“A while ago I started testing the Lenovo X300 with hopes of comparing it to Apple’s MacBook Air. The review never saw the light of day but the testing was mostly complete. Obviously the X300 doesn’t run OS X, but the MacBook Air can run Windows so I compared battery life,” Anand Lal Shimpi reports for AnandTech.
Lal Shimpi reports, “Note that this is the same hardware and with the same brightness settings under both OSes. Vista’s power management was set to Balanced and the display was set to never turn off under both OSes; the hard drives were free to spin down if possible.”
“The results are pretty staggering. The same usage model under both OSes results in a significant advantage for OS X. I basically got twice the battery life under OS X as I did under Vista,” Lal Shimpi reports.
MacDailyNews Note: Lal Shimpi also tested DVD playback in a brand new Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch and found that under Windows Vista, the battery lasted just 1.5 hours – shorter than many feature films – while Apple’s Mac OS X lasted 3.07 hours, more than double Vista’s time.
“Figuring out why OS X seems to be better for battery life is nearly impossible, at least without the aid of both Apple and Microsoft. I’ve brought up this topic with a handful of PC OEMs in the past and they haven’t been able to shed any more light on things, other than to confirm that Vista is a strange beast. It’s quite possible that Vista’s constant performance optimizations are preventing CPU and platform power management techniques from being effective, but that seems a little too simplistic of a view,” Lal Shimpi reports. “All I can do for now is report the numbers as is. An unexpected benefit of OS X appears to be [significantly] better battery life.”
Much more in the full article — recommended — here.
MacDailyNews Take: What’s so unexpected? After several years of staring at their cubicle walls doing pretty much nothing, Microsoft’s spaghetti coders finally shat out yet another bloated chrome-plated turd that tried and failed to look like a Mac. And Apple’s Mac OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system. So, color us unsurprised over AnandTech’s results.
Chalk up one more for Cupertino!
And guesse what?
– Snow Leopard is going to be even lighter then that!!
Woarf! M$ is doomed!
OS X for President !!!
It is probably because Vista is continually polling for piracy and the bloated code. Just compare the size of Vista to OS X.
When I run XP on my MacBook Pro, it’s the same deal. Battery life sucks. So I don’t think it’s Vista, it’s Windows.
Not surprised at all.
It’s Microsoft needing to be all things to all hardware.
Proprietary Microsoft Lock in and the Microsoft Tax on Computers by OEMs even if you buy a system with no OS or with Linux MS doesn’t care cause the Windows OEM PC maker still is required to pay MS for that copy of Winderz you didn’t have installed on that system you just purchased. That is the MS Tax..
I installed Vista ‘Ultimate’ on my MacBook using VirtualBox… 14.5GB!!!
OS X can take up just over 2GB. What a fat twat Vista is.
An interesting test would be to put OS X on a PC laptop and see if gets the same result. Is it possible that Apple laptops are designed with specific advantages for OS X power management? Isn’t that just the kind of plus having one company control the whole widget should grant?
All I can is, I’m going back to playing FC2….
I had a hackintosh install on a Lenovo Thinkpad. I had used it daily for a few months before graduating it to MacBook. The results are inline with this article. While it took a lot of figuring out and tweaking to get the power management to actually work on the hacked Mac OS, it eventually did and boy, did it ever! Other Thinkpads in my office were running out of juice within about 2 hours, while I could run it for 3, 3.5, doing more-or-less same stuff.
There you have it; it’s not hardware power management and optimisation for OS X; it’s OSX itself. As MDN said, no surprise there.
And you know what? Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba and Sony are all on the blower to Ballmer saying: “what the f*ck’s going on? How does Microsoft expect us to compete giving us sh*t like Vista???
This line in the article caught my eye: “There are no scripted battery life tests under OS X, while under Vista we have things like MobileMark.”
Is it possible to design to the test?
Would a system optimized to perform well on the test necessarily have equivalent performance in real life use?
Is any manufacturer getting test results that don’t reflect real life use? (In terms of relative rank, not absolute efficiency.)
A recent scientific study reports that Windows releases a constant stream of high-energy mind-numbing radiation, called Don’t Upset Monkey Boy (DUMB) radiation. Obviously this results in shorter battery life, as power in constantly diverted to brainwashing the user.
Anand Lal Shimpi, IS Anandtech. He’s as technically competent and insightful an observer there is. There’s no disputing his observations.
> other than to confirm that Vista is a strange beast.
Vista is so inefficient because it was slammed together from the Windows Server 2003 code base in about one year, after Microsoft essentially gave up on the multi-year “Longhorn” project as originally conceived, and started over.
Note that it was based on the Windows “server” code. Servers don’t have to run with any power efficiency. Explains quite a lot. Since Windows 7 builds on the same code, it may not get much better. Hopefully, Microsoft has some useful work between releases.
@Passerby, can you design to the test? Sure, companies do it all the time. That’s why independent “real-world” tests are used, to verify what benchmark tests show.
Since MobileMark is Windows only, the test works on comparing oranges to oranges, while nothing out there can benchmark, well, apples.
Anecdotal evidence and individual tests such as this one are the only reasonably reliable data to compare battery life and power management.
Apparently, OS X wins here as well.
I could have sworn that MacBook Airs had no DVD drive….
jiji:
They don’t. He didn’t test DVD playback on MBA; read the MDN take carefully.
Thanks, KenC.
I noticed among the comments to the original article giving rather complex instructions on how to tweak Vista to give better performance than any of the canned settings, a couple of posts that claimed the benchmarks are a more valid measure of performance than real world use.
I just hope people that think like that are never responsible for critical equipment my safety depends on.
Hey, an OS as powerful as Vista is certain to drain batteries!!
It’s gotta do all that advanced “real OS” stuff, like, I dunno.
Maybe put up stupid permission warnings or be a circus of incompatibilities or something.
From the article:
“The DVD playback test is simple: I play Blood Diamond in a loop from an image on the hard drive until the battery runs out.”
From the article:
“The DVD playback test is simple: I play Blood Diamond in a loop from an image on the hard drive until the battery runs out.”
Thanks. Saw that in the original article. The test is in a way better than testing with a drive, as it elliminates power consumption factor of the same drive and tests the efficiency of DVD player software MPEG-2 decoder.
So if Batteries last twice as long running OS X than they do keeping that polished turd Vista running then if we replace every Vista PC that needs an upgrade with a Mac running Leopard or better still Snow Leopard, We actually reduce the power consumed to keep them running by 50% and lower the planet’s carbon footprint by a good amount.
Tell that to GreenPiss
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