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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GotThumbs - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Apple has recognized the money maker it has with its App Store (Or can we now call this an application store). I'm not a mac user and most likely never will be, but I have to say their business model works very well for squeezing income from every corner of their empire. The IOS app store has been a huge money maker (30% of every purchase adds up quickly) and now Apple is moving the same business model to its computers. Apple does have a tendancey to repackage and sell its products in various versions, but with the same underlying technology (develop once, repackage multiple times). True to form, all the apple fans will swarm around and gladly deposit their coin into the machine.GotThumbs - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Realistically, They should give away their OS to invite more users, who will then shop their true money maker....the app store. Kinda like a drug dealer would give the first taste for free. :-)ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Apple's CFO Peter Oppenheimer has already said they operate the App Store as a break even venture, ie. their 30% cut basically goes directly to operating expenses. Unless you believe their CFO is actually lying to investors at shareholder meetings in which case you should report this and your evidence to the SEC.GotThumbs - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
$1,634,000,000 in revenue from Other Music Related Products and Services (3)(3) Includes sales from the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore in addition to sales of iPod services and Apple-branded and third-party iPod accessories
Lets not be too naive.
ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
The App Store no doubt generates revenue for Apple, but how much profit do they actually make?steven75 - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
Please educate yourself. As much as you might think it, yuo aren't smarter than the SEC.GotThumbs - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
I think ALL investors are looking for profits, and if Apple happens to turn a profit through their iTunes store (whoops), do you really think the investors will be angry about the white lie?Taft12 - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Accountants can paint a revenue picture to look any way they want it to. Look no further than "Hollywood Accounting" in the movie industry. Don't take that break even comment at face value.parlour - Monday, July 25, 2011 - link
I would call up the SEC and tell them about your great insight. If what you are saying is true Apple is in deep, deep trouble.In reality it would be stupid for Apple’s CFO to lie about something like that, not worth the trouble at all.
Puppies04 - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
$1,634,000,000 just to break even! Sheesh that is some massive overhead.