The “Break it Down” Blog

I’m not a fan of Macs generally speaking, but due to recent realizations that Microsoft was never going to create an operating system that didn’t share fundamental behaviors with all past and present versions of Windows — I’ve decided to jump ship and get a computer that will “just work”. Keep in mind I don’t mean something-sexy when I say “just works”, like support for every device on the market… I simply mean doesn’t fall apart and become unsable until you reinstall the OS for no reason.

While I’ve had luck with Ubuntu never really “rotting” on me, the battery life I’ve experienced on portable hardware with it is about 1/2 what I see with Windows XP — and battery life is very important to me.

Given that, I’ve been reading more and more reviews of the newly refreshed MacBook Pros from Apple. Beyond the initial launch in Q4 of 2008, Apple has revised the laptop with a new touch pad that no longer has the sensitivity and buggy multi-touch that the 1st gen touch pad had, and most importantly, it incorporates Apple’s new custom batteries.

With this new battery Apple promises “7 hrs” of runtime. Interestingly enough, with really light use (web browser), you can actually clock in closer to 8 hrs as evidenced by research done by the Anandtech team.

The most interesting bit of information to come out of one of the more recently articles on Battery Life in the new MacBook Pros over at Anandtech is that on the exact same piece of hardware, with all variables accounted for, a MacBook Pro that ran for 8.13 hrs would only eek out around 6 hrs with Vista and just under 6 with Windows 7.

That’s a 25% drop in battery life by using Windows. Anand spoke with some OEM providers and found out that Windows XP was “a bit better”, but overall it’s about a 20-30% drop in battery life when going from OS X to a Windows OS on that hardware.

Rumors have it that Sony and Lenovo — ever the fans of boot-time-system-utilities — have found a way to get closer to the MacBook Pro numbers of battery life with the appropriate custom power management software loaded up.

Interesting bit of data if you are looking for an all-day mobile working laptop. If you really do prefer Windows, I’d strongly suggest looking at the Lenovo X200s or X301 — smaller laptops that either support oversized batteries or main batteries + ultrabay batteries for a big boost in run time.