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.
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...
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.
Additionally its folly to think servers can't gain from power management.
Most servers are idle, or running maybe 40%, might as well let those other cores sit idle if they aren't used. Example is at idle with power management our latest xeon draws 300W versus 390 without. 900W at full tilt and all power management disabled.
The excuse that windows is a "general purpose" OS doesn't fly in my boat. Granted I don't use Linux for laptops generally but power management should be something any OS does somewhat sanely. We're moving to Amdahls law now away from Moore, also is there a law yet on power requirements for appplications? So power consumption is only going to be more of a basic feature than bolted on. That and doing things like using avx or gpu's for array multiplication because the power requirements are cheaper etc...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Plus, consumers don't really care. They just want the better product. "Yes, Mac's get twice the battery life but Microsoft has to support more hardware" doesn't really cut it. Sure, I appreciate it, but when it comes time to spend $2000, I simply want to know that I'm getting my money's worth.
He was talking about one $2k laptop. Once you buy one windows version of that, knowing that the software installed on it can support other laptop is not going to make you less sad about your short battery life...
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 terms of application performance.
>extra hardware somehow costs Windows 50% of the battery life of a Macbook Air
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.)
On the Air Apple disables USB suspend. Can you blame Microsoft for that? Replace Spoke with Asus/Lenovo/Dell/HP and you've got quite the problems on your way to"Windows Gets Great Battery Life!" goal post.
For surface - yes they're being a bit sloppy. They should work closer with their hardware manufacturers to fix things such as SoC current leaks, display power draw etc. But they are still limited by say NVidia Tegra 4 power characteristics. Microsoft doesn't design their own SoC like Apple does with A7 for example.
Mac OS X is much better than Windows 8 on the same Apple hardware. I think the key to Max OS X's efficiency is clearly the optimised drivers. Nevertheless, MS has to step up, good for us!
That might be true, but doesn't the whole "vertical integration" argument get thrown out the window when he describes the problem on Microsofts own hardware, the Surface Pro?
Certainly Microsoft should have the ability or money to optimize those drivers for maximum battery efficiency.
Performance optimizations are all about trade-offs, and what might be a good trade-off for Microsoft's own hardware could be a bad trade-off for 95% of the other hardware on the market.
In theory, Microsoft could ship a second set of bits for their own hardware. But now you start to have nightmares about the antitrust lawsuits in the 90s. Why is Microsoft keeping a secret faster Windows that only it gets to use? That's the headline anyway.
The only way for Microsoft to achieve the kind of vertical integration that Apple has would be if it was willing to destroy its existing OEM partnerships. And risk a lawsuit from the DOJ. And this is a crazy strategy, because Apple has all the experience manufacturing hardware, and Microsoft has very little.
>Performance optimizations are all about trade-offs, and what might be a good trade-off for Microsoft's own hardware could be a bad trade-off for 95% of the other hardware on the market.
Why not have an "Extended-Battery profile" that you can turn on and off, that will have Windows be more aggressive with respect to power conservation? It'll be toggled on automatically on Surface-type devices, and turned off for desktops and servers (though servers may also benefit).
So give me a break. Where there's a will there's a way.
>The only way for Microsoft to achieve the kind of vertical integration that Apple has would be if it was willing to destroy its existing OEM partnerships.
(I can't reply to your child comment so replying here.)
>Any move to give preferential treatment to MS's own hardware is the push the OEMs need to convert their Windows Tablet initiative into an Android Tablet one.
I hope Microsoft's OEM partners don't think this way for the sake of progress. It is a scary thought that MSFT/Google would not optimize their reference hardware for the sake of pleasing OEM partners. I have a Nexus 4 phone. I certainly hope when they write an update for mako, they optimize it for mako.
It doesn't mean OEM partners can't use similar optimization. However, to my naive mind it is absurd to cripple reference hardware for the sake of pleasing OEM partners.
I already told you why not. Because anything that gives the Surface an advantage has that antitrust lawsuit smell.
> Hyperbole much?
Again, no. Any move to give preferential treatment to MS's own hardware is the push the OEMs need to convert their Windows Tablet initiative into an Android Tablet one. Not to mention having potential ripple effects in unrelated businesses lines like spooking HP into doing more Linux servers.
For better or for worse, Microsoft's most valuable asset is its OEM partnerships. It's not as cool a trick as it used to be, but it's the only card they have to play.
>I already told you why not. Because anything that gives the Surface an advantage has that antitrust lawsuit smell.
Who says it needs to be Surface only? Who says it needs to be limited to Microsoft hardware?
If the changes need to be in the driver or hardware layer, all Microsoft needs to do is release specs and then setup a certifying service for OEMs. Something like "Battery Optimized" cert that the partner can then communicate to the end-user. However, I have a feeling that lots of improvements can be done at the OS level to boost battery life before you start thinking about changing your driver model.
Bottom line this can be done. Windows tablets can and should be able to match Apple hardware in battery life and I have no clue why you're arguing they can't.
