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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

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Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#131

Post by stonemetal »

Maakuth wrote: post #51
mjg59 wrote: post #45

Because Apple have custom ACPI methods for cutting power to unused components and Windows doesn't know how to call them.

That might explain the case of MacBook Air, but how come they don't do something similar with Surface Pro? It is their hardware, firmware and software - everything should be possible.

The Surface Pro is MS' V1. It is going to take a while for them to become as savvy at hardware design as Apple is. Is there really any surprise that the newcomer isn't quite as good as the old guard?

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#132

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

A Surface Pro is still fundamentally (well, it is, no ifs ands or buts about it) a tablet. There is no x86 tablet on the Mac side to compare it to, and I don't think you can compare one to the other. Sure, they may be the closest in function, but not in form. You'd really need a Surface ultrabook to compare the two.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#133

Post by mitchty »

__david__ wrote: post #111
paol wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing general purpose about Mac OS X as far as hardware support is concerned. Just like iOS, it only has to target a very small set of hardware configurations. Edit: as pointed out elsewhere, this doesn't excuse MS from not taking advantage of the same vertical integration on their own hardware...

As far as I know they still use the Darwin kernel in iOS. Which means it scales from desktops and servers all the way down to phones... That seems pretty general purpose to me.

Additionally its folly to think servers can't gain from power management.

Most servers are idle, or running maybe 40%, might as well let those other cores sit idle if they aren't used. Example is at idle with power management our latest xeon draws 300W versus 390 without. 900W at full tilt and all power management disabled.

The excuse that windows is a "general purpose" OS doesn't fly in my boat. Granted I don't use Linux for laptops generally but power management should be something any OS does somewhat sanely. We're moving to Amdahls law now away from Moore, also is there a law yet on power requirements for appplications? So power consumption is only going to be more of a basic feature than bolted on. That and doing things like using avx or gpu's for array multiplication because the power requirements are cheaper etc...

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#134

Post by badman_ting »

ams6110 wrote: post #44
16s wrote: post #26

Microsoft turned Windows 95 into a full-fledged multi-user operating system. Segmented user space? Unix had done that for years. All users where admin and it was horrible, but lot's of apps ran on it, so people bought it and used it. Then they merged Win95 into WinNT and gave us Windows 2000. Now they are turning a full-fledged multi-user OS into a tablet OS. Let's make this tank into a bicycle. History tells us ther…

Apple manged to turn a multi-user OS into a tablet OS, why can't Microsoft do it? The actual NT kernel is supposedly hardware-agnostic. I am guessing that power management was simply not on the radar when NT was developed. Few people had laptops, and if they did, nobody expected more than an hour or two of battery life out of them, and nobody really cared too much about power consumption on desktops and servers. For…

Microsoft is more dedicated to backwards compatibility, way more dedicated. Apple mostly don't care about breaking something that's three years old if it means they can do some new thing. It's a tradeoff and they've both made their choices. Can't blame MS, their choice has served them well for a long time.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#135

Post by Superleroy »

VLM wrote: post #32
sz4kerto wrote: post #27

Windows does not have a terrible battery life. That's so simple. The difference between OSX and Windows are related to drivers. The charts are quite ridiculous in the article - comparing an Ivy Bridge, actively cooled laptop-tablet to a Nexus 7? Why? BTW, the biggest difference is maybe CPU core hotplugging, this exists in Android and iOS but does not in Windows RT.

"The charts are quite ridiculous in the article - comparing an Ivy Bridge, actively cooled laptop-tablet to a Nexus 7? Why?" The relevant comparison was the surface pro 2, (a joke of a tablet), has a 42 Wh battery and runs a mere 6.6 hours, but the macbook 11 inch has a smaller 38 Wh battery yet runs longer at 11.1 hours very nearly twice as long.

There was no relevant comparsion, as long as the hardware differs there is no way to compare. It's not just about the processor it's about everything the display the speakers the wireless network adapter, etc. Don't get me wrong the battery life of the surface is ridiculous but still the comparsion is equally ridiculous.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#136

Post by fetbaffe »

[deleted] wrote: post #125
nbevans wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the Windows NT kernel is both newer and more maintainable for Microsoft than OSX is for Apple. At the core of OSX is a ton of legacy Unix monolith written in the 70s that I suspect very few in Apple dare ever touch. This can be seen by the fact that Microsoft has never shied away from improving their OS kernel. Recent stand-out improvements such as ASLR, UAC, TRIM support for SSDs, timer coalescing…

[deleted]

Windows UAC is the best I have used on any platform. What I can remember it was not that good on OSX. Not even Ubuntu gets this right. However the permission system on Windows is a hassle.

