
Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life? - chrisdinn
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-have-terrible-battery-life.html
======
blinkingled
Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high
throughput servers and low power tablets. The apps are written with little
focus on battery life. The drivers too. Microsoft doesn't write their own
drivers and then there's firmware too. It's the one area where Apple has
really taken advantage of the vertical integration - they do everything from
firmware to most apps people use.

But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted. Like
Google showed with the Nexus 7 - focus is all that's needed. It's just harder
for Microsoft considering everything they need to juggle.

Edit: Fun fact: Apple's own Boot Camp drivers disable USB selective suspend on
the 2013 Air! Check our powercfg /energy for more fun :)

Edit 2: Surface is Tegra 4 SoC isn't it? Microsoft still is limited by Tegra's
power characteristics as far as what I can tell from Anand's review. So the
integration story is better but still no match to Apple.

~~~
__david__
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).

~~~
paol
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...

~~~
__david__
As far as I know they still use the Darwin kernel in iOS. Which means it
scales from desktops and servers all the way down to phones... That seems
pretty general purpose to me.

~~~
justincormack
No one uses Darwin for servers, not even Apple.

~~~
mitchty
No one except a fair amount of people:
[http://www.macminicolo.net/](http://www.macminicolo.net/)

You can turn old laptops into "servers", or raspberry pi's, or hell even a
commodore 64 for that matter. As long as it serves something of value over a
network it qualifies.

Whether its a good idea is another matter.

~~~
kbenson
I think the fact you felt the need to put the word servers in quotes does a
lot to show that you and justincormack are talking about computers serving a
similar role, but with such laughably different requirements that it's obvious
what point he was trying to make, and your statement, while technically
correct, doesn't really change his point.

You are correct though, people do use commodity and low-end hardware for
extremely light server needs, and even in data centers.

~~~
mitchty
I put servers in quotes to denote something that serves that wasn't purpose
built for the role. Nothing more, the context from justincormack wasn't lost
but there are a lot of uses for osx servers, for example compile farms.

What I was referring to, which I thought was apparent but failed to convey, is
that this perception of nobody doing it is a fallacy.

~~~
kbenson
We are saying the same thing. My post wasn't meant to contradict yours, just
clarify.

> What I was referring to, which I thought was apparent but failed to convey,
> is that this perception of nobody doing it is a fallacy.

I just think that in this context the "nobody" you are referring to and the
"nobody" he is referring to are not equal sets. Yours is a superset of his,
which is why both statements are true (in spirit), while yours is true in
fact.

~~~
mitchty
True enough, think its been a long day for me then. Sorry for the confusion on
my end.

I do believe that means it is beer o clock time. Cheers and no worries mate.

------
fdm
I find the MBA vs Surface Pro 2 comparison to be more than slightly
misleading:

>The screen is somewhat lower resolution

No, 1920x1080 isn't only somewhat higher than 1366x768, it's 1.97 times the
number of pixels and the panel is PLS unlike the TN in the MBA. The display is
the component that eats up the battery the most when doing things like Wi-Fi
browsing, even the battery life of the MBA scales heavily with the level of
brightness.

>not touch capable

It also has an another, separate layer for the Wacom digitizer, it has to be
constantly emitting an electromagnetic field, which does take its toll on
power consumption.

>i5-4200u CPU

It's i5-4250U, with a considerably lower base clock (1.3GHz vs 1.6GHz).

Another fact that all the recent articles about the Surface Pro 2 fail to
mention, but isn't really relevant to the what the article is about, is that,
with the Power Cover that was announced at the Surface keynote, it should be
able to get 11.45 hours of Wi-Fi browsing if you extrapolate the results from
the Anandtech benchmark, or about 12.9 hours if you do it with the 7:33 hours
it got on The Verge review. This does bring the weight and thickness of the
device above the MBA though.

~~~
dragontamer
Woah, someone who did research.

Indeed: it is a known fact that Apple gets custom exclusive low-clocked CPUs
from Intel. Apple's chips are closer to "Y" class Intel Chips, which are
designed for exceptionally long battery life at cost to performance.

