In an effort to make the company look better (at the expense of forcefully changing your settings), the company seems to be releasing a future update that will default certain Xbox consoles to the Shutdown (energy-saving) power option. This includes those who have already selected the alternative of “sleep”.
Doing this, it will reduce the carbon footprint of the consoles worldwide. At least, that’s the idea. Once the update rolls out, consoles will be forcefully switched to energy savings and remain there unless the user once again switches it back. So if you do prefer to leave it in sleep mode, you’ll have to take the step to put it back. Hopefully, Microsoft won’t roll out another update in the future to just switch it back again.
Thankfully, the console can still get updates while in energy-saving mode as it supposedly “will wake up at a time when it can use the most renewable energy in your local energy grid”. Typically, this would be late at night.
The only issue is that other features that depend on sleep mode won’t be accessible (such as remote wake). So if you spend a lot of time remoting into your console to stream your games to other devices, you’ll want to undo the change.
While we get what the company is looking to do, this just seems a little violating. Once you configure your system to perform the way you like it to, you don’t typically expect the company to come in and start changing things without asking. The best approach would be to ask the user after the update has been installed. Just to raise awareness and give them the chance to “opt-in” to the change of settings.
For now, the company is getting ready to roll the update out to various Xbox Insiders. It will then roll out to the public sometime in the future. It will affect specific consoles, including Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One.
