Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#251

Post by dragontamer » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 6:46 PM UTC

fdm wrote: post #207

I find the MBA vs Surface Pro 2 comparison to be more than slightly misleading: >The screen is somewhat lower resolution No, 1920x1080 isn't only somewhat higher than 1366x768, it's 1.97 times the number of pixels and the panel is PLS unlike the TN in the MBA. The display is the component that eats up the battery the most when doing things like Wi-Fi browsing, even the battery life of the MBA scales heavily with the…

Woah, someone who did research.

Indeed: it is a known fact that Apple gets custom exclusive low-clocked CPUs from Intel. Apple's chips are closer to "Y" class Intel Chips, which are designed for exceptionally long battery life at cost to performance.

Overall, I think the better screen, Wacom Digitizer, and faster CPU will all add up to the difference between the Surface2 and MBA.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#252

Post by yth » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 6:48 PM UTC

i did not even realize there was a fight. MS has real potential under different leadership - most of their products are currently horrible.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#253

Post by temac » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 6:50 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #210

melling wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, consumers don't really care. They just want the better product. "Yes, Mac's get twice the battery life but Microsoft has to support more hardware" doesn't really cut it. Sure, I appreciate it, but when it comes time to spend $2000, I simply want to know that I'm getting my money's worth.

To some people, the one that supports more hardware is the better product. Especially when they are spending $2000.

He was talking about one $2k laptop. Once you buy one windows version of that, knowing that the software installed on it can support other laptop is not going to make you less sad about your short battery life...

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#254

Post by kyberias » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 6:53 PM UTC

hcho wrote: post #50

kyberias wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but that really is not an answer at all. It's just a fairly obvious GUESS.

It's not really a guess. Anyone who worked with power constrained devices would tell you it's because of polling. If I told you the biggest culprit is component xyz, that would be a guess.

Is too! If he doesn't know, he's guessing.

I can easily think of a myriad of SW explanations why Windows devices might have worse battery performance than Macs on similar HW that are not "polling": too long of a boot sequence, too many running processes, inefficiencies in the OS kernel in scheduling, memory management or caching, quality of ARM port, bugs in device drivers, bugs in the web browser, bugs in other applications etc. etc.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#255

Post by aroch » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 7:00 PM UTC

jasomill wrote: post #244

aroch wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. On OSX you get an elevated privileges login prompt for any installer needing to write to / and even for many write protected folders inside your own homedir. You can grant rights as any user you want simply by entering that username (it's automatically populated with…

This is true for properly written installers and apps, but since not everything is properly written, a related problem does crop up from time to time: an installer or app assumes the user has permissions to something that the "admin" group usually has access to, and therefore doesn't bother using the correct API to elevate. Even here, though, in the typical cases of installers and updaters, there are easy workarounds…

I don't think I've run into an installer that doesn't properly elevate since 2005... Most just shove things into .pkg with PackageMaker and everything's correct

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#256

Post by Samuel_Michon » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 7:02 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #248

JVIDEL wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt on the quality but the reality here is that even with proprietary hardware and thus able to optimize everything for the surface like apple does it this has a low battery life. It's all the x86 baggage windows has, osx threw everything from the powerpc years away, let alone the stuff from the previous 20 years of systemOS. Windows still carries crap from when 32mb of ram was more expensive than a computer tod…

Mac OSX runs all of that x86 baggage as well.

I don’t know much about semiconductors, but Apple started shipping x86 Macs when Intel had just switched to the Core architecture. I can imagine that Apple didn’t bother to write for technologies that were present in earlier Intel chips. Apple has only shipped Intel-powered computers with Core and Xeon chipsets (the first gen AppleTV ran on a Pentium M, though).

“The Core microarchitecture is a major architectural revision”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_(microarchitecture)

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#257

Post by temac » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 7:04 PM UTC

revelation wrote: post #186

dingaling wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt very much that the commodity hardware in Apple laptops exposes any ACPI methods of which other operating systems are unaware. They are the same components as widely used, just packaged differently ( as lspci from Linux on an Apple machine will show ). From memory the only Apple-branded components were the SD card readers and the keyboard. And how would Intel / Nvidia / Broadcom / Samsung / LG / whomever be pe…

Apple does use an extra microcontroller or small processor in MacBooks and other machines that controls fans and probably a large number of other power related things. They call it the SMC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Controller So maybe not ACPI, but homebrew.

Everybody does that. This has not much to do with ACPI. ACPI is mainly a software thing (yes, you have some dedicated register support in some chips, but the baseline of those that are absolutely necessary is quite small and well supported by chip vendors)

ACPI has also proven to be an idea with a very bad execution: much of the tables are filled with bugs, and the spec has been written by complete psychopaths. IIRC sometimes it is better to skip entire sections and to use a custom written driver for each OS (like Intel did for some processors or chipsets for Linux I think)

Remember that ACPI has been created in part by MS, and that Bill himself wanted a conception that was easy for windows and hard for the other. I'm not sure this has been executed for the conception (even though the result is a mess), but MS absolutely managed to create an ecosystem where board vendors test only on Windows and ship if this kind of work, regardless of the amount of obvious bug present in their ACPI code.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#258

Post by AsymetricCom » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 7:07 PM UTC

__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).

OSX is not a general-purpose OS.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#259

Post by nbevans » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 7:25 PM UTC

vor_ wrote: post #243

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…

Darwin wasn't written in the 70s, and the foundations are regularly updated. The source code is publicly available. Your speculation that few in Apple dare touch it, as if it's some indecipherable monstrosity, is nonsense.

Why is it so slow to add new features and technologies then? It took them, what, like 3 years? To add TRIM support for SSDs? Their first attempt at ASLR was woeful and badly broken and even that was a year after Vista got it.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#260

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 7:26 PM UTC

Its a valid question. Writing low power software is a deliberate act, just like writing secure software is a deliberate act. Look at Linux, as far as I can tell absolutely nobody cared about low power and the Android folks did their 'wakelocks' design, which got a lot of push back.