius.) And if Ford, Chevy, Toyota, Hyundai, Kia and all but one of the other car companies announced that they'd only make Prius-equivalents starting next year, the one remaining ordinary car company would eat their lunches.
- smoldesu 5y agoThere you are! I was hoping to find someone with this opinion, and although I had to scroll quite aways I'm glad to have found you.
- smsm42 5y agoThis Dell PC probably has as much to do with Silicon Valley as Tesla has with Detroit.
- wumpus 5y ago"AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series graphics." One wonders where you think these chips were designed? I used to live between the AMD and NVIDIA campuses.
- s0rce 5y agoIs this related to the screen under CA Title 20?
- mustntmumble 5y agoRelevant link: https://www.energy.ca.gov/programs-and-topics/programs/appliance-efficiency-program-outreach-and-education https://www.energy.ca.gov/programs-and-topics/programs/appli... (expand the section titled Computers)
- busymom0 5y agoCan someone ELI5 this please?
- h2odragon 5y agorequires: + 87% + PSU efficiency + Incorporate Energy-Efficient Ethernet functionality +. Transition connected displays into sleep mode within 15 minutes of user inactivity + Transition the computer into either the computer sleep mode or computer off mode within 30 minutes of user inactivity. If the transition is to a computer sleep mode, that sleep mode shall either as described in ACPI as S3 or Consume power less than or equal to 10 + 0.03 * C, where C is the system memory capacity in gigabytes minus 32 gigabytes (see Table V-6 in Title 20 Section 1605.3(v)) i was gonna try to summarize in simpler words but im laughing too hard at the last bits there
- busymom0 5y ago> Consume power less than or equal to 10 + 0.03 * C, where C is the system memory capacity in gigabytes minus 32 gigabytes (see Table V-6 in Title 20 Section 1605.3(v)) Umm what? Who came up with this? Is there any scientific basis behind this?
- kolinko 5y agoIt makes sense. Out of all components only RAM’s power usage scales linearly to it’s size. You need to periodically refresh each single memory cell to not lose it. Everything else you can either switch off or move to standby.
- cbozeman 5y ago
- c3534l 5y agoI've never wanted an Alienware laptop in my life, but as a resident of Oregon there is absolutely nothing more that I want right now than an illegally powerful laptop.
- cosmotic 5y agoThese aren't that powerful from a computing standpoint; They use low-end i5 11400F along with a low-end nVidia 1650 Super and have 8GB single-channel memory. Also, I think it's more about inefficiency when sleeping and idle.
- pc86 5y agoIf it was about inefficiency there would be regulations about efficiency, not raw power usage.
- cosmotic 5y agoThe linked regulations throughout the other comments are all about efficiency when sleeping.
- c3534l 5y agoYeah, but for me its more about it being illegal than actually being a good laptop.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mdasen 5y agohttps://www.engadget.com/2016-09-11-california-pc-energy-standard.html https://www.engadget.com/2016-09-11-california-pc-energy-sta... https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-computer-efficiency-regulation-2016aug03-story.html https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-computer-efficienc... https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cec-energy-efficiency-pc/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cec-energy-efficienc... I haven't found a lot of information about this, but it appears that this is about idle power draw in electronics. I've been seeing a few things say that they they aren't California Title 20 compliant (like lightbulbs). https://www.energy.ca.gov/rules-and-regulations/appliance-efficiency-regulations-title-20 https://www.energy.ca.gov/rules-and-regulations/appliance-ef...
- setpatchaddress 5y agoAlso https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/science/california-new-computer-energy-rules.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/science/california-new-co...
- dave_aiello 5y agoI found this document published by Intel which has all sorts of technical information about "CEC Friendly Motherboards" that appears to describe the regulatory framework that rules out sale of certain computers to customers in those six states, https://processormatch.intel.com/Resources/Program%20for%20CEC%20Friendly%20MB%20Guidelines%20June%202020%20Public.pdf https://processormatch.intel.com/Resources/Program%20for%20C....
- Ardren 5y agoThanks. Looks like everyone knew about this since at least Jan 2018. Guess Dell didn't care to update their motherboards.
- gillytech 5y agoAll blue states.
- iammisc 5y agoIf you believe in digital freedom , then you're probably a Nazi or something. Edit: sarcasm if that's not obvious.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoSomeone has to get started with saving the world, eh?
