3 ms·

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

by 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.
  - film42 13y ago
    And then as soon as there is, slam an entire core for about 30sec to calculate diffs. [MBP Quad i7, 16GB, 500GB SSD].
    - aroch 13y ago
      If it makes you feel better, Dropbox does the same thing across a few cores on my Xeon E5 under Mavericks.
menubar 13y ago
Check TimeMachine also (if you're running it). It's a beast.
- micampe 13y ago
  Time Machine doesn't run on battery power by default.
- joshstrange 13y ago
  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.

by da_n 13y ago

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.
- film42 13y ago
  And then as soon as there is, slam an entire core for about 30sec to calculate diffs. [MBP Quad i7, 16GB, 500GB SSD].
  - aroch 13y ago
    If it makes you feel better, Dropbox does the same thing across a few cores on my Xeon E5 under Mavericks.

menubar 13y ago

Check TimeMachine also (if you're running it). It's a beast.

micampe 13y ago
Time Machine doesn't run on battery power by default.
joshstrange 13y ago
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.