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Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?

389 points by chrisdinn 13y ago

nathan_long 13y ago
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.
wolfgke 13y ago
Perhaps the Windows Timer Resolution > http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-re... could explain this problem?
hcho 13y ago
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 13y ago
  I'm sorry, but that really is not an answer at all. It's just a fairly obvious GUESS.
  - Already__Taken 13y ago
    [Might not be that wild of a guess](http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-re...)
    - ygra 13y ago
      As the article states, Windows 8 moved to a tickless kernel.
  - hcho 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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.
  - corresation 13y ago
    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.
    - kyberias 13y ago
      > "almost certainly correct". Yes, that's why I wrote it's an obvious guess. > 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!"
      - corresation 13y ago
        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.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
- fetbaffe 13y ago
  Maybe all that legacy support that historically helped Microsoft to get marketshare dominance now is paying its hefty price. TANSTAAFL.
mathattack 13y ago
The issue has to be engineering. Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  >> 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).
  - lisnake 13y ago
    But Surface 2 Pro runs on a Haswell, its much more powerful than any Android tablet
    - k-mcgrady 13y ago
      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.
- easytiger 13y ago
  > The issue has to be engineering. Did... did you just invent the technology version of Fr Jack's "That would be an ecumenical matter."
  - cnvogel 13y ago
    In case people aren't familiar with Father Ted... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpIkDZIqnnY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpIkDZIqnnY
  - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
    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_gdata_player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIto5mwDLxo&feature=youtube_...
eknkc 13y ago
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?
- M4v3R 13y ago
  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.
- ygra 13y ago
  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).
  - 72deluxe 13y ago
    Isn't that called "crashing"?
    - ygra 13y ago
      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).
- terhechte 13y ago
  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!
artagnon 13y ago
I'm curious to know how the latest Linux fares on a Macbook Air.
- vyoming999 13y ago
  Aren't all the andorid devices mentioned inherently run on linux ?
  - snird 13y ago
    I think he meant a full OS comparable to Windows 7 and OS X, let's say Ubuntu or Fedora for that matter.
  - kuschku 13y ago
    The battery life of the Nexus 7 is almost the same using Desktop Ubuntu compared to Android.
- wielebny 13y ago
  Google Nexus 7 does run on Linux.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    Can we stop calling Android Linux just because it shares the Linux kernel? Obviously the author was referring to a GNU/Linux distro.
    - hahainternet 13y ago
      No, because it is Linux. The correct solution is to refer to a particular distribution, as many of them make significantly different decisions.
      - ekianjo 13y ago
bni 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
DZittersteyn 13y ago
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
- radio4fan 13y ago
  FTA: >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".
- devx 13y ago
  No, you're seeing comparison with the Surface Pro 2, which has same battery size as MBA, and hardware made by Microsoft themselves.
  - DZittersteyn 13y ago
    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.
sch1zo 13y ago
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.)
da_n 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
  - manojlds 13y ago
    I was about to say the same. My Dell laptop had better battery life with Windows 7 than Ubuntu 11.
  - da_n 13y ago
    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.
- mojuba 13y ago
  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...
  - mamp 13y ago
    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.
devx 13y ago
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.
16s 13y ago
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.
- ams6110 13y ago
  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.
  - badman_ting 13y ago
    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.
- Nikker 13y ago
  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__ 13y ago
    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.
sz4kerto 13y ago
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 13y ago
  "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 13y ago
    > surface pro 2, (a joke of a tablet) mind sharing why you think it is a joke of a tablet?
    - acqq 13y ago
      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? http://www.umpcportal.com/2013/09/microsoft-surface-pro-2-important-specifications/ http://www.umpcportal.com/2013/09/microsoft-surface-pro-2-im... http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/2RPjdxZgRFebOo1W.medium http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/2RPjdxZgRFebOo1W.me...
    - VLM 13y ago
      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?
optymizer 13y ago
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.
- barking 13y ago
  Valuable legacy windows programs can run on a tablet. From my perspective that shows that MS cares. Programs written for the Mac can't run on iOS, I think.
  - devx 13y ago
    Why would you need "legacy apps" on a tablet? The old Windows tablets had 4 main problems: 1) apps not optimized for touch 2) OS not optimized for touch 3) expensive hardware 4) inefficient hardware/small battery life 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.
    - barking 13y ago
      Because re-writing for a new platform isn't trivial. Because the customers want it. They're intelligent enough to know that a tablet isn't going to be as productive as a desktop/laptop. But they still want it.
      - threeseed 13y ago
        Customers generally do not want to run Windows apps on their tablet. If they did then Surface Pro would be the number one seller.
JosephRedfern 13y ago
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.
mjg59 13y ago
Because Apple have custom ACPI methods for cutting power to unused components and Windows doesn't know how to call them.
- Maakuth 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      > 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 13y ago
        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.
        protomyth 13y ago
ohwp 13y ago
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.
- jebblue 13y ago
  That reminds me, on Ubuntu you can install powertop and run it "sudo powertop". It's a handy tool to be sure.
- korg250 13y ago
  The correct syntax is: powercfg /ENERGY
  - ohwp 13y ago
    Both work. powercfg /? shows -ENERGY
    - josteink 13y ago
      Not sure if that applies all over the line. On my win8 install only /energy works.
_wmd 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
- ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
  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.
blinkingled 13y ago
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__ 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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__ 13y ago
      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.
      - 13y ago
chatman 13y ago
Wondering how GNU/Linux distros (e.g. Fedora) stacks up against Windows 8 and OS X in terms of battery life.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
- chrissmeuk 13y ago
  Comparing to Windows, I find battery life on Linux is much shittier. Ubuntu 12.04 for example on my Lenovo T400 lasts about 2 hours. On Windows 7 x64, I got about 4.5 hours. On Windows 8.1, I get about 5.5 hours. I did the usual "powertop" optimisation on Ubuntu as well. It just sucks power.
ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
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.
Major_Grooves 13y ago
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 13y ago
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).
fonnesbeck 13y ago
I didn't know Windows had a battery.
shubb 13y ago
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?
programminggeek 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
  - usaphp 13y ago
    > 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)
  - JVIDEL 13y ago
    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.
woodchuck64 13y ago
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.
drtse4 13y ago
Informative article as usual.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
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.
fdm 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
Lagged2Death 13y ago
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.
- mech4bg 13y ago
  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.
- ramones13 13y ago
  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.
lttlrck 13y ago
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.
dman 13y ago
Does anyone here have numbers of battery life on the same machine with linux?
mwfunk 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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).
pearjuice 13y ago
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.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
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.
yth 13y ago
i did not even realize there was a fight. MS has real potential under different leadership - most of their products are currently horrible.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
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.
mpweiher 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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/#process-model http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/8/#proces... 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-works-its-power-saving-magic/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/how-os-x-mavericks-work... 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.
dschiptsov 13y ago
Too much emulation/virtualization/sandboxing (to be able to run old corporate_win32crap.exe) badly implemented?)
VladRussian2 13y ago
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.
iyulaev 13y ago
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?
norswap 13y ago
This is about the Surface, not Windows. I consistently have more battery life with Windows than Linux.
znowi 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  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.
trynumber9 13y ago
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-exceptionally-portable/4 http://anandtech.com/show/7417/sony-vaio-pro-13-exceptionall... Of course it has a much smaller battery due to it's low weight.
RachelF 13y ago
It's always busy. To look at what it is doing, download Procmon: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.asp...
Intermernet 13y ago
There's a comment on the article that links to http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-re... . 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.

