Done for 2009: The Holiday MacBook Pro Roundup
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 10, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Snow Leopard: Bad for Battery Life
I've been very quiet on the Snow Leopard front, honestly in the condition it was released it was worth exactly what Apple was charging for it: $30. The bugs and incompatibilities weren't showstoppers, but they were annoying.
Since its release, Snow Leopard has improved tremendously. I'd say we're almost to the point where there's nothing I miss from Leopard. Is it worth the upgrade? Yeah, I'd say so, but do your research beforehand. There are still some incompatibilities that may make you want to wait before jumping. But if you don't use many 3rd party apps or non-Apple hardware, you'll be fine.
The title of this section says it all - Snow Leopard is worse for your Mac's battery life than Leopard. In the majority of cases it's not that big of a deal, take a few results from my 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro review and compare them to the same system under Snow Leopard:
| 15-inch MBP Battery Life | OS X 10.5.7 "Leopard" | OS X 10.6.1 "Snow Leopard" | % Drop |
| Light Web Browsing | 493 minutes | 444 minutes | 9.9% |
You're looking at nearly a 10% reduction in battery life, nothing to be proud of.
That's not the big issue however. The results on the previous page showed something troubling. The MacBook Pro is only able to deliver between 3.7 - 4.4 hours of battery life while browsing web pages with flash ads on them. Looking back at my 15-inch MBP results under Leopard, we see a problem:
| 15-inch MBP Battery Life | OS X 10.5.7 "Leopard" | OS X 10.6.1 "Snow Leopard" | % Drop |
| Flash Web Browsing | 403 minutes | 230 minutes | 42.9% |
I asked Apple on numerous occasions to help me understand what was going wrong, unfortunately I didn't get any response. I tried multiple things from my end. I updated the version of Flash, but that didn't help. It wasn't until I told our own Ryan Smith, one of the people instrumental in getting me to try a Mac years ago, that he gave me a brilliant suggestion: try 32-bit Safari.
Snow Leopard takes another step towards being a completely 64-bit OS, in many ways this step is the most disruptive. Many of SL's applications now ship with 64-bit binaries such as Finder, TextEdit and Safari. You can launch these 64-bit apps in 32-bit mode by selecting their .app icon and running Get Info (Command + I or File -> Get Info).
From there you can check the "Open in 32-bit mode" box. In my case, this gave me 32-bit Safari, which also gave me much better battery life in my heavy web browsing test:
| 13-inch MBP Battery Life | 64-bit Safari | 32-bit Safari | % Improvement |
| Flash Web Browsing | 222 minutes | 323 minutes | 45.5% |
My 3.7 hours of battery life that the 13-inch MacBook Pro gave me jumped up to 5.36 hours. That's an increase of over 45%.
I passed this data along to Apple but haven't gotten anything back from them. I'm guessing the silence on the matter means that it's a known issue and isn't something that's going to be addressed for a little while. Just to be sure, I spent most of last night running OS X 10.6.2 on three different systems to see if it fixed the problem. It didn't.
You'd think that with $1.67 billion in profit last quarter, Apple could afford to hire a couple of engineers to keep its OSes a bit more polished.
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dagamer34 - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - link
I doubt the chipset needs to be actively cooled. And plus, TDP is meant to be a "maximum", not an average. Plus, a higher concentration of power, means more heat, which means more cooling is necessary. I don't see Apple adding more fans to facilitate cooling.solipsism - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
If, like in the new iMacs, they move to a 16:9 ratio they may be able to allow for better spreading and a loner vent in the back. Personally, I am not a fan of the 16:9 for reading on a notebook. I’d rather have them finally get rid of the optical drive to make room for more cooling, an extra 5” for ports and even more battery space.dagamer34 - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - link
Oops, I meant 1600x900 for the 15".SocrPlyr - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 - link
Why doesn't anyone else make a high end laptop like Apple? Hardwarewise, there isn't hardly any (readily available) Windows based PCs that match the specs. As for software, except for a few GUI tricks, Apple still is not capable of writing good software/code. That is clear with pretty much all of their software. They made a good choice for the base of OS X, but as they modify it more and more I can only see things getting worse and worse until we are back at OS 8 levels of garbage (or was it 7 that was so bad). Hopefully they will get things figured out, but I don't have much faith in them.Exelius - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Um, really? Have you even used a Mac for more than 5 minutes? Snow Leopard is great. I've never used an OS that can remain smooth with uptime numbers like this:10:15 up 29 days, 1:49, 3 users, load averages: 0.66 0.94 0.93
OS X is a terrific, flexible, stable platform. The only drawback is lack of driver support, but even that is changing rapidly.
Please don't post about things which you know nothing about, it only makes you look bad and discounts your arguments. I'm not some rabid Mac zealot (I'm an MCSE and run Windows 7 on several machines at home, so I know Windows very well) but Apple does have a premium product and OS X is a very good OS.
sigmatau - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Hardwarewise? You mean packaging? You do know their hardware is often a generation or more behind the competition. Not only do you pay a huge premium for the shiny case, you get old hardware to boot. Just look at the processors and video cards available on Macs. Usualy 6months to a year behind the competition.Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - link
Precisely - I don't understand why Apple gets such an easy ride here especially from a tech site. I've had a Dell Studio XPS 16 for a while with a blu-ray drive and RGB LED screen, even budget laptops now come with blu-ray and given Apple's reputation for graphics use they should have had RGB LED displays ahead of anyone else.John
michael2k - Thursday, November 12, 2009 - link
What is your issue? Apple's been shipping LED displays since 2005 on their 15" MBP, and are LED across all laptop systems as of 2008 and all desktops by 2009.Johnmcl7 - Saturday, November 14, 2009 - link
There's a large difference between the two, have a look at the article on this site for the Studio XPS 16 if you're not familiar between the two. Apple currently don't ship any machines with RGB LED backlit displays.Although they do offer LED backlit displays on their machines now, they were also slow to adopt this technology. Given the premium price they charge and this being a tech site I'm surprised they're given so much praise while offering basic or older technology lagging behind rivals. Never mind even rivals, many budget machines are using more advanced technology than Apple do although I guess they need to string out upgrades to ensure people keep buying machines.
michael2k - Saturday, November 14, 2009 - link
So you're asking why Apple doesn't offer cutting edge HW?Apple does; the issue is what HW it is you're looking for. As outlined in the article it is the battery (and battery life) and the physical case design.
Look at the new Adamo and Adamo XPS systems. Dell looks to be charging an arm and a leg, too, for cutting edge physical design.