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Windows Drains MacBook's Battery; Who's To Blame?
ericatcw writes "Users hoping that Windows 7's arrival will mean less power drain on their MacBook laptops may be disappointed, writes Computerworld's Eric Lai. Running Windows 7 in Boot Camp caused one CNET reviewer's battery life to fall by more than two-thirds. But virtualization software such as VMware Fusion suffer from the same complaints. Some blame Apple's Boot Camp drivers (the last ones were released in April 2008); others lay the blame at Windows' bloated codebase. With Apple and Microsoft both trying to avoid responsibility for improving the experience, Windows 7's reported improvements in power management will be moot for MacBook users for a while."
No matter how bloated Windows is, battery life is only a function of ACPI drivers --- bootcamp's fault
Can you expect "power savings" when VMware is running? You are basically running two computers at once.
I write driver level embedded code for a living. Everything from bootstrapping embedded linux to SoC level power management.
Power management is usually the last thing to get done (if at all)... why? Because management usually sees it as icing on the cake. Attitudes are typically just make it work and we'll ship a bigger battery to make it last. Or we'll ship an upgrade in 6 months, if the product starts to take off and we decide to fund further development.
Time to market is everything.
Power management is also really hard to get right 100% of the time. It's really hard to debug code/hardware where stuff is shutting itself off, or worse, a controller uP is shutting you off unexpectedly.
It has NOTHING to do with 'bad code' or 'shitty programmers'. It's just management grinding down on the engineers to do it: better, faster, cheaper, pick two. Usually faster and cheaper win.
http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2243 Pretty straight forward. Regular PC laptops with the dual/triple gpu's can use Nvidia's Hybrid SLI.
OS X does no switching. Check the 'Energy Saver' System Preferences panel, and you'll see the toggle between the two graphics cards. If you haven't touched it, it'll be in 'Better Battery Life'. Changing between discrete and integrated graphics requires logging out. Windows and Linux cannot switch to the integrated graphics card, explaining some reduced battery life.
LOL... You gave the standard answer, even briefly mentioning Dell. Macs are still way more expensive though.
That's because Macs don't use the POS Intel graphics chips.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
You've posted a link to an article speculating about Apple switching to the nvidia platform. I, on the other hand, actually own a MacBook pro, and can tell you that I have to logout to switch modes. And there's this article too.