> all Microsoft needs to do is release specs and then setup a certifying service for OEMs
So this exists. It's called the Windows Logo Program for Hardware. The reason we are reading this article is that it failed to do the job.
What you seem not to be understanding is that in order to "match Apple hardware in battery life" one also has to "match Apple hardware" in the small number of distinct hardware configurations sold per year.
Taking that hardware configuration and calling it "a standard" doesn't actually do anything. If your standard is broad enough to support 100 hardware configurations, battery life will be poor. If your standard is narrow enough to only support 2 hardware configurations, OEMs will not build it, because Dell has no way to differentiate itself from Toshiba.
To match Apple, Microsoft needs to cut back to maybe 3 models of Windows tablets per year. You can make that into a standard if you like, but no OEM will ever adopt it. They will all (correctly) point out that such a standard is designed for Microsoft's hardware team to implement and to hell with all the third parties.
>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.
What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers?
Come on.
>But both Windows and Linux are more than capable to get this all sorted.
Bingo. So the questions stands, given that the consumer market is a huge priority for Microsoft and that iPads and iPhones and Android devices represent some of the biggest competition for Microsoft, why haven't they done this already?
> Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers?
Not only servers but they need the same kernel design to work well across a ton of different hardware/firmware combinations, form factors (Phone, Tablets, Laptops) and they do an OK job. But to excel they need to put in a lot more effort (working with OEMs, working with SoC makers is another challenge - everyone optimizes for Android now a days including Qualcomm and Nvidia). So yes, they can do it but it is exponentially more challenging for them due to their legacy and current market position.
Funny, the Linux kernel performs excellently on my $35, 800MHz, 400mA ARM RaspberryPi embedded machine, my x86 desktop, and some of the world's largest supercomputers with who knows what architecture.
For a company with hundreds of millions to spend on R&D, you'd think Microsoft could match a bunch of hobbyists.
I am as big a Linux fanboy as anyone - but Linux doesn't do power management across different set of hardware consistently and when it does it is with mediocre results. In fact you'd be hard pressed to find a PC Laptop running Linux that gives you great battery life. It's largely a miss. So performance yes, great power characteristics no - that's too hard due to sheer number of variables.
My bet: backwards compatibility. Better power management requires changes in behaviour of the OS and it is very hard to change behaviour without breaking things.
Suppose the USB sleep state handling code is suboptimal. Is that because programmers paid less attention to power usage a decade ago, or because some devices implement a power state incorrectly? If the latter, which devices? If Microsoft isn't 100% sure they know of all devices for which it is needed, they may choose to leave the less efficient code in place regardless of whether a deficient device is plugged in.
An example might be a pet peeve I have with Windows: its tendency to 'discover new hardware' when one plugs a bog standard mouse or keyboard into a USB port for the umpteenth time. That in itself is baffling, but it can take Windows half a minute or so to figure out that it has a driver for the device and start it. I do not have the faintest idea what it does in that time, but it must be unavoidable within the constraints microsoft sets itself, since it hasn't been fixed in a decade or so (but it has been improved quite a bit) and I bet it must have itched quite a few engineers.
Whatever the cause, plugging in a USB mouse must use way more power on Windiws than on a Mac.
An example might be a pet peeve I have with Windows: its tendency to 'discover new hardware' when one plugs a bog standard mouse or keyboard into a USB port for the umpteenth time. That in itself is baffling
It's not baffling, it's manufacturers implementing USB standards improperly, and Windows doing the least-bad thing.
Suppose Microsoft rewrites Windows to optimize for the Surface platform. How long would it take for Microsoft to stand accused of unfair business practices in the press? How much risk would they run of being hauled into court in the EU or US?
They just paid a billion dollars for failing to provide browser options in the EU last year.
They paid a billion dollars for disobeying a direct court order. You phrase that as if they paid a fine for randomly not doing something.
Your suggestion that they are equally vulnerable to the same thing for solving a difficult, market driven technical challenge seems like a stretch to me.
> What are you saying? That Microsoft can't build a consumer OS with great power-management because the kernel also needs to work on high throughput servers?
It's more the drivers than the kernel. Apple has a lot more control over OS X drivers.
Right, but the original post said the same about Linux.
With very few exceptions, Linux drivers live in the kernel tree, so the Linux community has absolute control over them. The claim doesn't really seem to make sense. It's not like power management is unimportant in a server rack.
In fact, there's a really nice talk somewhere by (I think) the LWN guy, about how running the same kernel on mobile and on big iron gives huge benefits to development -- it turns out that the needs are really not so different after all, and power management work intended for the mobile space helps big iron (and vice versa, cf. PowerTop from Intel).
Nothing is free - everything is a trade off. Hardware isn't magical. There is cost to how fast you can switch between various C states on Intel CPUs for example. There is hardware that explodes if you play too hard for another example. Servers need maximum performance and low latency - guess what aggressive power management will do to that?
