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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 bat

• __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.
      • justincormack 13y ago
        No one uses Darwin for servers, not even Apple.
        • mitchty 13y ago
          No one except a fair amount of people: http://www.macminicolo.net/ http://www.macminicolo.net/ 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. Whether its a good idea is another matter.
          • kbenson 13y ago
            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.
            • alayne 13y ago
              Apple took a shot at traditional datacenter rack servers with their Xserve product line. I don't think it failed because OS X couldn't scale.
            • mitchty 13y ago
              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.
              • kbenson 13y ago
    • melling 13y ago
      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.
      • kbenson 13y ago
        To some people, the one that supports more hardware is the better product. Especially when they are spending $2000.
        • melling 13y ago
          Yes, Linux is very cool in that respect. I really home Linux continues its long and relentless march.
        • temac 13y ago
          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...
    • nl 13y ago
      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.
      • blinkingled 13y ago
        >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.)
  • blinkingled 13y ago
    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.
  • AsymetricCom 13y ago
    OSX is not a general-purpose OS.
  • Knacktus 13y ago
    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!
• mistermann 13y ago
  > 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.
  • macspoofing 13y ago
    >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.
    • sirkneeland 13y ago
      The infusion of Nokia engineers long familiar with engineering for battery life should help
  • JimmaDaRustla 13y ago
    Yup, no one there cares about power consumption or the core OS development. /s http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/10260956.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/10260956.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/
    • mistermann 13y ago
      And yet, we have this article.
  • 13y ago
• gnaffle 13y ago
  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.
  • drewcrawford 13y ago
    Quite simply, no. 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.
    • macspoofing 13y ago
      >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. Hyperbole much?
      • drewcrawford 13y ago
        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.
• deleted 13y ago
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• wbond 13y ago
  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?
  • blinkingled 13y ago
    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.
• macspoofing 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. 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?
  • jrajav 13y ago
    > 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.
    • herge 13y ago
      Microsoft picks all the hardware, and corresponding drivers, that goes into the surface.
    • hdevalence 13y ago
      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).
      • blinkingled 13y ago
        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.
• hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  > 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.
• rcthompson 13y ago
  Linux already has it sorted, at least on certain hardware. I have a 13-inch Retina MBP, and I get the same battery life with Linux and OSX on it.