Overall, I think the better screen, Wacom Digitizer, and faster CPU will all
add up to the difference between the Surface2 and MBA.

------
programminggeek
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 to be
the best Windows experience. At least, I would hope so.

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware because 3rd party
manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in
the early 90s.

The Surface is absolutely gorgeous. If they softened the edges on the tablet
portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made.
I would love to see MS try to build its own 'Yoga' type laptop...provided I
can still install Linux on it.

Dell, Lenovo, Sony, and HP should be ashamed of themselves. Apple makes the
best hardware to run Windows on and they don't even like that you can.

~~~
JVIDEL
No doubt on the quality but the reality here is that even with proprietary
hardware and thus able to optimize everything for the surface like apple does
it this has a low battery life.

It's all the x86 baggage windows has, osx threw everything from the powerpc
years away, let alone the stuff from the previous 20 years of systemOS.
Windows still carries crap from when 32mb of ram was more expensive than a
computer today.

And for what? I got several winxp apps that don't work with 7 or 8, it's
pointless.

~~~
XorNot
I seriously doubt it's x86 baggage. You don't pay a battery life penalty for
code you don't execute.

~~~
rbanffy
While you don't use the battery for code you don't execute, when your code is
finely tuned to a single machine (as in CPU + auxiliary chips) architecture
rather than able to run on a wider choice of hardware, you may be able to
squeeze some extra juice from your battery.

~~~
rayiner
Except MacOS X ships fat binaries for multiple CPU architectures and uses a
kernel originally designed in the 1980's for an m68k machine.

~~~
rbanffy
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.

~~~
Tloewald
Openstep supported quad fat binaries iirc, supporting x86, sparc, mips, and I
think pa-risc. Gotta say the NeXT software architecture has aged well.

~~~
rbanffy
That's not what I was talking about. I said that, if all you support is a
specific Intel Atom processor, you can tweak your kernel to support every bit
of energy-saving performance-enhancing silicon in there.

Shipping fat binaries is not new. I remember them (not very fondly) from the
MacOS 7/PPC days.

------
optymizer
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.

~~~
nbevans
I would argue that the Windows NT kernel is both newer and more maintainable
for Microsoft than OSX is for Apple. At the core of OSX is a ton of legacy
Unix monolith written in the 70s that I suspect very few in Apple dare ever
touch.

This can be seen by the fact that Microsoft has never shied away from
improving their OS kernel. Recent stand-out improvements such as ASLR, UAC,
TRIM support for SSDs, timer coalescing etc. These are all things that OSX
took years to get after Windows got them.

~~~
dsr_
And of course the smashing success of WinFS.

~~~
nbevans
I don't really think that WinFS was a core OS kernel feature. It was built on
top of SQL Server, so I doubt it even had a kernel-mode component either.

ReFS would be a better example. And that's just another example of how
Microsoft is keeping their core technology up to date. Apple meanwhile is
still using HFS+ which even Linus Torvalds called out as being utterly crap.

~~~
theandrewbailey
What doesn't Tovalds call out as being utterly crap?

------
Lagged2Death
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 logos. If one is honestly
trying to illustrate the simple point that Windows has a power problem, its a
strange conclusion to draw.

~~~
ramones13
The first half the article is comparing three or even four different classes
of device. He's got a mobile gaming console hardware wise the equivalent of a
phone, a 7 inch ARM tablet, some ~10 inch ARM tablets, and an x86 tablet.

It's like comparing apples, oranges, peaches, and tomatoes.

------
mjg59
Because Apple have custom ACPI methods for cutting power to unused components
and Windows doesn't know how to call them.

~~~
Maakuth
That might explain the case of MacBook Air, but how come they don't do
something similar with Surface Pro? It is their hardware, firmware and
software - everything should be possible.

