Done for 2009: The Holiday MacBook Pro Roundup
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 10, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Still Better Battery Life Than Windows 7
Other than running Safari in 64-bit mode, the best way to hurt battery life on your MacBook Pro is to throw Windows 7 on it. I've pointed OS X's battery life advantages out before, but this is one of those things that's difficult to compare since there's only one brand of computer that runs OS X.
The best reference point I've got is still my old Thinkpad X300. It has a similar configuration in terms of battery capacity and CPU power draw to the MacBook Air, yet gets about half the battery life under Windows Vista as the Air did under OS X. Put them both under Vista and they are quite similar.
I ran a few more tests with the MacBook Pro under Windows 7 to see what the final tally was. Apparently the latest version of Boot Camp improves Windows 7 battery life, but I like having numbers to back up unverified claims.
I ran two tests under Windows 7, our light wireless web browsing test and our XviD playback test. The reason I chose these two is simple: I wanted one where the system spent a good amount of time in an idle state (up to 20 seconds between web page loads in the web browsing test) and another where the system was constantly busy (with no hardware XviD offload, the CPU has much less downtime).
Windows 7 was configured to maximize battery life, running in its power saving mode. Unlike the test I ran in the last review, I used IE8 and Windows Media Player 11 in Windows 7 while I used Safari/iTunes in OS X. The results I got were both expected and quite revealing:
| 13-inch MBP Battery Life | OS X 10.6.1 "Snow Leopard" | Windows 7 x64 | OS X Advantage |
| Light Web Browsing | 468 minutes | 263 minutes | 77.9% |
| XviD Playback | 207 minutes | 198 minutes | 4.5% |
The light wireless web browsing test echoed what I'd seen previously: OS X is better for battery life when it comes to lots of idle time (from the CPU's perspective). But look at the XviD results, the two OSes last the same amount of time.
These results appear to confirm what I'd suspected; throw enough load on the system and the OS X advantage is negligible. Keep it light and with enough idle time and you'll find OS X pull ahead. Jarred has seen similar results. One of his battery life tests involves leaving the laptop idle at the Windows desktop until it shuts off. None of his laptops have ever been able to match the battery life of the MacBook Pro in my light wireless web test.
Ultimately Apple still uses the same hardware as PC notebook manufacturers, so under load its systems shouldn't really consume any less power. But at idle Apple has much more control over the OS and drivers than a Dell or HP, the result appears to be better idle battery life. For light usage or working with a lot of pauses or downtime, OS X just lasts longer.
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Baron Fel - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Why didnt you mention the 15" HP Envy? It beats the MBP in everything but battery life...solipsism - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
There is a distinct difference in these machines. For starters, these MBPS have been out many months and won’t be getting an update until after the holidays. If your focus is solely on a Clarksdale quad-core processor.Note that it doesn’t beat the nearly half-a-year old 15” MBP in a lot of areas. It’s nearly 10% thicker, only has a 6-cell battery, while not having an optical drive. I hope that the MBPs come without an optical drive in favour of the OS being installed on a SD Card, but Apple isn’t HP with dozens of machines with the same display size. Apple still runs like a boutique shop so when they commit to removing the optical drive to run a Core i7 quad-core it’ll be for all their 15” notebooks.
far327 - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Apple equals proprietary gayness!! Design is great. Quality is stellar, but Apple is GAY!!!aapocketz - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - link
I like apples line of laptops, they seem quite well built, though I don't really see a huge benefit of unibody design, I think my ancient ibm laptop is just as nice. I don't really love the glossy screens either. Overall they are nice.apple has some impressive engineering and decent innovation capabilities but their closed and protected platform and general company philosophy is disturbing to someone who relies on and enjoys the openness of hardware and software platforms.
Consider apple disabling support for Atom cpus in the newest OS updates, ostensibly to prevent homebrewers from using the OS on their own hardware like netbooks. Man I certainly don't love Microsoft, but we would be way worse off if Apple dominated the market. I am fine with them as long as they only want that single bite of the apple though.
