Back to the Mac: OS X 10.7 Lion Review
by Andrew Cunningham, Kristian Vättö & Anand Lal Shimpi on July 20, 2011 8:30 AM ESTBattery Life
Battery life on the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro improved in our two lighter workload tests by 5%, however under heavy load there was no change. Given that we only saw improvements in our two workloads with built in idle time I suspect Lion may have tweaked some power management settings vs. Snow Leopard, but nothing more. The improvements here might be limited to newer architectures or systems with Apple SSDs however, because they definitely weren't echoed on our older MacBook Pro:
The early 2008 MacBook Pro showed around a 20% decrease in battery life in our two web browsing battery life tests. Once again we saw no difference in our heavy multitasking test. Once again I'm guessing this change is due to some tinkering with OS X's behavior at idle. Our performance data above doesn't suggest any performance issues causing lower battery life on the old Core 2 Duo based MacBook Pro, so there's got to be something keeping the CPU out of its lower idle states during our tests. I checked Activity Monitor during the benchmarks and didn't see anything obvious, meaning it's likely a lower level OS issue. Our own Brian Klug theorized that the lower battery life could be due to the Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro now loading Lion's 64-bit kernel by default instead of the 32-bit kernel like it did in the Snow Leopard days.
The impact is pretty significant on the older MacBook Pro. Older mobile Mac owners dependent on battery life may want to wait to pull the trigger on Lion until at least the first point update.
I will add that something very strange happened on one of our battery life runs with the 2011 MacBook Pro. During our Flash Web Browsing battery life test we recorded a full battery rundown that took under 3 hours, instead of the ~7 hours you see above. Once again I checked Activity Monitor to ensure nothing funny was going on and didn't find anything odd. Subsequent runs couldn't duplicate the result either. It's pretty unusual for us to see that sort of run-to-run variation in our tests so it's not totally clear what happened there, other than Lion does seem to be doing more in the background which could impact battery life than previous iterations of OS X.
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steven75 - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
"The fact is Windows/Office is really only expensive if you are building your own computers and installing your own OS"You seem to be implying that Office comes free with a pre-built computer when it in fact doesn't ever.
anactoraaron - Sunday, July 24, 2011 - link
wrong. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but when office 2010 came out my local office depot (and likely every office depot) had at least one pc with the full version of office 2010 on it. It was some kind of promotion they ran for about 2 weeks.tipoo - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Apart from the new animations in Safari, is performance improved any? Any word of it getting GPU acceleration?name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
My experience was that it ran the IE Paintball demo 25% faster, and the end result showed no visual artifacts. So, an improvement on 5.0, but still nothing like the HW acceleration performance of IE.On the other hand, I've yet to encounter a site (apart from the IE demos) where this actually matters...
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Oh, it also, if you care, has elementary support for MathML. To be honest, however, the support is REALLY limited. The typography looks like crap, and anything even slightly fancy looks even worse --- eg long bars over symbols, large surds, etc.tipoo - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Thanks. Yeah, its GPU acceleration doesn't seem as expansive still as other browsers, judging by canned benchmarks I've run it through. IE9 and FF5 are still far ahead in GPU acceleration, Chrome and Opera are getting there, Safari 5.1 is still last.EnzoFX - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
I think it's pretty unfair to compare Windows full-screening to Lion's. Full screening in Windows is not a feature at all IMO, it is the equivalent of dragging the window size out to the size of the screen. You do not gain any functionality whatsoever (usually just a lot of empty space, which was never in Apple's radar before). This kind of full-screen functionality has been present in OS X long before Lion, though it was often more manual, having to drag the window size out.But as you say, Apple has added functionality and it's become it's own separate feature. I think the comparison is pointless.
SmCaudata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
True full-screen in Windows only happens with games, certain video players, and select other apps. I personally so no use for full-screen for most computer applications.Also, the comparison is valid because even in those areas where Windows does use full-screen, the other display still works. I can have a full-screen movie on one monitor while I do whatever I want on the other.
I really fail to see how Apple's implementation has "added functionality" that didn't exist in other OSes before. The article talks about using gestures instead of minimization... isn't that what Alt+Tab and Win+tab already did?
There are certain things that Apple does do well. Their dock was something that MS obviously took inspiration from for W7. This implementation of full-screen seemed pretty limited IMO.
name99 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
I suspect that the multi-screen hiccups with full-screen are purely temporary.We have seen problems like this before --- for example when multi-user GUI support (the rotating cube thing, to allow new users to log in to a mac) was first added, it didn't take long to discover that various iLife apps didn't behave properly. (I forget the details, but I think both iTunes and iPhoto wouldn't launch for the new user.)
It's one of the drawbacks of Apple being so secretive, even internally, that you get these sorts of crossed signals. But the issues usually get fixed, and if they are very visible, they usually get fixed soon.
I'd say, right now, the appropriate response is to assume this is a screwup, not go into conspiracy theory mode about how this is a plot by Apple to eventually remove multi-screen support.
Uritziel - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
LOL. As if a company spearheading Thunderbolt would aim to remove multi-screen support.