~~~
Touche
A quick Google search shows many Windows laptops with equivalent or better
battery life. Is your question why don't _all_ Windows laptops have equal
battery life?

~~~
SEMW
> A quick Google search shows many Windows laptops with equivalent or better
> battery life.

I don't want to state the obvious, but different laptops have different
capacity batteries. Atwood was comparing the 11" MBA to the Surface Pro 2 as
they have similar battery capacities (SP2: 42 Wh, MBA: 38 Wh), and - as
Maakuth notes -- are both made by companies in control of both software and
hardware. The fact that you can find laptops with higher capacity batteries
that have longer battery life doesn't prove very much.

~~~
yeukhon
A 100% true test is when you have the same hardware. Running windows on MBA is
defect because Apple writes iOS for their hardware. So if we have a magical
power to run iOS on another hardware and run Windows on that same hardware,
then the test is fair. But that doesn't need to as windows-based tablets
hardware are not always as polish as apple's.

~~~
stonemetal
They have numbers for your 100% true test. That is where the final 50%
difference comes from.

2013 MacBook Air 13"

Under OS X: 14hr 26 min

Under Win8: 7 hrs 40 min

Though I am not sure I would call that 100% fair. Apple wrote the firmware and
drivers used by each OS, so it has a vested interest in getting something out
there that works but not optimizing for the competition.

~~~
sliverstorm
Your parent already said he did not consider running Windows on Apple hardware
to be a fair test; he was calling for running both on <GENERIC PC>

~~~
stonemetal
Yeah, but what are you going to see in the real world? You are going to see OS
X on Apple hardware and Windows on whatever random box the person had handy.
Sounds pretty much like what they tested.

~~~
yeukhon
The test indicates something more important than Window's performance and that
is monothilic designer like Apple can in fact make a great product if the
designer chooses to. If Windows were to make their own laptop and invest the
same amount of resource into bothe software and hardware, the comparison will
be more interesting.

In essence, your average OEM does not do a great job. The capacitor, the
transistors they use are probably way cheaper than what Apple have put into
their MBA. That is expected because after all, your Dell computer is not going
to cost $1499.

------
da_n
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.

~~~
The_Double
Anectotical counter point:

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.

~~~
da_n
That's probably true if they are running older versions of the kernel, which
were not optimised for battery. If you install a recent kernel and load
laptop-mode-tools I'm sure you might see different results, if not that is a
strange result for sure.

------
shubb
Surely a lot of this comes down to the screen?

Battery life varies greatly between e.g. Google Chromebook systems, running
the same software (and between windows systems for that matter).

Some of this is to do with the power usage of the CPU, and whether video
decoding is done in low power hardware, or which wireless chipset is used. But
just looking at the power usage manager on your Android phone will tell you
that the screen uses most of the power.

Windows hardware varies from high priced ultra books (where all is sacrificed
for shininess and performance), to bargain bin systems where using an old
backlighting technology saves a few bucks.

Question to Apple users - comparing windows laptops to your mac, which shipped
with the more aggressive power saving settings in terms of turning the screen
off when not in use?

------
ohwp
In the Windows prompt (admin mode) you can use the following command to
monitor (it will generate a HTML file) energy usage (for 60 seconds):

    
    
      powercfg –ENERGY
    

I can see some problems on my own system. For example _" USB Suspend:USB
Device not Entering Suspend"_

Maybe misconfigurations like these are also causing more power consumption
than needed.

~~~
korg250
The correct syntax is:

powercfg /ENERGY

~~~
ohwp
Both work.

    
    
      powercfg /?
    

shows -ENERGY

~~~
josteink
Not sure if that applies all over the line. On my win8 install only /energy
works.

------
eknkc
I wonder if Maverics will widen the gap further. It has that app suspension
thing when some window goes invisible.

Also there are some decent performance improvements that would mean less cpu
usage (or bursts of them, which is more power efficient).

Are there any benchmarks? Or is it still behind NDA?

~~~
terhechte
I'm seeing around 1 to 1.5 more hours of operation on Mavericks on a 2012
Macbook Air 11". Now, that is not for web browsing but for development &
debugging with Xcode, so I'm usually never reaching these marvellous 6+ hour
rates, but with Mavericks it went basically from 3-4 hours to 4-6 hours, which
is fantastic.

I'm pretty sure that that will only widen the gap between OSX and Windows on
Laptop hardware.