389 points by chrisdinn 13y ago

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.

wolfgke 13y ago

Perhaps the Windows Timer Resolution > http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-re... could explain this problem?

hcho 13y ago

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 13y ago
I'm sorry, but that really is not an answer at all. It's just a fairly obvious GUESS.
- Already__Taken 13y ago
  [Might not be that wild of a guess](http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted/ http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-re...)
  - ygra 13y ago
    As the article states, Windows 8 moved to a tickless kernel.
- hcho 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
- corresation 13y ago
  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.
  - kyberias 13y ago
    > "almost certainly correct". Yes, that's why I wrote it's an obvious guess. > 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!"
    - corresation 13y ago
      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.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
fetbaffe 13y ago
Maybe all that legacy support that historically helped Microsoft to get marketshare dominance now is paying its hefty price. TANSTAAFL.

mathattack 13y ago

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

k-mcgrady 13y ago
>> 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).
- lisnake 13y ago
  But Surface 2 Pro runs on a Haswell, its much more powerful than any Android tablet
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    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.
easytiger 13y ago
> The issue has to be engineering. Did... did you just invent the technology version of Fr Jack's "That would be an ecumenical matter."
- cnvogel 13y ago
  In case people aren't familiar with Father Ted... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpIkDZIqnnY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpIkDZIqnnY
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
  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_gdata_player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIto5mwDLxo&feature=youtube_...

eknkc 13y ago

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?

