With some powertop tweaks battery life can be as good as in OS X. I do in fact get a bit more juice from Arch than from OS X in my MBA. My setup is a very mini

With some powertop tweaks battery life can be as good as in OS X. I do in fact get a bit more juice from Arch than from OS X in my MBA. My setup is a very minimal on Arch, so the comparison is slightly unfair but it shows my point. OS X doesn't do any special magic. Linux can achieve equally low power consumptions with decent drivers and correct setup.