The 13" Macbook Air could then theoretically reach 17 hours of operation time!

~~~
tuananh
I've read report about improvement battery life on Mavericks. I just didn't
expect the difference is that huge. Gotta update as soon as it's out ; )

------
JosephRedfern
Surely this doesn't just affect mobile devices. If the OS causes a higher
power drain, then it must be more expensive to run a Windows server than an OS
X/Linux server.

------
devx
When 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.

------
DZittersteyn
Might 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 hours under Vista, and
would be dead in the water in 1 hour under Ubuntu. I think it was either GPU
or CPU scaling or both that wasn't supported in the linux drivers I was using

~~~
devx
No, you're seeing comparison with the Surface Pro 2, which has same battery
size as MBA, and hardware made by Microsoft themselves.

~~~
DZittersteyn
Ah yes, I missed that WattHour spec. That's pretty dreadful then..

So the real comparison is SP2 (42Wh) with 6 hrs. vs. MBP 11' (38Wh) with 11
hrs.

------
sz4kerto
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.

~~~
VLM
"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.

~~~
bosie
> surface pro 2, (a joke of a tablet)

mind sharing why you think it is a joke of a tablet?

~~~
VLM
People spend money to conform for mating rituals or to gain power.

You don't conform for mating rituals by purchasing some weird thing that no
one else wants.

(non-engineering defined) Power comes out of what you can do with something,
not meaningless specification numbers (however awful they are for the surface
pro 2). So to do something powerful on a surface pro 2, you go to itunes app
store for that cool new app and ... whoops I mean play.google.com and ...
whoops I mean I hope you never leave the tiny walled garden of the shovelware
it ships with, because no 3rd parties are going to pay any attention to it and
it'll be forgotten about in a year at most. Its got the expandability of a
fisher price toy tablet.

So if you're trying to impress/intimidate/mate (all three?), its about as
useful as wearing a Darth Vader costume other than on Halloween, if you're
trying to collect meaningless specs its one of the worst in class for battery
life, if you're trying to actually do something you need a real supported
tablet like an apple or google tablet. So other than that, its a great...
paperweight?

~~~
rmrfrmrf
HN must have not sprayed for evopsych in a while.

~~~
Zaytes
This comment isn't helping, but I can't resist - HN is inevitably devolving
into /r/technology...

Kind of sad.

------
artagnon
I'm curious to know how the latest Linux fares on a Macbook Air.

~~~
vyoming999
Aren't all the andorid devices mentioned inherently run on linux ?

~~~
kuschku
The battery life of the Nexus 7 is almost the same using Desktop Ubuntu
compared to Android.

------
hcho
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.

~~~
kyberias
I'm sorry, but that really is not an answer at all. It's just a fairly obvious
GUESS.

~~~
hcho
It's not really a guess. Anyone who worked with power constrained devices
would tell you it's because of polling.

If I told you the biggest culprit is component xyz, that would be a guess.

~~~
kyberias
Is too! If he doesn't know, he's guessing.

I can easily think of a myriad of SW explanations why Windows devices might
have worse battery performance than Macs on similar HW that are not "polling":
too long of a boot sequence, too many running processes, inefficiencies in the
OS kernel in scheduling, memory management or caching, quality of ARM port,
bugs in device drivers, bugs in the web browser, bugs in other applications
etc. etc.

------
16s
Microsoft 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.

~~~
Nikker
I'm curious to know what they took from W95 to give W2K. I've used NT3.5 and
up and I didn't notice any w95 influence, unless you mean start button and
desktop.

~~~
__david__
NT4 was the one that took cues from Windows 95—it took the desktop and start
button, but it also took the whole grey UI/widget look. NT 3.5 had the same
cheesy look and toy program launcher as Windows 3.1. NT4 was the first good
windows version (though Windows 95 was the first to be almost as usable as the
classic Mac OS).

As far as I remember Win2k was a refinement of NT4, not the same revolutionary
leap as 3.5 to 4 was.