You talk about drivers but what about firmware? Have you looked at how kludgy and unreliable ACPI implementations across hardware are? What about the in kernel drivers being mostly reverse engineered - how many hardware vendors care to provide power management docs for their hardware?
Everything is possible of course - it's just that it is way harder to do when you support everything from toasters to big iron in case of Linux and Phones to gazillion varying PC hardware combinations in case of Microsoft.
I would presume with the Surface Pro Microsoft would be involved in, or at least work with hardware manufacturers to write the drivers. The integration is the same as Apple has on OS X. Microsoft is involved with the hardware, the OS and the app (IE), right?
Sort of but not quite. Tegra 4 that goes in the new Surface 2 - The AnandTech review states the power draw for Tegra 4 is not that impressive for example. So Microsoft would have to be involved in the design and manufacture of the SoC to cure that problem as just one example of how hard it can be.
> 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.
Couldn't they just hire someone and say "Fix this. Identify the problem and we will support your findings to get the fix implemented."
It's not like they lack the financial means. I just don't think there's anyone at the company that gives a shit any more (or their is no culture to support the few people who do give a shit).
Microsoft in 2013 (actually, for a very long time now) focuses too much on the sizzle and not enough on the steak imho.
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 go.
Microsoft does have leverage, they just didn't use it for a long time to allow for a quantity over quality approach.
Microsoft doesn't have much leverage because the US Justice Dept sued Microsoft to enable OEMs to do almost anything they like. The "Vista certified" debacle showed just how little leverage Microsoft had.
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...
>Couldn't they just hire someone and say "Fix this. Identify the problem and we will support your findings to get the fix implemented.
Power conservation is more of a mantra, rather than a feature. If you decide that this is your priority, it should infuse every feature and every aspect of the OS. This can absolutely be done, and Microsoft is more than capable to cater to this need. I'd like to know why they haven't done so already. I mean, Intel finally got it with Haswell.
> Windows and Linux are general purpose OSes. The same kernel runs on high throughput servers and low power tablets.
Since we haven't figured out free-energy yet, using less power on servers is just as important as on tablets - if not more, considering most servers sit idle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 3rd party manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in the early 90s.
I’m not sure whether that’s a fitting analogy. The Mac clone program was launched for other companies to build cheap computers with low margins, so that Apple could continue serving the higher end markets while MacOS would gain marketshare. Instead, clone makers ended up building very high end machines that were faster than anything Apple offered. They hurt Apple’s brand because they were so much faster, not because they were cheap trash.
Daystar Digital’s Genesis had 4 processors, PPC 604e @233Mhz. It had 12 RAM slots and 6 PCI slots. It was a monster and it creamed Apple’s PowerMac 9600, but it was also considerably more expensive.
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.
Power Computing was doing pretty well, even though Apple wouldn't allow it to make notebooks. And then, of course, Apple/Jobs bought back its license and eliminated the competition....
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.
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.
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.
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.
True.
What is fun is that you could imagine a technology where you would (powering down some unused memory chips), but I don't know if this would be worth it.
Attended a lecture by a grad who implemented this back in 2006. Code resided on the southbridge. Never got commercialized as the penalty of waking/sleeping the chip was not worth the few watts saved. Plus, most servers used all their ram, or near it, all the time.
I don’t know much about semiconductors, but Apple started shipping x86 Macs when Intel had just switched to the Core architecture. I can imagine that Apple didn’t bother to write for technologies that were present in earlier Intel chips. Apple has only shipped Intel-powered computers with Core and Xeon chipsets (the first gen AppleTV ran on a Pentium M, though).
“The Core microarchitecture is a major architectural revision”
Microsoft didn't bother either. SSE2 and PAE requirements mean a Netburst or later Intel Chip. (or K8 or later from AMD). So Windows8 requires a relatively modern chip, and ignores the earlier ones.
IIRC, Windows 8 and 8.1 take advantage of the new P-States in Haswell / Clover Trail. (And connected standby on Clover Trail definitely shows that Microsoft is working hard on the power problem).
I definitely think its an issue with Apple Marketing. Apple is basically selling Y-class processors in their MBA. 1.3 GHz max speed is some 25% slower than the 1.6 GHz that Surface Pros ship with. The Surface Pro also has a superior screen and active digitizer, so it isn't too curious why it would use more power.
BTW: Xeon has been shipping for like 15 years. When talking about architectures, it tends to be more precise to use the core architcture names. IE: Netburst (P4), Nehelem, etc. etc. "Xeon", "Core", and "Pentium" are marketing names that barely mean anything technically.
> If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made.
I actually like Surface's edges quite a lot, I think it looks brilliant and stands out from the army of cheap looking iPad clones most of which look exactly the same. And the magnesium casing is also a great choice by MS, it makes it look expensive and well built (which it really is)
The chance that that happens, is abut the as Microsoft giving the physical devices out for free. Lock-in is the common way today to get market control.
It's interesting to compare this to what I have read (and experienced) about Linux vs. Windows battery life on laptops. Maybe things have changed in the last few years, but it used to be that Linux delivered far worse battery life than Windows.
