Live data from Hacker News

Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

codinghorror.com

321–329 of 329 posts

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#321
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're not slow to add features. Some may arrive after a competitor, but every release of OS X sees low-level feature additions and updates. They're documented by Siracusa's mega-reviews as well as the OS X release notes. Nearly Apple's entire product line has been dependent on the flexibility of that foundation, from the PowerPC Macs to the Intel transition to the ARM squeeze, not to mention the recent ARM64 port.…

You're really digging in on this aren't you? I wrote very clearly that it was only a suspicion clearly in an attempt to explain why they are so much slower at improving their OS kernel than Microsoft is. So any time somebody makes a suspicion you'll arrive and interpret it as though it was a statement of fact? Noted.

Meanwhile, you make woolly justifications of their slowness by making contradictions like this: "They're not slow to add features. Some may arrive after a competitor" Comments like these are not helpful and do not add anything to the conversation.

They're slow. The reasons why this is the case is still not entirely clear. But even OSX fans get frustrated sometimes at how slow they are to add features that other operating systems got years before. The most vocal recent one I can think of was probably the TRIM support for SSDs.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#322
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…

> 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. The Darwin kernel is regularly updated; for example Apple replaced Unix init and cron with launchd in 2005, achieved full POSIX compliance in 2007, and went to full 64-bit in 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29

I admit I'm not super familiar with Darwin internals, but on most *NIX systems, init and cron are userspace programs. Does launchd need some special syscalls?

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#323

I think the article is asking the wrong question. A better question is: why does Apple (OSX/iOS) have such awesome battery life? After all, it wasn't always this good, or rather, it's been improving by leaps and bounds, both with new hardware and with new OS versions. I think the answer is that Apple really, really cares and has been extremely focused on power/performance for a number of years. It has the focus, the…

Exactly. Apple learned a lot working on resource-constrained mobile platforms, and they brought a lot of that knowledge into OSX (one of the benefits of not having separate divisions?).

Back in Lion, the Mac would began suspending/killing processes in the background:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/8/#proces...

Devs and ubergeeks got upset ("Steve Jobs is taking away control of our desktop too!"), but obviously we are seeing the benefits with battery life. And Mavericks goes much further:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/how-os-x-mavericks-work...

Update: If there's any doubt how seriously Apple takes battery life, note that their WWDC 2013 talk/video on "Maximizing Battery Life on OS X" was given by Bud Tribble.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#324
post #310

I'm actually saddened by the fact that we consider 8 hours of battery life satisfactory, and 14 hours nothing short of astronomical . Anything less than a full day work for a mobile device should be unacceptable. Smartphones are particularly bad at it. If anyone remembers Palm devices, they could last for more than a week (!) on one charge. With my Nexus 4, even with light usage, I've come to a habit to plug it in wh…

An extra pound of battery would make a big difference, but customers have shown that they would rather have a smaller, lighter device than 3years ago, even if it doesn't last as long.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your parent already said he did not consider running Windows on Apple hardware to be a fair test; he was calling for running both on

Yeah, but what are you going to see in the real world? You are going to see OS X on Apple hardware and Windows on whatever random box the person had handy. Sounds pretty much like what they tested.

The test indicates something more important than Window's performance and that is monothilic designer like Apple can in fact make a great product if the designer chooses to. If Windows were to make their own laptop and invest the same amount of resource into bothe software and hardware, the comparison will be more interesting.

In essence, your average OEM does not do a great job. The capacitor, the transistors they use are probably way cheaper than what Apple have put into their MBA. That is expected because after all, your Dell computer is not going to cost $1499.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shipping fat binaries with different versions for every different Atom/Core/Xeon/FX/Phenom/Opteron Intel/AMD/Nvidia + chipset glue combination would be quite a feat. This could go well beyond what compiling every package for your specific machine can do.

Openstep supported quad fat binaries iirc, supporting x86, sparc, mips, and I think pa-risc. Gotta say the NeXT software architecture has aged well.

That's not what I was talking about. I said that, if all you support is a specific Intel Atom processor, you can tweak your kernel to support every bit of energy-saving performance-enhancing silicon in there.

Shipping fat binaries is not new. I remember them (not very fondly) from the MacOS 7/PPC days.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#327
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imagine owning a race car team. For years you buy cars from Ferrari. Finally, you're forced to make your own. While in 5 years you will certainly have a better understanding of the car, V1 of your new product will certainly be a bit inferior.

S/Yugo/Ferrari/

Downvotes? The build quality on most PCs is atrocious compared to Apple.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted. Like Google showed with the Nexus 7 - focus is all that's needed. It's just harder for Microsoft considering everything they need to juggle. Couldn't they just hire someone and say "Fix this. Identify the problem and we will support your findings to get the fix implemented." It's not like they lack the financial means. I just don't think there…

Yup, no one there cares about power consumption or the core OS development. /s http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/10260956.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/

And yet, we have this article.

Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers? Come on. >But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted. Bingo. So…

My bet: backwards compatibility. Better power management requires changes in behaviour of the OS and it is very hard to change behaviour without breaking things. Suppose the USB sleep state handling code is suboptimal. Is that because programmers paid less attention to power usage a decade ago, or because some devices implement a power state incorrectly? If the latter, which devices? If Microsoft isn't 100% sure they…

An example might be a pet peeve I have with Windows: its tendency to 'discover new hardware' when one plugs a bog standard mouse or keyboard into a USB port for the umpteenth time. That in itself is baffling

It's not baffling, it's manufacturers implementing USB standards improperly, and Windows doing the least-bad thing.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/10/25504...

Post reply on HN