The always-on nature of phones and tablets is incredibly convenient. Wouldn’t it be great if your (non-ARM) laptop or desktop could do this too?
No, it would not.
My laptop is not a phone. I do not want it to notify me about things when it's inactive. All I want from suspend to RAM is for it to quickly[0] return to its previous state[1].
[0] Compared to suspend to disk, even with an SSD
[1] This isn't an excuse not to save work before suspending
Well, I can see useful use-cases. I mean, laptops are often used disconnected right? So if a laptop sitting in a bag can wake up, sync all your emails and do all your patches while it's in your house and internet-connected, that means it's ready to go when you're using it at the doctor's office where he's got no wifi and you don't want to turn on pairing on your phone because every time you do that it somehow blows through all your data.
Obviously the trade-off failed miserably. I'd much rather have a full-battery laptop then a laptop that tried to sync everything 2 days ago then ran down the batteries. But it should've been able to work in theory.
All of which would be fine for people who want this, but the issue is there is no option on many computers. For users who don't want this functionality, who don't enjoy their computer doing shit in the background when not using it, there is no option to disable it fully. It's either shit it down or accept this crap as a consequence of sleeping it.
Also, when laptops are in bags, ventilation isn't very good. I'd rather it not be trying to do anything in there, at all, whatsoever, except staying asleep.
But more to the point
So if a laptop sitting in a bag can wake up, sync all your emails and do all your patches while it's in your house and internet-connected
Another way to frame this is "what if Microsoft could do shit at literally any time and the only way to stop them is to shut down fully or get out of range of any any known wifi network".