- throwaway984393 5y agoAlso, all states with humans living in them. If we're just gonna mention random facts.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoRegulations are a political action. For political actions, it's not a "random fact" to mention which party is running politics.
- throwaway984393 5y agoIce cream consumption does not cause drowning.
- josephcsible 5y agoLaws are enacted by politicians, so when talking about dumb laws, it's relevant to mention which politicians are in charge.
- throwaway984393 5y agoBlaming a group of people is a lot more convenient than trying to find evidence to support a theory. But whether an answer is convenient has nothing to do with whether it is correct. When people jump to conclusions, they might be right, but not because jumping to conclusions is inherently more correct. Or, to put another way: only an idiot would suggest that a complex subject like the energy policy of a small handful of states in an incredibly large country with wide-ranging economic and environmental factors is solely due to the generic political group that currently makes up their majority. Why do we have to keep re-establishing the basics of cognition and critical thinking? Did these commenters not go to school, yet somehow found their way to HN? Are they trolls? Is it just more fun to speculate stupidly? Is "low effort thinking" some kind of meme now?
- kccqzy 5y agoJust want to remind everyone how far California has gone in energy efficiency: > In 2018, California's energy consumption was second-highest among the states, but its per capita energy consumption was the fourth-lowest due in part to its mild climate and its energy efficiency programs. Source: https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA#tabs-4 https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA#tabs-4 This is an achievement to be proud of.
- bostonsre 5y agoWhat was the energy consumption per capita before 2018? Curious how much that mild climate is responsible for the energy consumption.
- ww520 5y agoWhy do the electric bills keep increasing?
- yumraj 5y agoPG&E
- breadzeppelin__ 5y agogotta pay for all that wildfire liability somehow!
- 5y ago
- taylorfinley 5y agoActual regulations here: https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Document/IEEDE2D64EF7B4F168C0E85379828A8C2?bhcp=1&transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)&ignorebhwarn=IgnoreWarns https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Document/IEEDE2D64EF7B4F168...
- throwawayboise 5y agoI can't imagine living in California and having to put up with all its foolishness.
- iammisc 5y agoAll those blue activists speaking their truth to power took their calling a little too seriously lol
- captainredbeard 5y agoThey are destroying civilization
- iammisc 5y agoI agree.
- throwaway984393 5y agoA policy designed to make more power available to a civilization is somehow seen as destroying it. It is honestly fascinating to watch the human brain at work.
- iammisc 5y agoThey're not making more power available to citizens. They're literally trying to silence people they disagree with on Facebook because their ideas are more persuasive than their own. Stop with the moral high horse, the left in this country fell off long ago. We're all on the ground now so it's time we look around and accept reality.
- captainredbeard 5y agoThat is the least charitable interpretation of my comment. The sycophants and iconoclasts driving the modern left are a destructive force, it’s not about this particular “issue”.
- throwaway984393 5y agoYou literally just went from being defensive about not being thought of charitably, to denouncing a gigantic group of people as destructive sycophantic iconoclasts, in the same breath. Astounding.
- daxfohl 5y agoWonder if driving to Idaho to pick one up offsets the carbon savings.
- sxp 5y agoTable V-7 on http://energycodeace.com/download/26420/file_path/fieldList/T20%20Computers%20FS-2019-070219-3.pdf http://energycodeace.com/download/26420/file_path/fieldList/... has details based on the "expandability score" which limits desktop to 50-75 kWh/year. The issue seems to be that the devices don't have low-power modes that meet the criteria for annual idle power usage. However "If the model is shipped at the purchaser’s request with either a limited capability operating system or without an operating system, or if the model is not capable of having an operating system, the model is not required to comply with the power management requirements of Section 1605.3(v)(5)(B)." So it should be possible to buy the system without an OS from an appropriate provider.
- neelc 5y agoWhile I don't own any recent Dell hardware (maybe apart from two thin clients I got off eBay), I own a similarly-spec'd HP Omen 30L desktop (AMD Ryzen 5800X version) that was shipped to WA. I did get the 30L from eBay without a GPU, but Best Buy was willing to ship the GPU-encumbered version to me (Full disclaimer: I don't game, I develop FreeBSD in my spare time and need a powerful PC to compile kernels/packages, I am nc@ in FreeBSD). Maybe HP is already complying since they are based in California versus Dell being Texas-based, who knows?