> if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going to be the best Windows experience
If they do that, their OEM's will have to turn their backs on Microsoft in order to differentiate themselves. Dell can, if they want, provide a better Android experience than anyone else, but if Microsoft builds the hardware and has privileged access to Windows core developers, Dell can't hope to do better.
This is, perhaps, Microsoft's most delicate moment since negotiating the exclusivity of PC-DOS.
But that's the thing. They did create the hardware, and it isn't even the first generation, and it still performs poorly. The problem isn't the hardware. It's the software. So either Microsoft makes a new OS from scratch that only works on their hardware, or this problem won't be fixed anytime soon, either way.
I think the point is that Apple has many, many more years of designing their software for a very specific list of hardware. MS software engineers are probably just starting to think about a closer relationship between code and hardware, and even then I'm sure there's a fair bit of distrust within MS as to how the market will respond. Will their OEM partners call foul on MS leveraging their position? It wouldn't be the first time.
imagine owning a race car team. For years you buy cars from Ferrari. Finally, you're forced to make your own. While in 5 years you will certainly have a better understanding of the car, V1 of your new product will certainly be a bit inferior.
Nope. Windows RT is ARM compiled Windows 8 with a little flag that prevents the installation of 3rd party desktop apps. It's not even a little bit different.
Technically speaking, the little flag does not prevent installation of third-party desktop apps. It prevents executing executables not signed by Microsoft. It is just a policy, that Microsoft will not sign classic win32 executables.
Why do you think this is about the hardware at all? Most of the savings are down to software (try Windows or Linux on the Macbook Air). It requires lots of hard work to change the kernel to make better use of sleep state and to reduce CPU utilisation in apps.
The reality is that Apple cares about battery life, because they know users do, they work constantly on this. Numerous Apple announcements talk up battery life improvements, they are clearly very aware of this issue.
I've never got the impression that that Microsoft does care very much about this issue, in fact their kernel doesn't even sound like it gets much development in the core functions (it's all about fixing bugs and adding features).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The Darwin kernel is regularly updated; for example Apple replaced Unix init and cron with launchd in 2005, achieved full POSIX compliance in 2007, and went to full 64-bit in 2009.
I admit I'm not super familiar with Darwin internals, but on most *NIX systems, init and cron are userspace programs. Does launchd need some special syscalls?
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.
I don't think this is true at all. Sure, there's always been a BSD-style environment for compatibility, but Apple has never been shy about ripping and replacing legacy Unix-y infrastructure (see: launchd) or about adding new, "deep" APIs close to the plumbing (see: libdispatch).
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.
They're not slow to add features. Some may arrive after a competitor, but every release of OS X sees low-level feature additions and updates. They're documented by Siracusa's mega-reviews as well as the OS X release notes. Nearly Apple's entire product line has been dependent on the flexibility of that foundation, from the PowerPC Macs to the Intel transition to the ARM squeeze, not to mention the recent ARM64 port. So, I don't understand why you think Apple can't or won't work on the foundation or why you believe it's a monolithic relic written in the 1970s, unless you're just referencing some vague bias against Unix in general.
You're really digging in on this aren't you? I wrote very clearly that it was only a suspicion clearly in an attempt to explain why they are so much slower at improving their OS kernel than Microsoft is. So any time somebody makes a suspicion you'll arrive and interpret it as though it was a statement of fact? Noted.
Meanwhile, you make woolly justifications of their slowness by making contradictions like this: "They're not slow to add features. Some may arrive after a competitor" Comments like these are not helpful and do not add anything to the conversation.
They're slow. The reasons why this is the case is still not entirely clear. But even OSX fans get frustrated sometimes at how slow they are to add features that other operating systems got years before. The most vocal recent one I can think of was probably the TRIM support for SSDs.
Windows UAC is the best I have used on any platform. What I can remember it was not that good on OSX. Not even Ubuntu gets this right. However the permission system on Windows is a hassle.
I always have a normal user account and an seperate admin account. The normal account does not have sudo permission. This setup on Ubuntu and what I can remember on OSX is not hassle free because a lot of installers and apps assumes normal user has some sort of sudo.
Unfortunately Windows 8.1 dumped UAC in the toilet when forcing the Windows 8.1 update to be downloaded from the store, which made your local admin account useless.
>This setup on Ubuntu and what I can remember on OSX is not hassle free because a lot of installers and apps assumes normal user has some sort of sudo.
On OSX you get an elevated privileges login prompt for any installer needing to write to / and even for many write protected folders inside your own homedir. You can grant rights as any user you want simply by entering that username (it's automatically populated with the current user)
This is true for properly written installers and apps, but since not everything is properly written, a related problem does crop up from time to time: an installer or app assumes the user has permissions to something that the "admin" group usually has access to, and therefore doesn't bother using the correct API to elevate. Even here, though, in the typical cases of installers and updaters, there are easy workarounds that at least don't require logging out or giving additional rights to the logged-in user: fast user switch or login(1) to an admin user, then retry from there.
