291–300 of 329 posts
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I agree. And some of the clone makers offered a better customer experience than Apple, too. For example, Power Computing had a great online store before Apple did.
True, and their ad campaigns were fresh too. “We’re fighting back for Mac!” http://imgur.com/Bfl7LkZ
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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).
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...
"Supports extra hardware" sounds suspiciously like the "unoptimised 3rd party drivers" excuse that Microsoft used to throw around.
I find it very difficult to believe that supporting extra hardware somehow costs Windows 50% of the battery life of a Macbook Air, but somehow doesn't have the same costs in terms of application performance.
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It's not their problem most of the time, it's 3rd party apps and drivers. They do however have various levels of tests and certifications for both apps and drivers, some of which focus on energy efficiency.
Microsoft has a certfication programs. Sadly, those programs are notoriously weak (see the outrage about "Vista certified" machines not actually being able to run the hardware accelerated desktop). This was done to please hardware manifacturers and allow them to put new hardware out quickly. Applying pressure here and denying certification to drivers not implementing power features properly would have been the way to…
And with OEMs shipping flaky, crapware-loaded PCs that took several minutes to boot, I don't expect power saving was Microsoft's biggest concern...
When you aren't creating the hardware, it is harder to care about power management in the software because that is seen as "someone else's problem". It is easy to blame things on terrible drivers or whatever, but no matter how you look at it, the product is worse as a result. This is why Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware like the Surface. As time goes on, if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going…
When you aren't creating the hardware, it is harder to care about power management in the software because that is seen as "someone else's problem". It is easy to blame things on terrible drivers or whatever, but no matter how you look at it, the product is worse as a result. This is why Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware like the Surface. As time goes on, if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going…
When you aren't creating the hardware, it is harder to care about power management in the software because that is seen as "someone else's problem". It is easy to blame things on terrible drivers or whatever, but no matter how you look at it, the product is worse as a result. This is why Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware like the Surface. As time goes on, if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going…
Along these lines, Anand tested Windows on Mac hardware, but not also the other way around. Since OS X is so optimized for Mac hardware, this counterexample needs to be evaluated. I don't know... use a Dell and test OS X battery life.
[1] http://www.mobilemag.com/2009/05/14/hackintosh-netbooks-expe...
I see and agree with the larger point he's making, but a 42% increase in a single generation strikes me as huge , not just "decent." And this? If you want a device that delivers maximum battery life for light web browsing, there's no question that you should get something with an Apple logo on it. Except the top two champs on the Anandtech chart - champs which are way ahead of a fairly close pack - don't have such lo…
It's like comparing apples, oranges, peaches, and tomatoes.
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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...
Even with extra hardware support, I'd like to know the details of exactly what OS X is doing that Windows doesn't. "Supports extra hardware" sounds suspiciously like the "unoptimised 3rd party drivers" excuse that Microsoft used to throw around. I find it very difficult to believe that supporting extra hardware somehow costs Windows 50% of the battery life of a Macbook Air, but somehow doesn't have the same costs in…
See mjg59's reply and my note on USB suspend elsewhere in the thread. (OS X turns off lot of things using non standard firmware implementation and uses out of band notifications that Windows and Linux aren't made aware of. Apple's Boot Camp drivers also turn off USB suspend on Windows. Those things matter a lot for power management.)
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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.
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Except MacOS X ships fat binaries for multiple CPU architectures and uses a kernel originally designed in the 1980's for an m68k machine.
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.