- Pxtl 5y agoHonestly, now that SSDs are near universal why are we bothering with sleep mode anymore anyways? Can't full hibernate be made fast enough for no-power standby?
- navjack27 5y agoExactly! Sleep mode is known to have issues. On off over the years multiple different operating systems have had issues with sleep modes. Hibernate just always works and it's quick.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y agoI didn’t know of such issues. What are they?
- swiley 5y agoYou have to copy things for hibernate and you don't for sleep. Also because you can go into/out of sleep quickly you can periodically wake back up for notifications. MacOS and some Linux distros do this.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Marsymars 5y agoWindows does this too since Windows 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstantGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstantGo
- ianlevesque 5y agoHibernate has to persist all used memory, and RAM just keeps getting larger too.
- techrat 5y agoA 1TB SSD is about 1/3rd the cost of 64GB Ram. I think we'll do just fine.
- jiggawatts 5y agoThese overzealous "green" regulations crack me up. Don't get me wrong, I'm very pro-green-energy: I think my own country should stop building coal power plants and start investing heavily in solar and wind. However, a lot of these consumer-targetted rules are just ludicrous bureaucratic overreach that cause more issues than they solve. A quick example: My apartment block was just "upgraded" to meet some new energy-efficiency building codes, and the result is that the car park now looks like a cave. The new LED lights turn on and off automatically, but they turn on seconds after you drive past them. So you're basically driving along in the darkness, but followed in the distance by some lights. It's a lot like the glowing trails of bioluminescence you see behind dolphins sometimes. It's insane. A more IT-focused example relevant to this article: I have made a name for myself running around to various customers doubling the performance of their core business applications by turning off dynamic power management on their database servers. There's a literal turbo button (in software) on every piece of server kit sold for about 15 years now because of some stupid regulation that was started by some hippie moron in California. Think about how absolutely crazy it is that to be "energy efficient", companies all around the world are buying servers twice as powerful as they actually need, just to save $50 in electricity per annum. The amount of time, money, and resources wasted waiting around for CPUs running at 50% of their rated clock speed is just mindboggling. This extra computer power they've been forced to buy isn't energy neutral! More chips have to be made, more assembly is required, etc... It burns up an unbelievable amount of resources in order to save a negligible amount of electricity, which is now becoming increasingly clean anyway... I'm not making this up. A large telco here kept doubling down on the scale of their new LOB application server platform because the performance was bad. The irony is that the more hardware you throw at something like this, the slower it gets because the percentage load drops, which lets the power management kick in more often and more aggressively. Last I hard, they were planning on buying another 100 blade servers, despite 5% or lower loads on what they already had. PS: Some cloud platforms like Azure leave this on the default settings at the hypervisor host level, so now there is nothing I can do to improve this situation. The control has been taken away from me, so I guess everyone just has to learn to live with 3 GHz CPUs running at 1.5 GHz forever...
- ajmurmann 5y agoI'm becoming increasingly extreme on actions were should take to fight climate change, but have to agree with you here. This type of weirdness happens because of super specific regulation instead of creating the right incentive structure. Just charge for negative externalities, in this case carbon emissions. That will incentivice consumers to seek out low-power consumption devices and energy providers to offer competitive pricing by avoiding carbon emissions. Set the right incentives and then the market/everyone together will solve the problem
- shiado 5y agoThis is legally codified horizontal scaling. Blue state legislators know that taping together a bunch of cheaper computers is better than a single expensive high powered device. It's very considerate of them to force this on those who might make the classic mistake.
- mritun 5y agoAll that the rules say (yes, I read them) is that a workstation with 32G RAM (formula is 10 + 0.03 * RAM_GiB) must not exceed ~ 11W in sleep mode and a desktop with 32G RAM must not exceed 6W in sleep mode (5 + 0.03 * RAM_GiB). Basically, these desktops probably have very ancient/buggy motherboards with broken ACPI. Good riddance. Fun fact: Desktops/workstations shipped without an operating system at purchasers request are exempt from the rule. So technically, if they don’t insist on shipping with OEM Windows, then the PC can be shipped just fine. In any case, hopefully this rule will nudge them to use half-decent motherboards that maybe better supported under non-Windows operating systems.
