Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

The short answer is polling. There's nothing better at draining a battery than infinite loops waiting for something to happen. I bet Windows have too many of those, remnant from the days where power consumption didn't matter because your PC is plugged into a socket at all times.

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?

>> Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?

The article points out the Surface 2. Software and hardware developed by MS and it still has bad battery life when compared with Nexus 7 and iPad (it has half the battery life of the Nexus 7).

Might it be that the Win7/Vista drivers for the MBA are worse that the OSX drivers?

We see the comparisons: Surface iPad, OSX MBA Win7/Vista MBA

Surface has different architecture than the iPad, so the battery difference is easily explained, and maybe driver support is just less than stellar, meaning HW isn't as efficient and/or doesn't scale back quickly enough?

I had an Asus laptop some years ago that would last 3 hours under Vista, and would be dead in the water in 1 hour under Ubuntu. I think it was either GPU or CPU scaling or both that wasn't supported in the linux drivers I was using

Google Nexus 7 does run on Linux.