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Vista Runs Hot on Macbook Pro
PetManimal writes "Ken Mingis, Computerworld's Mac editor, has given Vista a spin on his Macbook Pro in order to review and compare hardware performance with OS X. It's not a rigorous benchmarking, but he does notice a few issues relating to power consumption: 'Since installing Vista, I have found that my MacBook Pro runs hot. No doubt Microsoft hasn't worked on power management issues that might affect Apple hardware, which leaves me to wonder whether I'm slowly cooking the motherboard of my laptop. It's not hot enough to fry an egg on the aluminum case, but my laptop is noticeably warmer than when I use Mac OS X. I've also noticed that battery life is substantially reduced. Once again, energy management for Apple hardware is not likely at the top of Microsoft's list. Once Apple writes updated drivers to work with Vista, I'd expect these issues to be addressed.'"
1. Vista runs hot on MacBook Pro because he's using a beta OS without hardware drivers, using a mechanism for running it that itself is still beta. (And uh, I got news for you: everything "runs hot" on MacBook Pro.
But:
2. Apple doesn't support Vista on MacBook Pro and doesn't make Vista drivers for Apple hardware, but probably will after Vista and Boot Camp are both, you know, actually shipping, supported products.
Seems like the submitter managed to leave out quite a few things from the article, like the fact that the subtitle is:
Apple's top-end laptop runs Vista better than a high-end Sony Vaio
...and pretty much the entire rest of the article, which is downright positive, and managed to only come up with "Vista runs hot on Macbook (sic) Pro", something only mentioned in a couple of sentences on page 3 of the article.
The author makes claims that while using an unsupported, beta OS on hardware for which driver profiles don't exist in conjunction with another beta, unsupported product (Boot Camp), he wonders whether he's "slowly cooking the motherboard", even given the hardware safeties built in, and then goes on to say that he expects these to be fixed when Apple releases drivers for their hardware that actually work with Vista, and Vista is no longer, oh, I don't know, a beta product, and not even out yet?
So, why does the entire submission revolve around the ONE item that likely won't be news, and indeed will be completely moot, by the time Vista ships and Apple actually supports Boot Camp as a product (when Leopard ships)?
Why is this news? A beta OS doesn't run at full capacity on a specific piece of hardware? More likely is that Apple needs to release Vista power management drivers. They probably will do so once Vista is officially released. It's not really worthy of a news posting; maybe as a footnote in a larger review of Vista itself.
windows 2000 even always ran hotter than any other OS on my laptops, i remember hearing an explanation a long time ago that they ignore the "wait" cycles or somesuch running the cpu harder than intended.
Hello, McFly (or dumb reporter) but Apple's beta Boot Camp software is not designed to run Vista. You have no reasonable expectation that these issues will be addressed since Apple did not make Boot Camp for Vista. I will say it again -- Boot Camp is beta and it is not designed to run Vista, an operating system that itself is beta.
First, why is this even considered news?
Second, last I checked Vista was not complete. If people even bothered to read the release notes for RC1 you would see Microsoft specifically mentions that the power savings functionality is not yet complete.
Third, as was mentioned multiple times by the reviewer, Apple has not released drivers for Vista yet. Since when is this Microsoft's fault?
From the article, highlighted in the introduction:
"my laptop is noticeably warmer than when I use Mac OS X. I've also noticed that battery life is substantially reduced."
Come on, that's not even the center point of the article, nor is that anything but subjective, anecdotal observation. Of one. As someone else has said here in the past, even the plural of anecdote is not data. Get a surface temperature thermometer, get some real data. Who knows? Does this guy sense a 3 degree difference as a lot or a 20 degree difference as a lot? Would either of those differences even matter? Did he run Mac OS X under the same conditions as Vista - was the room temperature the same? How about the apps he was running? I could care less about Vista, but, really, folks, how is this newsworthy that some one guy thinks his one laptop runs hotter running Vista the one time he tried it?
And please stop with the Vista posts. We don't need daily updates, thanks though.
Everyone I know who has a windows laptop of any form has always found that the battery drains quickly. Granted I don't know too many people who condition their batteries properly or anything of the sort, but it kind of leads me to believe that Windows doesn't do a whole lot with power management over all.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
My guess was that Windows' System Idle Process was using CPU cycles even when nothing else was
Damned System Idle Process, regularly hogging 100% of my CPU! I bet it uses even more in Vista!
So I try to end the process and Task Manager gives me some BS about it not being valid. What if I want to use a different idle process? Hmm? Vendor lock-in! Monopoly!
Just one more reason to drop M$ and Windoze if you ask me.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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"Apple's top-end laptop runs Vista better than a high-end Sony Vaio"
So, the Mac he bought a few months ago performs better than a Sony he bough almost a year ago? How is that not expected? You compare two PC laptops of the same age difference and you're going to get the same result.
It's like saying 'Gee, my brand new Mac is faster than the old PC I'm replacing, Macs are so much better'
Bah and humbug.
Way to sound like a douchebag. Once again, it's MS, not M$. Second of all, he's comparing a Pentium M on the Sony Vaio to the vastly superior Core Duo chip, not to mention that the M is a single core while the Core Duo is, oh, I don't know, a dual core machine. FYI, just to feed your trolling, Vista (Beta 2) managed to run my laptops battery longer than XP did.