~~~
Nikker
Those are mainly cosmetic changes. The other 99% was a whole new OS.

~~~
__david__
I'm not disagreeing that Windows 95 and Windows NT are completely different
OSes. But I do disagree that it is "just" cosmetic—the desktop and forms APIs
are the basis for the UI of the whole system. It's like saying Mac OS X -> iOS
was just a cosmetic change, since much of the underlying OS and kernel are
still the same.

------
bni
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?

~~~
nonane
Almost all UI frameworks work this way including Android, iOS and Cocoa. They
receive events from the OS or window manager (mouse moved, keyboard button
pressed, touches moved) and dispatch it to the app. The only difference is how
the events are dispatched.

------
znowi
I'm actually saddened by the fact that we consider 8 hours of battery life
satisfactory, and 14 hours nothing short of _astronomical_. Anything less than
a full day work for a _mobile_ device should be unacceptable.

Smartphones are particularly bad at it. If anyone remembers Palm devices, they
could last for more than a week (!) on one charge. With my Nexus 4, even with
light usage, I've come to a habit to plug it in whenever possible, it goes
that fast.

We all love feature-rich devices, but I think, currently, the promoted
features and hardware are way ahead of the battery capabilities. And it's not
OK.

~~~
72deluxe
So would you be happy with modern devices with Palm screens? I don't think
anyone would. The screens are the power drains. The actual processing power
has skyrocketed, and I consider the power available in a modern phone to be
quite amazing.

I had a Palm 3e that took AA batteries if I recall correctly. True, the
battery life was quite good but the volatile memory was not - you needed to
replace the batteries within seconds of taking them out else you lost
everything.

------
mpweiher
I think the article is asking the wrong question. A better question is: why
does Apple (OSX/iOS) have such _awesome_ battery life? After all, it wasn't
always this good, or rather, it's been improving by leaps and bounds, both
with new hardware and with new OS versions.

I think the answer is that Apple really, really cares and has been extremely
focused on power/performance for a number of years. It has the focus, the
institutional awareness and know-how that's been built up since around Tiger,
and last not least the people on their performance teams.

That's how you get great battery life.

~~~
skue
Exactly. Apple learned a lot working on resource-constrained mobile platforms,
and they brought a lot of that knowledge into OSX (one of the benefits of not
having separate divisions?).

Back in Lion, the Mac would began suspending/killing processes in the
background:

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-
os-x-10-7/8/#proces...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-
os-x-10-7/8/#process-model)

Devs and ubergeeks got upset ("Steve Jobs is taking away control of our
desktop too!"), but obviously we are seeing the benefits with battery life.
And Mavericks goes much further:

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/how-os-x-mavericks-
work...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/how-os-x-mavericks-works-its-
power-saving-magic/)

Update: If there's any doubt how seriously Apple takes battery life, note that
their WWDC 2013 talk/video on "Maximizing Battery Life on OS X" was given by
Bud Tribble.

------
VladRussian2
When you have lets say 4 CPU cores and 1 active thread, Windows [by default
config] wouldn't let the other CPU cores go into deep sleep [core parking] by
intentionally moving the active thread from core to core. That supposedly
improves performance on some tests as bringing a core from deep sleep takes
some time noticeable by the tests. Keeping the cores "warm" also means
increased power consumption.

------
_wmd
While the core subject seems fair enough, I'd expect Atwood not to be so
utterly _stupid_ by trying to swap out _Apple_ OS X running on one of a highly
restricted variety of _Apple_ Mac hardware with a generic Windows install and
expect the result to be competitive. That's boxes-with-arrows mentality at its
worst right there.

