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Lies, Damn Lies, and Battery-Life Statistics
theodp writes "What if automakers measured gas mileage by rolling their cars downhill with their engines idling? They might, Newsweek's Daniel Lyons suggests, if they took inspiration from the MobileMark 2007 notebook battery-life benchmark test, the creation of a consortium called BAPCo, whose members are — surprise — computer makers and other tech companies. Laptops score big numbers, Lyons explains, because they're tested with screens dimmed to 20%-30% of full brightness, Wi-Fi turned off, and the main processor chip running at 7.5% of capacity. Professional reviewers see company-generated battery-life claims as a joke. 'The rule of thumb is that in real-world use you get about 50 percent of rated battery life,' says a Gizmodo associate editor. Leading the call for reform is the not-necessarily-altruistic AMD, who gripes that MM07 was created in Intel's labs and rigged so Intel chips would outscore AMD chips, which draw more power when idle."
People "expect" that just because they don't really realize it can be better. Put it another way: they don't expect that at all, they just accept it.
One that hath name thou can not otter
This challenge can be equally turned around.
For the sake of devil's advocacy:
Hey Intel, I have a challenge for you. Instead of rigging your battery life testing mechanisms, why not run your tests like real-world usage would do?
Also, frankly, I don't want a laptop that is unusable out of suspend mode, I want to be able to use my laptop while it's near idling. Yes, I use WIFI, and I also use my laptop to see things I want to see. So at this point, just for this reason, I'm glad my laptop has an Intel chip in it, and I'm glad I get those 2.5 hours of battery life (I'd be interested in after-market quality batteries fyi) I can't see how hard it would be to prove your measurements inaccurate.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
...Perhaps Apple is using a different benchmark...
Perhaps Apple computers are able to manage power better because Apple is the only computer maker that engineers their hardware and software together and is thus able to optimize battery life.
All theory is gray
You don't seriously expect that the internal battery is any more "apple manufactured" than the removable battery was, do you?
Apple, like pretty much all the domestic PC brands, has little to no manufacturing capacity in-house. Possibly some prototyping, and likely some customization/assembly; but all the serious manufacturing is handled by a bunch of OEMs and their suppliers. The cells will be sourced from some third party in any case.
How appropriate, then, that the one thing they *do* oversee in-house is the manufacturing processes for the *cases*. They've invested quite a bit in manufacturing process development and patenting, resulting in things like the "Unibody" laptops and those highly-resilient aluminum coating materials.
So many of their customers, after all, "judge a notebook by its cover"...
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.