The only thing Windows does differently here is that it provides a silent, non-admin workaround (filesystem and registry virtualization) for buggy applications, which works, but which can be problematic in other ways. Most notably, while OS-level workarounds are a clear win for older and otherwise unsupported software, they reduce motivation for developers to fix bugs in current software papered over by Windows' workarounds.
I don't think I've run into an installer that doesn't properly elevate since 2005... Most just shove things into .pkg with PackageMaker and everything's correct
For mobile applications Windows has been constantly behind Android and iOS. One part of Nokia's problems was that MS could not deliver drivers for new hardware. For example, Nokia could not move to high resolution screens because Windows could not handle them. Being constantly 6-12 months behind because software is not up to dates was devastating.
Stop comparing Windows, a desktop OS, to mobile-first optimised OSes like Android and iOS. Even Windows RT is not technically mobile-first optimised like those two.
Windows Phone 8 vs Android/iOS would be a fair comparison. Because WP8 has undergone the same treatment and has been optimised for high battery efficiencies whilst still retaining the Windows NT kernel at its core.
WP8 has always had support for high-resolution displays and Nokia et al have not had issues with it. WP7.x was a different story but that was a different OS kernel (WinCE not NT). During this time Microsoft was busy creating a minimised edition of the Win8 kernel that would be suitable for use on a smartphone, much like the work Apple did to OSX in order to create iOS.
If Microsoft markets Windows as a mobile platform I'll compare it to the existing competition. Sure, it might not be fair, but ultimately I'm looking for results, not fairness.
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.
It seems to me that with devices like Surface Pro, the 1) and 3) problems are still ported to the new devices. I don't see legacy apps that aren't optimized for touch and on a 10" screen, as an "advantage" for Windows tablets. For all practical purposes, they are not.
Even if you want to do "work" with legacy apps when in "laptop mode" - are you sure you want to do that on a 10" screen? Because I'm telling you 10" is too small for productive work, and the keyboard is too crammed at that size.
> Because re-writing for a new platform isn't trivial
That's not the consumers' problem, is it?
> Because the customers want it.
That's not reflected in sales yet. If you're talking about the 100 Microsoft fans that upvote and comment all positive Microsoft stories on Reddit, HN and Verge - that doesn't count. We're talking about the market as a whole.
Also, even Microsoft themselves barely even promote the "legacy app" thing in their commercials. All they are showing is Metro. But if they think Metro is their tablets' competitive advantage, then why wouldn't the consumer just get an iPad or Android tablet instead - and for a lot less?
That's a very strong assumption... The only reason I have an Ipad rather than a Surface Pro, is because it didn't exists when bought my Ipad, sure thing that will be my future tablet in my next cycle, and I feel I am not alone. I think surface is not doing it better because it came into the game too late but it is a nice replacement for my heavy laptop and my Netflix viewer (namely Ipad)
Apple ran PowerPC apps on Intel processors. The real answer is that they don't want them to.
Rosetta is neither included nor supported in Mac OS X v10.7 "Lion" or later. Therefore, with Lion and later releases, the current Macintosh platform does not support PowerPC applications.
Reach out and save a battery today! With your help we can change the world. Please submit donation to help this innocent battery to get a better future.
Yes, that's the correct answer. This problem today, on tablets especially, also comes from Microsoft's unwilling to use anything other than the full Windows on almost any product they have. So instead of starting something from scratch, they'd rather force all that legacy bloatware into devices that need very efficient software and have smaller batteries.
Therein lies the problem: Full windows is the only kind of windows there is. Today you still cannot boot a windows server without a GUI layer. Windows is utterly monolithic.
Apple were able to rip the top layers off OSX and ship it as iOS without too much trouble, because it's unix. (They didn't start from scratch.)
Windows, not so much. MS have been trying to do it for a decade or more, and they've failed for the reasons outlined by optymizer.
While Windows's functionality in general is indeed pretty monolithic, you are generally wrong. In fact, there is (I believe since Windows Server 2008[1][1]) an installation method to get Windows without any GUI.
In fact examples like Windows CE (Now WP8) prove you wrong.
Server core still has a GUI, it just doesn't run Explorer as a shell and doesn't have a bunch of GUI programs that come with Windows included. When you log in there's a cmd or powershell window floating there with the standard-issue non-themed graphical chrome.
The problem with Server Core begins at the description:
> "Server Core is a minimal server installation option for computers running on the operating system. Server Core provides a low-maintenance server environment with limited functionality."
Limited functionality is the key. In order to administer windows server, one is expected to use remote desktop. This is in contrast to a unix machine, where everything can be controlled via command line and configuration scripts.
It is getting better, as Powershell exposes a lot of functionality. But it is still not there yet.
I disagree. WP7 would've been a much better and more efficient OS for tablets, and they already built that, but in the name of keeping OS licenses for tablets at ~$100 like for notebooks, and some kind of "unification strategy" (which still hasn't been realized yet), they've also made Windows RT for tablets and WP8 out of the NT kernel for phones. But even WP8 would've be better than Windows 8 or Windows RT (which is 95 percent Windows 8 anyway).
