To keep electronics on or off for longevity

[sparkz_alot]

Interesting question. I would have to say (from my experience, anyway) that this started quite some time ago, in the age of tube TV's when they came out with the greatest improvement ever...Instant On. Prior to that, when you turned the set off, there was no power to it. With Instant On, there was always a small amount of power generated to keep the tubes 'warm'. Even with today's newer TV's, there is always some power (provided it's plugged in), otherwise how would your remote work? :-). I think the on/off button is a misnomer and more akin to a 'sleep' button. The advent of the computer brought on a whole new debate: There were some that said it was bad for the hard drive to be constantly cycled and should be left on 24/7, others said this was bad because it caused the hard drive to overheat and wasted precious lifetime spin cycles. Again, as with the TV, there is usually power always going to the computer, particularly if you have power-on-lan active. My personal view is that, with today's solid state technology, the power consumption is so minimal it's not worth the calories to get up and physically unplug a device. I think the greater concern is power surges and an even bigger concern is 'brown outs'. Unless you do some digging, it's not often clear what the surge protection is and how long it will last. In a brown-out, your device may still operate, but at the outer margins of it's power requirements, placing undue stress on the components. The best solution is to use a UPS, or a cheaper alternative would be a surge protector (though that doesn't address the brown-out issue).

In any case for any device, your not going to defeat the 'planned obsolescence' built into just about every product made today.