The issue has to be engineering. Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?
> The issue has to be engineering.
Did... did you just invent the technology version of Fr Jack's "That would be an ecumenical matter."
Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
21–30 of 329 posts
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#22When Windows 7 launched, I had a netbook with XP on it, on which I got about 5 hours on Wi-Fi with just browsing. I put Windows 7 on it, the battery life dropped to 3.5 hours, which is a huge 30 percent decrease. So it's incredible that Windows 8 has become even worse at battery life since then, instead of becoming better.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#23Might 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…
FTA:
>I had a brief Twitter conversation with Anand Shimpi of Anandtech about this, and he was as perplexed as I was. Nobody could explain the technical basis for this vast difference in idle power management on the same hardware. None of the PC vendors he spoke to could justify it, or produce a Windows box that managed similar battery life to OS X. And that battery life gap is worse today – even when using Microsoft's own hardware, designed in Microsoft's labs, running Microsoft's latest operating system released this week. Microsoft can no longer hand wave this vast difference away based on vague references to "poorly optimized third party drivers".
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#24Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#25The issue has to be engineering. Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?
>> 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).
But Surface 2 Pro runs on a Haswell, its much more powerful than any Android tablet
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#26Microsoft 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 there will be a few painful years.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#27Windows 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.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#28I'm curious to know how the latest Linux fares on a Macbook Air.
Which Linux? I'm sure something based on LXDE will outlast everything, while Ubuntu or other Gnome 3-based systems probably won't fare too well.
I expect great performance and battery life improvements with Mir and Unity 8, though, but that won't happen at least until 14.10, and won't be stable until 16.04. By then the Linux drivers should be a lot better and more efficient, too.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#29Might 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…
No, you're seeing comparison with the Surface Pro 2, which has same battery size as MBA, and hardware made by Microsoft themselves.
Re: Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
#30Well, 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.