It's actually how Apple built iOS, too. But will they put WP8 on tablets? No of course not. Instead, they'll try and push Windows RT to phones, which is the totally wrong way to do it. But just watch it happen.
To the contrary, Microsoft, Nokia and partners are actively looking at bringing WP8 tablets to the market. Thus completely sidestepping the Windows RT issue.
No, the answer is certainly not correct. Even worse, it's purely speculative and shows that the auther doesn't like MS.
I think it's not about the OS, it's about the drivers. If you would trace the power consumption properly my guess would be that the WiFi module is the culprit. As the hardware is the same, the driver must be the place, where Apple has the edge.
This sounds very biased and uninformed. It really doesn't belong here. A simple look at the kernel level stability and perf gained from Vista => 7 => 8 => 8.1 show that it clearly isn't true.
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.
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.
In the context of the article I believe he's talking about devices that run full-fledged operating systems, rather than mobile devices.
That being said, the 13" MBA has the best battery life out of everything on that page. I also imagine the Shield is somewhat compromised for web browsing, given it's been optimized to be a gaming machine.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, of course, Windows can be comparable on similar capacities. Does this need to be stated? Go read the reviews of some Acer or Samsung laptops. Extrapolating the problems of the Surface 2 to all computers with the same OS doesn't make sense. Microsoft isn't experienced at making computers, shouldn't be a surprise that they are bad at it right now.
The article's point was that on closely comparable hardware doing nearly the same task, the operating system seems to make a significant difference in battery power. Maybe other Windows PC makers are more experienced in making efficient drivers and tuning the OS delivered on disk? In a couple of reviews I read, that isn't the case:
First Samsung laptop review I read, a NP900X3E-K01US with a 44 Wh battery:
...battery life is disappointing for such an expensive laptop... [1]
Second, a Dell XPS 12 review:
50WHr battery ... Wi-Fi browsing test ... seven hours and 58 minutes
No, I didn't say #2, I said it's not surprising that the Surface Pro gets poor battery life. My comment about this whole controversy is that you cannot project 1 computer's battery problems to the operating system. My Windows does get poor battery life but we haven't seen any evidence of that. Clearly it can get good battery life as there are real-life computers running Windows that get great battery life.
Not necessarily. I'm just wondering why isn't Microsoft pulling some of the Apple tricks with Surface Pro if suspending some part of hardware really is responsible of OS X's better power economy. As others have pointed out in this discusion, some legacies of Windows architecture probably adds to its battery use.
My EeePC is still doing quite well. Everything else I have ever bought has been a massive lie on the order of "* battery tested by doing nothing with the wireless and screen turned off."
The Surface Pro is MS' V1. It is going to take a while for them to become as savvy at hardware design as Apple is. Is there really any surprise that the newcomer isn't quite as good as the old guard?
I doubt very much that the commodity hardware in Apple laptops exposes any ACPI methods of which other operating systems are unaware.
They are the same components as widely used, just packaged differently ( as lspci from Linux on an Apple machine will show ). From memory the only Apple-branded components were the SD card readers and the keyboard.
And how would Intel / Nvidia / Broadcom / Samsung / LG / whomever be persuaded to keep it a secret?
You might doubt it, but it's entirely true. Apple aggressively cut power to unused devices and provide out of band mechanisms to generate wakeup notifications. Apple will entirely cut power to an SDHCI or Thunderbolt controller that's not in use. Windows won't.
There's nothing secret about this. Anyone who spends a while looking at the ACPI tables will see it. Recent versions of ACPI provide a standardised mechanism for doing this, but Apple have chosen to continue using their custom implementation.
Apple does use an extra microcontroller or small processor in MacBooks and other machines that controls fans and probably a large number of other power related things. They call it the SMC:
Everybody does that. This has not much to do with ACPI. ACPI is mainly a software thing (yes, you have some dedicated register support in some chips, but the baseline of those that are absolutely necessary is quite small and well supported by chip vendors)
ACPI has also proven to be an idea with a very bad execution: much of the tables are filled with bugs, and the spec has been written by complete psychopaths. IIRC sometimes it is better to skip entire sections and to use a custom written driver for each OS (like Intel did for some processors or chipsets for Linux I think)
Remember that ACPI has been created in part by MS, and that Bill himself wanted a conception that was easy for windows and hard for the other. I'm not sure this has been executed for the conception (even though the result is a mess), but MS absolutely managed to create an ecosystem where board vendors test only on Windows and ship if this kind of work, regardless of the amount of obvious bug present in their ACPI code.
Sony manage to get pretty amazing battery life from their new Vaio Pro 11 and 13 models. I am really tempted to get one as it does pretty much everything I want from a high powered laptop and the price is pretty good in my opinion.
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.
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.
