Apple's Updated MacBook Pro's Deliver Outstanding Battery-Life

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

At last week's WWDC, Apple had much to show off, including OS X Snow Leopard, Safari 4, iPhone 3G S and of course, the revised MacBook Pro line-up, which introduced for the first time, a 13-inch model. One of the biggest things taken away from the conference was the fact that Apple promised up to 7 hours on the new integrated-battery notebooks... a bold claim.

It didn't take too long before Apple-enthusiast Anand Lal Shimpi got one of the new models in for testing, and to say he was impressed would be an understatement. In his initial tests, the 2.53GHz version of the MacBook Pro lasted 8.13 hours in his wireless web-browsing tests. I don't think battery-life alone would sell me on a MacBook, but no one can deny such results are impressive.

What's more impressive is just how much more efficient OS X is when it comes to battery-life than Vista. We're not talking small differences here, but differences of 25% or higher. The frustrating thing is that it's hard to even come up with a reason for this. Vista is "bloated", sure, but 25%? Even worse is the fact that Windows 7 delivers even worse battery-life. Anyone have any ideas what could possibly be giving OS X such a worthwhile edge? I'd sure love to know.

The situation is apparently a bit better under Windows XP but not significantly. Even more depressing is the fact that Windows 7 doesn’t appear to make the situation any better. I still have a couple more hours in my Windows 7 run but I’ll update this page once I have the results. Right now it’s looking like ~6 hours for the new MacBook Pro under Windows 7 x64 RC1.

Source: AnandTech​

 

[Kougar]

Lets start at the basic question... how many processes are running on OS X after startup? Windows Vista can be running 50 or more, and that's before bloatware and cheaply designed support softwre gets installed by OEMs. Does OS X constantly read the hard drive, polling data for caching to memory just incase the user decides to run certain programs?

How about from another angle, is OS X rendered on the GPU like Vista is? That caused some dips in battery life initially, but I'm less sure how much of a factor it is today with better written drivers. Perhaps in addition to everything else OS X doesn't require as much processing overhead for rendering the desktop GUI.

Then there's the services... Windows uses 200+ background services, many it starts, executes, then stops during or just after boot, or intermittently starts and pauses while in use, or simply leaves running all the time. There's several always running services that their goal is to ensure Windows is legitimate, if you kill those then the OS goes into lockdown mode. I'd bet it's just a combination of all the above additional overhead in windows preventing one or more CPU cores from fully powering down as they do under OS X, if I was guessing. After 5 hours, even the slightest inefficiency is going to have added up into a measurable loss of battery life.

 

[Rob Williams]

That's true... it goes to show that Microsoft needs to take things a LOT more seriously. I've love to see Linux run on the same notebook though and see the results from that. At least that way, we'd be able to point blame there as well if the same issue is there, or further discover whether or not Apple is using some trickery that the other OS' are not currently capable of exploiting.

 

[Kougar]

Can you even install and run Linux on a mac? Since they use the EFI version of a BIOS I'm not sure how that'd work.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'm not sure how the process works nowadays, but you've always been able to install Linux on Macs as far as I know... even back in the Power PC days (thanks to Yellow Dog Linux). Linux also supports EFI no problem, so I'm not sure if there's a real limitation there. I do know of people who've run Linux on their Macs, even recently, but whether they were resorting to using a VM or not, I'm not sure.

I'll have to ping Brett, seemingly the only Mac user around here, and see what he says.

 

[Kougar]

I guess there isn't actually a problem then, but it struck me when reading the thread that I actually didn't know and couldn't think of anyone that'd actually installed Linux on their OS X system.

 

[Rob Williams]

OS X might be the "perfect" operating system depending on who you ask, but everyone likes a change every now and then, even if the change limits you a bit more than you're used to. OS X is built on top of Unix, so it's really not a far stretch from Linux to begin with. Thanks to that, many console commands are the exact same as well, so moving from one to another isn't really a major shift, aside from the GUI, of course.