- nyanpasu64 5y agoWhat distinguishes a workstation from a desktop?
- HKH2 5y agoDo I have to call my desktop a funstation now?
- 411111111111111 5y agoThey're often called Battle-Station. Somehow I feel a fun station to be slightly more naughty, but I guess that's just my mind ;)
- emodendroket 5y agoThat was where they got "PlayStation."
- bufferoverflow 5y agoI once bought a workstation for a great price, wanted to make a good gaming PC. I discovered that the case didn't fit dedicated GPUs, except the short form factor ones. I ended up cutting some metal bays out with a metal saw to fit my GPU in. Workstations are also often sold with ECC RAM.
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
- abz10 5y agoYears ago I bought a tiny hockey puck sized computer to act as an internal web server. AFAIK there seemed to be no way for me to prevent it from going to sleep, I presume it was due to a similar regulation. This one from the EU. Had to throw the thing out. I’m not looking forward to having to fight hardware / software locks on my computer that make it go to sleep all the time.
- techrat 5y agoSounds like a user misconfiguration issue to me. I've never had an issue keeping a device from going to sleep when it's... actively doing something... like running services.
- abz10 5y agoIt occurred in both Windows and Ubuntu. In Windows “Never” wasn’t an option for Sleep (edit; I forget if it wasn’t an option or selecting it didn’t work), in Ubuntu the usual disable sleep commands didn’t work. Someone in the Ubuntu forums suggested there was a recent power management change due to EU reg and the code around it was freshly buggy. I spent a day on it before cutting my losses.
- techrat 5y agoIt's software that triggers the sleep state, not the hardware. Sounds more or less like you were using the desktop OS version for a server device.
- emodendroket 5y agoEven in the case where this were really true there are programs like "Caffeine" which will fool your machine into thinking it's not idle.
- jeroenhd 5y agoI've never heard of any power regulation like that in the EU. Any idea what directive that might even be from? Edit: looks like 617/2013. Weird that I've never heard about this. This is about total power consumption per year though, so that thing would probably either be inefficient as hell or misclassified for some reason. None of the sleep mode regulations should apply to your case.
- dragonwriter 5y agoLast time I checked during a previous discussion of this on HN, there were slightly more expensive CA (and presumably the other states) shippable versions of essentially the same models that had that warning available, that meet the power regs.
- blondie9x 5y agoThere are two ways to solve climate change. Lower the population or lower consumption. Efficiency gains such as these are a way to lower consumption and we should be continue to focus on regulations that drive towards lower consumption. Population control is still largely taboo so lowering consumption is the only way out of climate change at this point.
- josephcsible 5y agoYou missed an option: more renewable electricity generation.
- blondie9x 5y agoThat is just shifting consumption but there are tradeoffs to that as well. Make sure you are mindful of the curves. Exponential year over year rise in greenhouse gas emissions in CO2 CH4 SF6 N20. Renewables help. But not enough. Lowering consumption is the main way to stop climate change.
- josephcsible 5y agoThis doesn't make any sense at all to me. Aren't renewable energy sources like solar and wind zero-emission? How am I contributing to climate change even slightly if I'm using power entirely from these sources?
- mcswell 5y agoSeems like it would make a lot more sense to focus on things that really use lots of energy. Focusing on sleeping computers is like a certain wise man said a couple thousand years ago: straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
- blondie9x 5y agoAll venues need to be examined. Some with more intensity than others. But you must still look into solutions.
- mcswell 5y agoNone of this is the real reason. The real reason is that computers are known to the State of California to cause cancer. The other states in the list are just hitch-hiking, I guess.
- underseacables 5y agoSo Dell can’t ship the computer directly, but could a third-party?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fencepost 5y agoEfficiency standards also impact UPSes, which is why a lot of them are listed as "not for sale in Washington, Colorado and Vermont." More details on this reddit discussion, but it's not just APC affected. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ijmgnm/apc_ups_not_for_sale_in_vermontwhy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ijmgnm/apc_ups_no...
- Proven 5y agoComing next: PC can't be shipped to the USSA due to no self-repair. We need the government to protect us!
- rasz 5y agoAlienware AMD cooling disaster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ulhFi5N2hc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ulhFi5N2hc
- csense 5y agoIf I want to use my PC as a space heater and I'm willing to pay for the electricity consumption, why should the government stop me from doing it?