When Mac faithful tussle with Windows aficionados, the fur can fly. And at some point, someone will probably bring up the old battery life chestnut: Windows laptops simply run out of juice when you need them most, while MacBooks just keep chugging away.
Battery life is a serious issue. Every road warrior fears running out of power at the worst possible moment. Preventing this scenario has quietly emerged as the most significant design trend in mobile computing. Smartphones like the Galaxy Note 3, LG G2, and Moto X have prioritized battery life, while power-sipping chips, like Intel’s Haswell and Bay Trail Atom, now inhabit PCs that offer all-day computing—especially when paired with keyboards or covers with supplemental batteries inside.
Meanwhile, deciding between an Apple laptop and a Windows PC remains a perennial question.
Surface Pro 2 battery bummer
The PC-versus-Mac controversy took new life last week thanks to Jeff Atwood, who runs the Coding Horror blog. Atwood examined data supplied by Anand Lal Shimpi of AnandTech, ran some tests of his own, and then came to some alarming conclusions.
Using the 15-inch MacBook Pro, in 2008 Shimpi discovered that the laptop’s battery lifevaried dramatically when running three different operating systems on top of the same hardware. His test systems included OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard), Windows Vista X64 SP1, and the release candidate of Windows 7. In fact, Shimpi’s tests showed that the MacBook Pro lasted almost 2 hours longer under OS X. AnandTech had also published battery-life tests indicating that the 11-inch MacBook Air lasted over 11 hours during Wi-Fi Web-surfing tests.
Flash forward to last week. Looking at the Surface Pro he owned and the Surface Pro 2 he had on order, Atwood saw that the expected battery life of the new Surface Pro 2 was just a third better than the previous generation’s, at about 6.6 hours. (PCWorld’s own tests of a 64GB Surface Pro 2 yielded a battery life of 6 hours, 9 minutes.)
“The Surface Pro 2 has a 42 Wh battery, which puts it closer to the 11 inch Air in capacity,” Atwood wrote. “The Air is somehow producing nearly two times the battery efficiency of the best hardware and software combination Microsoft can muster, for what I consider to be the most common usage pattern on a computer today. That’s shocking. Scandalous, even.”
Yes, Windows is less efficient (on the Mac)
Our interest piqued by Atwood’s blog post, we ran our own battery tests of different operating systems running on a single piece of hardware: In this case, the 2012 Ivy Bridge-based 13-inch MacBook Pro. We used Apple’s latest operating system, OSX 10.9 Mavericks, as a baseline, and compared it to Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1, using Apple’s Boot Camp to multiboot all three systems. We also set specific testing parameters to minimize various hardware effects. These included preventing the system and display from sleeping; setting display brightness to a uniform 150 cd/m2; and turning adaptive brightness off.
We then charged up the Air to full capacity and performed our standard Wi-Fi battery rundown test for each of the three systems, each time accessing a series of websites until the notebook conked out. Our browsers differed for each OS. We used Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7, IE 11 for Windows 8.1, and Safari for the Mac OS, opting for each system’s default, stock browser. We used the Windows Power Saver profile for the Windows tests. At Microsoft’s request, we also installed Flash on Safari to ensure that any webpages were rendered completely.
Via : PCWorld
No comments