I've just disabled iCloud on my iMac, many things got faster, such as the Preview app. Previously it could take 3 to 5 seconds to load a trivial png image, now it's less than a second. But unfortunately I'm a bit dependent on the iCloud already...
The biggest background drain on my MacBook Air is DropBox. It keeps trying to make a network connection when there is no wi fi available. Pause syncing on DropBox and the battery life improves.
I just recently had to replace my external hard drive I use for TM backups and whenever it would start to backup it would bring the computer to a grinding halt (2013? MBPr, it's from work). I ended up disconnecting it and taking it home on the weekend to do the initial backup.
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?
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!
There are probably no benchmarks yet, but from my experience (I use both 10.8 and 10.9 regularly) Mavericks does a better job on battery than Mountain Lion, with about 1 hour of usage added. This is on 2012, 13" Air. The 2013 model will probably see even better gains.
Strangely enough, my Windows 8.1 managed to suspend everything yesterday. Not only the Metro apps that I didn't use, but also Explorer and every other desktop application I used. Wonder how that happened (although I used to suspend applications manually before if I wanted to pause them somehow, e.g. CPU- or I/O-intense long-running things).
I cannot undo a crash, but I can resume applications just fine. In that particular case I tried hibernate first which led nowhere, so essentially yes, it was akin to a crash. Still puzzling, as that never happened to me (and Windows versions prior to 8 didn't use the suspend/resume functionality anyway).
I have a 2010 MacBook Pro and it's about 10-20% better battery life.
Mavericks IMHO is designed for the newer MacBooks which really need to get to 8+ hours battery life for it to change people's behaviour i.e. being able to realistically leave the power adapter at home.
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.
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.
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
>I had a brief Twitter conversation with Anand Shimpi of Anandtech about this, and he was as perplexed as I was. Nobody could explain the technical basis for this vast difference in idle power management on the same hardware. None of the PC vendors he spoke to could justify it, or produce a Windows box that managed similar battery life to OS X. 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. Microsoft can no longer hand wave this vast difference away based on vague references to "poorly optimized third party drivers".
"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.
So are we comparing different hardware or operating systems? Surface 2 Pro and a Macbook Air are completely different:
- different screen resolution
- one of them has touchscreen, other doesn't
- different keyboards (might matter a lot)
.. and so on. The MBA is clearly better, but that does not tell too much about whether Windows is inherently bad at power management or not.
Doesn't it have a fan or two? You know this thing that has to rotate thousands times per minute to blow the heated air, producing whirring noise, and being able to get stuck or result in overheating if you cover the exhausts?
Unless the Surface Pro 2 is significantly improved over the 1, which it doesn't look like it is from reading the reviews, it is a joke to be honest. Everyone keeps saying it's a 'real computer'; so why didn't you buy a laptop then? I worked on the 1 for about 2 weeks; the keyboard drove me insane as did the battery life. I didn't like how it stands up compared to a laptop and for some reason the screen wasn't as responsive to my touches as I would've expected it to be. For the price of these things I don't really see why anyone would buy one unless you have way too much money to spare on toys.
That said, I'll try the 2 as well when I can borrow it for a few weeks. I'm afraid the difference won't make me a convert though.
> the keyboard drove me insane as did the battery life
They've improved a battery life to 7 hours of browsing, it's even more than many other windows laptops out there. Are you talking about type cover? If yes, than what exactly drove you insane? It works find for me.
> I didn't like how it stands up compared to a laptop
They've added a new stand position which will satisfy those who are looking for laptop-like stand
> For the price of these things I don't really see why anyone would buy one unless you have way too much money to spare on toys.
It costs as much as macbook air but has a touch screen and a tablet form factor, it might fit a lot of people who don't want to carry around macbook air + ipad but want a single device.
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?
Huh? It's a regular Windows computer, you use the same Windows software everybody else uses. You don't have to use the goofball metro interface anymore than someone who installs Windows 8 on a desktop does.
I mean, if you're in the market for a big iPhone, you'll be disappointed, but it's not competing with iPad, it's competing with Macbook Airs and Chromebooks.
There was no relevant comparsion, as long as the hardware differs there is no way to compare. It's not just about the processor it's about everything the display the speakers the wireless network adapter, etc.
Don't get me wrong the battery life of the surface is ridiculous but still the comparsion is equally ridiculous.
They pick their hardware though, it's their device. You can't claim it's the drivers.
I still don't really get what they're trying to do with the surface. If I want a tablet, I can buy a nexus 7 for cheap and it's a superior tablet to the surface anyway from things that are important to tablets (battery, apps, ui etc). If I want a laptop, I can go buy a laptop and not pay for all the bells and whistles with a touch screen, odd hardware in the screen, etc.
Depending on the window manager, there are reports[1] of Linux achieving better battery life than OSX. That's not surprising though, as a lightweight WM like i3 is going to use much less resource than OSX's shiny interface.
Which Linux? I'm sure something based on LXDE will outlast everything, while Ubuntu or other Gnome 3-based systems probably won't fare too well.