I always have a normal user account and an seperate admin account. The normal account does not have sudo permission. This setup on Ubuntu and what I can remember on OSX is not hassle free because a lot of installers and apps assumes normal user has some sort of sudo.

Unfortunately Windows 8.1 dumped UAC in the toilet when forcing the Windows 8.1 update to be downloaded from the store, which made your local admin account useless.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#137

Post by rmrfrmrf »

terhechte wrote: post #49
eknkc wrote: post #4

I wonder if Maverics will widen the gap further. It has that app suspension thing when some window goes invisible. Also there are some decent performance improvements that would mean less cpu usage (or bursts of them, which is more power efficient). Are there any benchmarks? Or is it still behind NDA?

I'm seeing around 1 to 1.5 more hours of operation on Mavericks on a 2012 Macbook Air 11". Now, that is not for web browsing but for development & debugging with Xcode, so I'm usually never reaching these marvellous 6+ hour rates, but with Mavericks it went basically from 3-4 hours to 4-6 hours, which is fantastic. I'm pretty sure that that will only widen the gap between OSX and Windows on Laptop hardware. The 13" M…

Wow! That's fantastic news.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#138

Post by hannibal5 »

nbevans wrote: post #95
optymizer wrote: post #30

Well, how about this: because MS doesn't care. It's too late, the code is too large and too old, the developers are too new, no one knows what's going on and this whole thing is a giant rolling monster with parts flying out every second, killing innocent batteries.

I would argue that the Windows NT kernel is both newer and more maintainable for Microsoft than OSX is for Apple. At the core of OSX is a ton of legacy Unix monolith written in the 70s that I suspect very few in Apple dare ever touch. This can be seen by the fact that Microsoft has never shied away from improving their OS kernel. Recent stand-out improvements such as ASLR, UAC, TRIM support for SSDs, timer coalescing…

For mobile applications Windows has been constantly behind Android and iOS. One part of Nokia's problems was that MS could not deliver drivers for new hardware. For example, Nokia could not move to high resolution screens because Windows could not handle them. Being constantly 6-12 months behind because software is not up to dates was devastating.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#139

Post by stonemetal »

yeukhon wrote: post #85
SEMW wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A quick Google search shows many Windows laptops with equivalent or better battery life. I don't want to state the obvious, but different laptops have different capacity batteries. Atwood was comparing the 11" MBA to the Surface Pro 2 as they have similar battery capacities (SP2: 42 Wh, MBA: 38 Wh), and - as Maakuth notes -- are both made by companies in control of both software and hardware. The fact that you can…

A 100% true test is when you have the same hardware. Running windows on MBA is defect because Apple writes iOS for their hardware. So if we have a magical power to run iOS on another hardware and run Windows on that same hardware, then the test is fair. But that doesn't need to as windows-based tablets hardware are not always as polish as apple's.

They have numbers for your 100% true test. That is where the final 50% difference comes from.

2013 MacBook Air 13"

Under OS X: 14hr 26 min

Under Win8: 7 hrs 40 min

Though I am not sure I would call that 100% fair. Apple wrote the firmware and drivers used by each OS, so it has a vested interest in getting something out there that works but not optimizing for the competition.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#140

Post by blinkingled »

__david__ wrote: post #96
blinkingled wrote: post #93

Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little focus on battery life. The drivers too. Microsoft doesn't write their own drivers and then there's firmware too. It's the one area where Apple has really taken advantage of the vertical integration - they do everything from firmware to most apps people use. But both Windo…

Perhaps you missed the part about Mac OS X (also a general purpose OS) using significantly less battery than windows on the exact same hardware. And that's not even considering OS 10.9 which is due to be released soon which has a bunch of battery life improvements (rumored to be around a 10% to 15% increase).

On the Air Apple disables USB suspend. Can you blame Microsoft for that? Replace Spoke with Asus/Lenovo/Dell/HP and you've got quite the problems on your way to"Windows Gets Great Battery Life!" goal post.

For surface - yes they're being a bit sloppy. They should work closer with their hardware manufacturers to fix things such as SoC current leaks, display power draw etc. But they are still limited by say NVidia Tegra 4 power characteristics. Microsoft doesn't design their own SoC like Apple does with A7 for example.

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