Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

Even on an old, well-understood, and revered[0] laptop (the ThinkPad T530), I was having an unexpectedly-dead battery when running Windows.

It's a work laptop, and it is pretty much only used for occasional actually-portable computing work like programming of other devices in the field. It spends most of its time in the work truck, hibernated and unplugged -- sometimes, for weeks at a stretch.

I began to accept its increasingly-poor apparent battery health and started to explain it to myself as "Well, it is pretty old."

Or so I thought, anyway: One day it was sitting there on a table, unplugged, and I noticed that it came to life by itself and then hibernated again a few minutes later.

WTF?

Waaaay too much investigation later, I found that a part of an HP printer driver was forcing it to wake every couple of hours...for reasons that I don't care to explore, since none of those reasons could possibly have any positive merit.

Waaaay too much poking-and-prodding after that, I was able to disable the offending thing using powercfg on the command line.

And now, it seems fine. The battery life is not particularly good and never will be, but at least it's not "Surprise! I'm completely dead!!!" anymore.

This kind of sloppiness in software seems to be considered normal in the Windows space, and an abusive HP printer driver doesn't care if it is running on a 9-year-old ThinkPad or a 9-day-old Surface: It will abuse all of them just the same.

[0]: I hate numeric keypads, and gamer laptops, and computers that are built down to a budget as a primary design criteria. The T530 is approximately the last 15" PC laptop that lacks a numeric keypad, and that does not have stupid gamer-glam functions or styling, and that isn't built down to a budget price. It is stoic and plain and black, and both the keyboad and the touchpad are centered on the screen.

Who said they never reach those numbers? All manufacturers have disclaimers that the "UP TO numbers" have been achieved in their labs in their own controlled environment, and some even specify some the conditions: Pass Mark, wifi, power-mode screen brightness, etc.

Your car also specifies some very optimistic MPG/range specs that most owners will never reach but they were reached in a lab somewhere running on a dyno.

I'm of the opinion that's getting into the realm of impossible numbers, absent evidence otherwise.

If you get it out of the box and it doesn't get what they specify - that's misleading at best, fraud at worst.

The car tests do specify the testing conditions, so I would expect that my car would perform the same under the specified conditions.