I expect great performance and battery life improvements with Mir and Unity 8, though, but that won't happen at least until 14.10, and won't be stable until 16.04. By then the Linux drivers should be a lot better and more efficient, too.
Android is not just linux. Linux is just the kernel, and everything else running on it has nothing to do with Linux and that's the majority of Android user software and interface.
It's just like saying "this human and this bacteria are the same, they have a DNA with the same chemical structure !".
My point was not 'call all distributions Linux'. I'm saying that disqualifying Android but keeping Debian is incorrect. Debian, Android, Ubuntu. They are just different Linux distributions.
I think we should stop calling "all the distros" simply "Linux". There is an Ubuntu operating system and a Fedora operating system. They might short most of the code, but you cannot expect to run programs compiled for to run unmodified on the other.
Well, yes, but it's certainly way fairer to put Fedora and Ubuntu under the same umbrella than putting Ubuntu and Android in the same basket. GNU/Linux distros have tons of things in common, and you can often use passthrough systems to run packages from one distro on another (not that I'd recommend that).
For this purpose, "Linux" is still too general even when restricting ourself to traditional GNU/Linux distributions. The answer may depend on which exact services a specific distribution runs by default, as well as kernel configuration.
I'd be interested to see the answer for an out of the box Ubuntu distribution (latest stable version), as well as the answer for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to cover the "leading brands" for the consumer and business markets.
That's not true, the Android userland is not GNU. It's probably possible to compile some of the GNU tools to work with the bionic libc but it's not the default userland.
I think it's fair to say Android is running on Linux, it's just not GNU/Linux.
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 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.
It might be a guess, but it's one that we know is almost certainly correct. Windows has an enormous amount of legacy code, and behaviors that were perfectly fine even just a few years ago now can devastate battery life.
Windows is an eminently pluggable system, fully able to take advantage of low power states in hardware, ACPI, etc. Fundamentally there is no reason for it to be a power pig. But it is, because the choices made in it were made for a different world of computing.
> Windows has an enormous amount of legacy code, and behaviors that were perfectly fine even just a few years ago now can devastate battery life.
Ok, you seem to know this. Can you tell us now EXACTLY what legacy code is there in Windows that causes the "busy-loops" and bad battery performance?
> But it is, because the choices made in it were made for a different world of computing.
That's a very vague statement. What choices exactly?
Come on people, anyone can make these claims! This is almost the same as saying: "There is some software in Windows that is causing the bad battery performance." It's patently tautological!
The other guess is "there's some power-hungry components in Windows devices causing it!"
You have some unwarranted hostility and defensiveness about this, when everyone has openly stated that this is all guessing.
Yet the empirical evidence is that on the same hardware, with the same capacity to preserve battery, and on similar workloads, Windows yields a much worse battery life. Which has to come down to the operating system not sleeping when it should sleep, and doing more when it could do less. Anyone who has ever programmed ever knows that the primary cause of such work is polling.
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.
Apple manged to turn a multi-user OS into a tablet OS, why can't Microsoft do it? The actual NT kernel is supposedly hardware-agnostic.
I am guessing that power management was simply not on the radar when NT was developed. Few people had laptops, and if they did, nobody expected more than an hour or two of battery life out of them, and nobody really cared too much about power consumption on desktops and servers.
For whatever reason they have not made power management a priority since then, maybe because it was easy (and at least somewhat correct) to blame 3rd party drivers. But in the Surface devices they have the same "known target" that Apple has always had with their hardware, so they should have been able to optimize for that, if they had wanted to.
Microsoft is more dedicated to backwards compatibility, way more dedicated. Apple mostly don't care about breaking something that's three years old if it means they can do some new thing. It's a tradeoff and they've both made their choices. Can't blame MS, their choice has served them well for a long time.
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.
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.
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.
Since Windows 3.1 to Windows XP, the aspect and look of the Font installer tool nearly not has changed. I could say that they keep the old 16 bit tool all time with minor changes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
An extra pound of battery would make a big difference, but customers have shown that they would rather have a smaller, lighter device than 3years ago, even if it doesn't last as long.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hackintoshes have been benchmarked by the community and by and large they hold up quite poorly when it comes to battery life. It seems to be a larger issue with power management in general when the hardware is so generalized.
That being said, there is no reason Microsoft's own drivers shouldn't work as good if not better on the Surface. The power management on these devices should be the benchmark for other companies to attempt to live up to.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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. :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Keep in mind Watts measure power, not energy. So to save 3.297 Watts average, OSX is keeping something mostly turned off that Windows is not successfully keeping off. OSX is saving on average 3.297 W over the test period by having brief bursts of activity while staying mostly idle.
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...
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.
>> Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?
The article points out the Surface 2. Software and hardware developed by MS and it still has bad battery life when compared with Nexus 7 and iPad (it has half the battery life of the Nexus 7).
How much will a user notice that performance difference in everyday use? Maybe they are putting in more power than is needed. Also the Surface RT battery performance is just as bad and it's running ARM I think.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.