In any 5 year period, Apple has a _tiny_ list of _exact_ hardware
configurations OS X is designed to run on. It's so small, they even use the OS
X software update mechanism to push BIOS updates! They have so much room to do
better than Microsoft here it's barely even funny. This isn't an excuse for
Microsoft's poor performance, but if you try to gloss over the fact as Atwood
does here, then you're omitting the full truth.

~~~
Jakob
Later in the article Atwood does compare it with a non-generic Windows
install:

> 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.

The benchmark which is missing to make this article more relevant, though, is
to measure and compare a hackintosh (i.e. non-apple PC + Mac OS X) battery
performance.

------
mwfunk
It would really interesting to see the same battery life charts normalized for
the display's power draw. I could be totally wrong here but my understanding
is that that's an extremely significant factor in a lot of "casual usage"
battery life benchmarks. If you take the display into account, then you can
start to see how relatively efficient different OS' power management code
really is.

Of course, if what you care about is the efficiency of the PM software,
looking at total battery life probably isn't the most meaningful factor
either, as they all have different-sized batteries, so what's important is
power drain as a function of time.

~~~
thrownaway2424
These measurements are both from Anandtech, which a while back absorbed this
obvious lesson and started testing at a standard 200 nits, instead of "50%"
brightness like a lot of clueless review sites use (including Ars Technica,
sigh).

------
wolfgke
Perhaps the Windows Timer Resolution

> [http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-
> re...](http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-
> megawatts-wasted/)

could explain this problem?

------
Intermernet
There's a comment on the article that links to
[http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-
re...](http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-
megawatts-wasted/) .

Which seems to point to many apps (embarrassingly mostly MS apps) setting the
OS timer interval to something like 1ms (from a default of 15.6ms) and not
resetting it.

Anyone with any experience with the Windows 8 timer care to weigh in on this
issue? I'm well out of my depth when it comes to processor / kernel level
power tuning.

------
nathan_long
To what degree does "worse battery life" mean "worse performance?" I suppose
two possible wastes of energy are 1) powering components that should be
sleeping 2) inefficient code.

Any of #2 would impact both.

------
Major_Grooves
I bought a new HP laptop reecntly, with Windows 8 and touchscreen, to replace
my dead Packard-Bell laptop. My old PB usually gave me about 4h battery life,
and sometimes up to 6 hours. I was told my new laptop would give me 5-7h
battery life, which seemed pretty good to me.

In reality I get 2.5 hours maximum. It's so bad that I actually returned the
first one I got as I though something was wrong with it. Nope, 2.5 hours is
it. Not even enough for a half-day working in a cafe.

So I guess 5-7h only applies if the screen is turned off, no programmes
running and no wifi. Useful. :/

------
frogpelt
Why did he only highlight Surface Pro?

Windows RT on the Surface 2 appears to have better battery life than the
Samsung Galaxy Tab (according to his chart).

------
trynumber9
The Sony VAIO Pro 13 seems to have a lower normalized power consumption in the
same workload, per [http://anandtech.com/show/7417/sony-vaio-
pro-13-exceptionall...](http://anandtech.com/show/7417/sony-vaio-
pro-13-exceptionally-portable/4) Of course it has a much smaller battery due
to it's low weight.

------
woodchuck64
Why does Windows have terrible battery life? Most likely for the same general
reason Microsoft is losing slowly but steadily in all areas: it takes more
effort and manpower to get Windows OS to perform in a particular area than it
does to get a Linux-variant OS to perform. That's the fundamental implication
of better design.

------
ZanyProgrammer
A Surface Pro is still fundamentally (well, it is, no ifs ands or buts about
it) a tablet. There is no x86 tablet on the Mac side to compare it to, and I
don't think you can compare one to the other. Sure, they may be the closest in
function, but not in form. You'd really need a Surface ultrabook to compare
the two.

------
chatman
Wondering how GNU/Linux distros (e.g. Fedora) stacks up against Windows 8 and
OS X in terms of battery life.

~~~
chimeracoder
On hardware for which high-quality drivers exist, GNU/Linux has the potential
to outpace Windows and OS X[0] by a decent margin. The OS and kernel
themselves are very power-efficient. You're not going to double your battery
life or anything, but you might get a noticeable amount more. It depends a lot
on what software you're running and whether you're taking advantage of any
power-saving features that GNU and Linux provide.

However, unless you've chosen your hardware carefully, GNU/Linux will give you
slightly worse battery life, because the drivers may be less efficient than
whatever the manufacturer's native (Windows) drivers are. Again, the
difference is significant statistically but not practically.

[0] The latter is a bit trickier to compare precisely, because OS X is
designed specifically for very closed-source hardware for which no decent
Linux drivers exist.

