TekRevue

Definitely engineering.

Optimizing battery life is like f(x) = 1/x

If there is a way to get your standby power down to 0, you have infinite battery life. (Theoretically!)

If OSX really gets 2x the battery life of Windows, they only had to squeeze out 3.3 Watts. (calculation below)

So Atwood points to the 2013 Macbook Air 13", and its "14 hr 25 min" battery life. Well something fishy is going on there. He cites [1] but Apple themselves only claim 12 hours [2], and other tests have come in just under 12 hours [3].

Here's how I derived the 3.3 Watts above: the 2013 Air has a 54 Watt-Hourr battery.

54 Wh / 7 h 40 m = 7.043 W
54 Wh / 14h 25 m = 3.746 W
Save 7.043-3.746 = 3.297 W

Keep in mind Watts measure power, not energy. So to save 3.297 Watts average, OSX is keeping something mostly turned off that Windows is not successfully keeping off. OSX is saving on average 3.297 W over the test period by having brief bursts of activity while staying mostly idle.

It isn't surprising at all that Windows isn't able to fully manage power on a system that hasn't had its ACPI tables set up specifically for Windows (beyond getting Windows to boot).

I'm happy to say I've been Windows-free since 1997, no love lost and never looking back. But the statistics presented here have some major flaws. More testing / engineering needed...

[1] http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/apple-13-macbook-air-2013-running-windows-8-p16624/test.html

[2]…

Another "courageous" thing that Apple did was release a computer in 1983 without any fans, which was extremely heavy because it had a giant heat sink, and would still overheat constantly.[1]

And yes, this was apparently Steve Job's idea, as he felt that fans were "too noisy and inelegant". I imagine that he felt that fans were holding humanity back, and smugly told people who disagreed that they were clinging to obsolete technology.

It got so bad, that Apple actually advised their customers to physically lift and drop their Apple IIIs to re-seat the chips that had popped out from the excessive heat.[2]

Of course, if today Apple decided that fans were obsolete again, and the latest Macbooks were twice as heavy and still overheated, then it would become the new normal, and it would be hard to find computers that had fans anymore, and we would long for the days when we could just use computers for as long as we wanted without worrying about them overheating. And on the internet, commenters would say that it wasn't a big deal at all, and if you were some sort of power user that wanted to use your laptop for more than a few hours at a time, you should buy a $250 cooling pad for it.

[1]: http://lowendmac.com/2015/apple-iii-chaos-apples-first-failure/

[2]: https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii-drop/

> Apple are truly unique in their ability to deliver improvements, introduce new technologies, and implement existing technologies in ways that are actually usable, while keeping regressions and serious problems low, much lower than the competition.

I like Apple products as much as the next guy, but cmon, this is some serious kool-aid drinking here.

Apple doesn't produce software that is any less issue prone than any other vendor. In fact the chorus complaining about software regressions has been getting louder and louder, even from Apple fans.

Yosemite was a particularly low point with regard to Apple software.

http://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/the-worst-bugs-in-os-x-yosemite-and-how-to-fix-them-1652690924

http://www.tekrevue.com/yosemite-bugs-time-for-another-snow-leopard/

Software is hard. Apple aren't special, their software has just as many issues as any other vendor's, which is actually kind of disappointing given they have full control of the hardware, MS actually does a lot better with regard to software quality given the varied HW landscape Windows is deployed to.

Edit: Software quality isn't just a Yosemite issue with Apple, it's a long running joke that you should never install a X.0 OSX release due to bugs.

Two minor details I disagree with (in an otherwise very interesting and entertaining article):

> In the 1980s and 1990s home computers didn't use much electricity. No-one cared about "thermal design power"

In fact, Apple DID have a notorious prior brush with thermal issues: https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii-drop/

> When Apple abandoned the PowerPC they temporarily took a step back into a predominantly 32-bit world with the Core Duo, only fully embracing 64 bits a few years later, with the Core 2 Duo and OS X 10.7.

As far as hardware is concerned, Macs with 32 bit Intel processors only shipped from January (iMac) to November (MacBook) 2006. I did wonder at the time whether gaining a few months was worth saddling software with i386 slices for several years (system frameworks had to be built for 4 different architectures, for instance). It's true that full 64 bit software support took a bit longer to emerge, but that may have been due to the need to support the 32 bit Intel Macs that were shipped.

Really love the UI and simplicity of adding tasks/task groups, but this app is (for some reason) a beast on my battery life. I sent you an email about this as well, but it was using well over what I had anticipated. From the OS X 10.11.4 Activity Monitor:

Alloy
Energy Impact: 651.4
Avg Energy Impact: 24.6

This is compared to Google Chrome, which, with 15 tabs open, has an impact of 11.2. When I looked into it, the energy impact of Alloy is near that one would expect on a stress test (ex: http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/use-activity-monitor-energy-tab-os-x-mavericks).

Any ideas what would be causing this much energy consumption?

Chrome supports an incognito command line switch you can embed into shortcuts/launchers:

http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/incognito-mode-shortcut/

Firefox similarly offers a -private flag:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options

Edge does not currently support the same, but there's a UserVoice request on the topic:

https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/257854-microsoft-edge-developer/suggestions/9245247-inprivate-command-line-switch