M4v3R 13y ago
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.
ygra 13y ago
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).
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  Isn't that called "crashing"?
  - ygra 13y ago
    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).
terhechte 13y ago
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!

artagnon 13y ago

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

vyoming999 13y ago
Aren't all the andorid devices mentioned inherently run on linux ?
- snird 13y ago
  I think he meant a full OS comparable to Windows 7 and OS X, let's say Ubuntu or Fedora for that matter.
- kuschku 13y ago
  The battery life of the Nexus 7 is almost the same using Desktop Ubuntu compared to Android.
wielebny 13y ago
Google Nexus 7 does run on Linux.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Can we stop calling Android Linux just because it shares the Linux kernel? Obviously the author was referring to a GNU/Linux distro.
  - hahainternet 13y ago
    No, because it is Linux. The correct solution is to refer to a particular distribution, as many of them make significantly different decisions.
    - ekianjo 13y ago

bni 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

DZittersteyn 13y ago

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

radio4fan 13y ago
FTA: >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".
devx 13y ago
No, you're seeing comparison with the Surface Pro 2, which has same battery size as MBA, and hardware made by Microsoft themselves.
- DZittersteyn 13y ago
  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.

sch1zo 13y ago

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.)

da_n 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
- manojlds 13y ago
  I was about to say the same. My Dell laptop had better battery life with Windows 7 than Ubuntu 11.
- da_n 13y ago
  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.
mojuba 13y ago
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...
- mamp 13y ago
  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.

devx 13y ago

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.

16s 13y ago

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.

ams6110 13y ago
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.
- badman_ting 13y ago
  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.
Nikker 13y ago
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__ 13y ago
  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.

sz4kerto 13y ago

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 13y ago
"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 13y ago
  > surface pro 2, (a joke of a tablet) mind sharing why you think it is a joke of a tablet?
  - acqq 13y ago
    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? http://www.umpcportal.com/2013/09/microsoft-surface-pro-2-important-specifications/ http://www.umpcportal.com/2013/09/microsoft-surface-pro-2-im... http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/2RPjdxZgRFebOo1W.medium http://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/2RPjdxZgRFebOo1W.me...
  - VLM 13y ago
    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?

optymizer 13y ago

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.

barking 13y ago
Valuable legacy windows programs can run on a tablet. From my perspective that shows that MS cares. Programs written for the Mac can't run on iOS, I think.
- devx 13y ago
  Why would you need "legacy apps" on a tablet? The old Windows tablets had 4 main problems: 1) apps not optimized for touch 2) OS not optimized for touch 3) expensive hardware 4) inefficient hardware/small battery life 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.
  - barking 13y ago
    Because re-writing for a new platform isn't trivial. Because the customers want it. They're intelligent enough to know that a tablet isn't going to be as productive as a desktop/laptop. But they still want it.
    - threeseed 13y ago
      Customers generally do not want to run Windows apps on their tablet. If they did then Surface Pro would be the number one seller.

JosephRedfern 13y ago

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.

mjg59 13y ago

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

Maakuth 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    > 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 13y ago
      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.
      - protomyth 13y ago

ohwp 13y ago

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.

jebblue 13y ago
That reminds me, on Ubuntu you can install powertop and run it "sudo powertop". It's a handy tool to be sure.
korg250 13y ago
The correct syntax is: powercfg /ENERGY
- ohwp 13y ago
  Both work. powercfg /? shows -ENERGY
  - josteink 13y ago
    Not sure if that applies all over the line. On my win8 install only /energy works.

_wmd 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
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.

blinkingled 13y ago

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__ 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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__ 13y ago
    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.
    - 13y ago

chatman 13y ago

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

chimeracoder 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
chrissmeuk 13y ago
Comparing to Windows, I find battery life on Linux is much shittier. Ubuntu 12.04 for example on my Lenovo T400 lasts about 2 hours. On Windows 7 x64, I got about 4.5 hours. On Windows 8.1, I get about 5.5 hours. I did the usual "powertop" optimisation on Ubuntu as well. It just sucks power.

ZanyProgrammer 13y ago

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.

Major_Grooves 13y ago

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 13y ago

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).

fonnesbeck 13y ago

I didn't know Windows had a battery.

shubb 13y ago

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?

programminggeek 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
- usaphp 13y ago
  > 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)
- JVIDEL 13y ago
  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.

woodchuck64 13y ago

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.

drtse4 13y ago

Informative article as usual.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

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.

fdm 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

Lagged2Death 13y ago

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.

mech4bg 13y ago
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.
ramones13 13y ago
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.

lttlrck 13y ago

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.

dman 13y ago

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

mwfunk 13y ago

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 13y ago
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).

pearjuice 13y ago

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.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

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.

yth 13y ago

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

ChuckMcM 13y ago

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.

mpweiher 13y ago

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 13y ago
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/#process-model http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/8/#proces... 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-works-its-power-saving-magic/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/how-os-x-mavericks-work... 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.

dschiptsov 13y ago

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

VladRussian2 13y ago

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.

iyulaev 13y ago

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?

norswap 13y ago

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

znowi 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
PeterisP 13y ago
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.

trynumber9 13y ago

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-exceptionally-portable/4 http://anandtech.com/show/7417/sony-vaio-pro-13-exceptionall... Of course it has a much smaller battery due to it's low weight.

RachelF 13y ago

It's always busy. To look at what it is doing, download Procmon: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.asp...

Intermernet 13y ago

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