~~~
codeflo
To put that more bluntly, Linux battery life entirely depends on the
quality(1) of the Linux kernel modules for your hardware, and those vary
wildly.

Yes, what Linux does in software is a lot better tuned in many places than the
equivalent parts of OS X or Windows (in case of filesystem performance,
sometimes frighteningly so). None of that matters when some component in your
system doesn't properly enter its sleep states, because that component will
suck your battery empty.

On the flip side, if you research Linux hardware support before buying your
laptop, you should get very good results.

(1) Edit: I don't mean poor quality of implementation, just incomplete
functionality. There's little the module maintainers can do about poorly
documented hardware.

------
fonnesbeck
I didn't know Windows had a battery.

------
ChuckMcM
Its a valid question. Writing low power software is a deliberate act, just
like writing secure software is a deliberate act. Look at Linux, as far as I
can tell absolutely nobody cared about low power and the Android folks did
their 'wakelocks' design, which got a lot of push back.

------
at-fates-hands
This is interesting to me since I have a Lenova Windows 8 tablet and it the
battery life is pretty impressive. If I use it consistently, I can easily get
10-12 hours out of it.

I'm wondering what the difference is between the hardware the Surface uses and
other Windows 8 tablets.

------
mathattack
The issue has to be engineering. Is it a case of too much distance between the
HW and SW people?

~~~
easytiger
> The issue has to be engineering.

Did... did you just invent the technology version of Fr Jack's "That would be
an ecumenical matter."

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Reminds me also of Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby in _Yes Minister_ , who
dodge constituents' questions with "That would be an administrative matter,
you must ask Sir Humphrey" and "That would be a policy matter, you must ask
the minister", respectively, until one woman complains that they always shift
the blame to the other, and Sir Humphrey makes a long, obfuscating speech
about the administration of policy vs the policy of administration,
bamboozling her.

Here it is on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIto5mwDLxo&feature=youtube_...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIto5mwDLxo&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

~~~
easytiger
Love that show. What happened to us being able to do funny TV?

------
RachelF
It's always busy.

To look at what it is doing, download Procmon:
[http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/sysinternals/bb896645.asp...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx)

------
ChikkaChiChi
It has to do with power management driver optimization. Linux and Hackintoshes
see equally poor performance on the same hardware. People far smarter than me
can explain all the different ways the OS can talk to the hardware.

------
pearjuice
The shortest human read- and understandable answer to this poorly written bait
article is: Mac OS is designed to run on only x, y and z hardware
configurations whilst Windows is designed to run on the complete alphabet (a
to z) of hardware configurations. This allows the developers of the former to
have total control of the hardware and build specific workarounds,
instructions and such as they know it will only run on that hardware. Windows,
however, can be licensed to any hardware manufacturer. "It just works" (kinda)
but that comes at the price of poor battery performance (and other things) as
it isn't (and can't) be optimized as well as Mac OS.

------
lttlrck
If he had done a little research beforehand he would have known how bad the RT
was and there would be zero basis for his over-inflated expectations for the
Pro 2.

------
iyulaev
My Atom-powered Windows x86 tablet weighs 1.5 lbs (same as iPad) and gets ~10
hours of run-time. How does Windows suck at power again?

------
dschiptsov
Too much emulation/virtualization/sandboxing (to be able to run old
corporate_win32crap.exe) badly implemented?)

------
norswap
This is about the Surface, not Windows. I consistently have more battery life
with Windows than Linux.

------
dman
Does anyone here have numbers of battery life on the same machine with linux?

------
yth
i did not even realize there was a fight. MS has real potential under
different leadership - most of their products are currently horrible.

------
drtse4
Informative article as usual.

------
sch1zo
I guess one problem is comparing apples with oranges. Meaning we can't compare
Windows to OSX on the exact same hardware. The closest we get is running
Windows via Bootcamp on a Macbook which seems to have its own issues (I don't
have a Macbook but have read that multiple times.)

