31–40 of 329 posts
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'm sorry, but that really is not an answer at all. It's just a fairly obvious GUESS.
Windows 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.
The relevant comparison was the surface pro 2, (a joke of a tablet), has a 42 Wh battery and runs a mere 6.6 hours, but the macbook 11 inch has a smaller 38 Wh battery yet runs longer at 11.1 hours very nearly twice as long.
Anecdotal, but on an older 11" MacBook Air I have a dual-boot with elementary OS (Ubuntu derivative) and I get around 20-30% better battery life with Linux than OS X (using laptop-mode-tools etc). I think this is probably due to all the iCloud crap going on with OS X these days, but I have no proof of that.
I have a old netbook that I've had running win7 starter, win7 ultimate running from the old SSD i had in my desktop, and a bunch of linux distros. So far, the win7 ultimate configured for a desktop pc has been the most energy efficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Nexus 7 does run on Linux.
Can we stop calling Android Linux just because it shares the Linux kernel? Obviously the author was referring to a GNU/Linux distro.
I remember from years ago writing Win32 programs, that it mostly consisted of an eventloop and you have a giant switch reacting to WM_* messages. On a deep level, does OSX apps work the same way?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Nexus 7 does run on Linux.
Can we stop calling Android Linux just because it shares the Linux kernel? Obviously the author was referring to a GNU/Linux distro.
Windows 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.
"The charts are quite ridiculous in the article - comparing an Ivy Bridge, actively cooled laptop-tablet to a Nexus 7? Why?" The relevant comparison was the surface pro 2, (a joke of a tablet), has a 42 Wh battery and runs a mere 6.6 hours, but the macbook 11 inch has a smaller 38 Wh battery yet runs longer at 11.1 hours very nearly twice as long.
mind sharing why you think it is a joke of a tablet?
The issue has to be engineering. Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?
Optimizing battery life is like f(x) = 1/x
If there is a way to get your standby power down to 0, you have infinite battery life. (Theoretically!)
If OSX really gets 2x the battery life of Windows, they only had to squeeze out 3.3 Watts. (calculation below)
So Atwood points to the 2013 Macbook Air 13", and its "14 hr 25 min" battery life. Well something fishy is going on there. He cites [1] but Apple themselves only claim 12 hours [2], and other tests have come in just under 12 hours [3].
Here's how I derived the 3.3 Watts above: the 2013 Air has a 54 Watt-Hourr battery.
54 Wh / 7 h 40 m = 7.043 W
54 Wh / 14h 25 m = 3.746 W
Save 7.043-3.746 = 3.297 W
It isn't surprising at all that Windows isn't able to fully manage power on a system that hasn't had its ACPI tables set up specifically for Windows (beyond getting Windows to boot).
I'm happy to say I've been Windows-free since 1997, no love lost and never looking back. But the statistics presented here have some major flaws. More testing / engineering needed...
[1] http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/apple-13-macbook-air-201...
[2] http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/features.html#battery
[3] http://www.tekrevue.com/2013/07/28/pushing-it-to-the-limit-2...
Well, 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.
From my perspective that shows that MS cares.
Programs written for the Mac can't run on iOS, I think.
Well, 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.