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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."
I have a slightly dated Macbook with an integrated Intel graphics chips. Has anyone with similar specs tried to run Windows 7 on it? If so, how does it stack up against XP in terms of performance and responsiveness, and how does Windows 7 fare in a VMware session?
This is a clever manipulation of statistics. The high-end market is rapidly shrinking as the average price of a PC has dropped under $500, while Apple's average price is still up around $1500. So yes their share of the remaining $1000+ market is increasing. Apple didn't destroy Dell and HP in the high-end market... that market moved out from under Dell and HP, and will eventually move out from under Apple as well.
Strangely enough NPD excluded high-end PC gaming systems... I'm not sure how many non-gaming $1000+ machines are out there to count, so the statistics are even more skewed than they should be.
Apple may own 91% of the high end "non-gaming" market, but right now the high end market is only about 10% of the total... they are missing out on nearly all of the lower 90% of the market.
As far as Windows licensing, I don't really see a lot of difference with Apple... in most cases you don't reuse OSX on your next Mac either.