If they've done that, I think the concept of "turning off" a device goes away. ...The OS can just always be loaded and ready to go; when power is restored it c

If they've done that, I think the concept of "turning off" a device goes away. ...The OS can just always be loaded and ready to go; when power is restored it checks to see if the hardware has changed and just loads up the 64 MB of CPU cache. The idea, called “Orthogonal Persistence” way back when, has been around quite awhile. Here’s my (probably spotty) idea of the history: Researchers wanted instant-on for their early visions of tablets. To make sure security and networking would still work properly, there was an idea to use Capabilities (which were around since the 1960’s) to support this and solve the chicken and egg problems that were thought to arise. Capabilities later became widely adopted just for better security, but Orthogonal Persistence never took off, because never rebooting would have required much higher levels of reliability, which would have been expensive to achieve. So today’s devices still reboot, but also have a fast "wake from sleep." So I’m not sure if we will ever have true “Orthogonal Persistence.” We might have much slicker “wake from sleep” instead. I'd expect the hardware in phones/laptops to become more distributed, with basic vital functions handled by a separate processor. This is already the case!