I like choice and flexibility, and apple computers tightly integrated platform may be a good choice, as long as its not my only choice.
robco - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - link
You have to see on in person to understand why the unibody design has benefits. While still being less than an inch thin, the MacBooks are incredibly rigid. Little flex at all. They feel rock solid. I do agree that the ThinkPads are nice and solid too. If I hadn't gotten a MBP, a ThinkPad was my second choice. You can now custom order the 15 and 17" models with a matte display.I find OS X to be a nice compromise. I like Linux, but it's not always easy to find good software. A lot of FOSS runs under OS X. There's also virtualization to run Linux alongside OS X. A friend who does web development loves the fact that he can run Office, Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat and MySQL all on the same machine easily.
As for dominating the market, I don't think that's Apple's goal - unlike Microsoft. Apple seems pretty happy with their market segment overall. They're raking in a lot of money.
I like my Mac and it's a solid machine. That being said, I'm hardly a fanboy. There are certain circumstances where people should get a Windows machine. As far as Atom support, Apple never supported Atom in the first place, I don't see why they should be expected to provide it or continue providing it. AFAIK, OS X uses some of the optimizations in the Core and Core 2 Duo chips that aren't present in the Atom.
setzer - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Okay, this is just a supposition because I don't have an actual macbook to test, but I would bet the reason OSx provides so much better battery values is because Apple is running the cpus at a much lower voltage than the defaults, ie, what is here: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Pentium_M_undervolti...">http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Pentium_M_undervolti...this does make a difference in battery longevity and by default windows doesn't undervolt processors.
blufire - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
I believe it may have more to do with napping and shutting down components more frequently/aggressively..araczynski - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
the macs are starting to smell like pc's now, incompatibilities all over the place.damianrobertjones - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
...so you'd think that with less hardware to code for, that they'd get it right!tuskers - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
At the Mac coverage at this time and place. As a long-time reader of Anandtech, this feels completely out of place from "coverage" and more non-topical than anything I've ever read here, before. We've seen the Macbook Pro reviews already.My guess is that this has to do with one (or more) of three things:
- Anand has turned into the "Mac person" who needs to justify his fanboi-ism.
- There's too little tech news in the holiday season, so this is a classic "fluff" piece, that was easy to write.
- Apple paid the site to publish said fluff piece.
Regardless, journalistically, this is one of the worst pieces I've seen here.
- Failure to analyze the market from a "competitors to Apple" sense. Dell and HP's "representatives" aren't competing with Apple with their mainstream products; instead, they're competing against each other. They're competing on low price to justify expenses with corporations. Most corporations don't care if a laptop is slightly thicker. Instead, pick laptops that are trying to out-Apple Apple, like the Envy or Adamo; Asus and MSI also offer intriguing competition and increasing market shares. Rather than looking at it as "Apple is a mainstream computer maker with 15% of the market", realize that the more true statement is "Apple is dominant in a high-priced niche market which doesn't focus on computing power, here is how it compares to other products competing for that market."
- Exaggeration of differences. The highlighted weight of the 15" MBP is within rounding error of the compared model! And in marketing specs instead of actual product weights, no less.
- Focusing on the battery so much without mentioning that other laptop brands only have to pack a replacement battery to achieve longer battery life. Yes, maintenance is a little more difficult, but you aren't making an honest comparison given that the unibody Macs discarded this functionality.
- A token "please get SSDs to work properly!" plea, without research. Does the "Mac Edition" OCZ Vertex work or not? It's true that OCZ has admitted it as marketing hype, but the least you could do is expose it. You even go so far as to say that some people might be happy to know that random combinations might work-- because people have SSDs lying around.
- I'm amazed a commenter put together the "Flash is 32-bit, so of course it runs slowly talking to 64-bit Safari" before Anand did.
- Blanket statements without truth to them. For instance, the claim that 1920x1200 screen in the 17" is not "bigger than anything else on the market". You simply need to select an Alienware model at Dell's site (a competitive price range for the MBP 17", no less). And then, Anand complains that the pixels are too dense-- a common complaint, which is why Dell offers more 1080p screens instead. I own an Inspiron with a 1920x1200 screen that I bought several years ago. They aren't an Apple monopoly because Apple's the only one that can do it. This whole scenario is worse than simple marketing hype.
I'll leave it there, I'm sure I could find more though. I expect better from this site, Anand!