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Everybody knows there is no industry standard to measure battery life (basically which workload to run when measuring it). For example Anandtech measured the Ma

by mrb 14y ago

Everybody knows there is no industry standard to measure battery life (basically which workload to run when measuring it). For example Anandtech measured the MacBook Air 13" as having a battery life varying between 3 and 7.52 hours depending on the workload: http://www.anandtech.com/print/6063 http://www.anandtech.com/print/6063 So my point is that Google would not specifically have the goal of underestimating battery life, but just that it is almost guaranteed that they have different standards from Apple for measuring battery life. The only way to fairly compare battery life is to have the same person/group run the same test on the 2 laptops. But even that is prone to human-error (eg. what if the tester forgets to disable LTE when testing the Pixel?).

lutusp 14y ago
> ... it is almost guaranteed that they have different standards from Apple for measuring battery life. Yes, most likely, which is why Consumer Reports articles are often such interesting reading. > The only way to fairly compare battery life is to have the same person/group run the same test on the 2 laptops. Yes, and (just to make it more scientific) the testers shouldn't be able to tell which laptop they're testing. Not so easy to do, but necessary for an unbiased evaluation. I just think Google's battery life specification is most likely correct -- they have no good reason to over- or underestimate it. But I agree that an independent test would be useful.
cricketer 14y ago
The battery life testing mechanism for Chrome OS is documented here: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/testing/power-testing http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/testing/power-testing.
- mrb 14y ago
  Thank you, this confirms what I suspected. Google makes the laptop stream music and play full screen video for some amount of time, whereas Apple makes it only browse wirelessly ("up to X hours wireless web").

by mrb 14y ago

lutusp 14y ago

> ... it is almost guaranteed that they have different standards from Apple for measuring battery life. Yes, most likely, which is why Consumer Reports articles are often such interesting reading. > The only way to fairly compare battery life is to have the same person/group run the same test on the 2 laptops. Yes, and (just to make it more scientific) the testers shouldn't be able to tell which laptop they're testing. Not so easy to do, but necessary for an unbiased evaluation. I just think Google's battery life specification is most likely correct -- they have no good reason to over- or underestimate it. But I agree that an independent test would be useful.

cricketer 14y ago

The battery life testing mechanism for Chrome OS is documented here: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/testing/power-testing http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/testing/power-testing.

mrb 14y ago
Thank you, this confirms what I suspected. Google makes the laptop stream music and play full screen video for some amount of time, whereas Apple makes it only browse wirelessly ("up to X hours wireless web").