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...
Reminds me also of Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister, who dodge constituents' questions with "That would be an administrative matter, you must ask Sir Humphrey" and "That would be a policy matter, you must ask the minister", respectively, until one woman complains that they always shift the blame to the other, and Sir Humphrey makes a long, obfuscating speech about the administration of policy vs the policy of administration, bamboozling her.
>> Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?
The article points out the Surface 2. Software and hardware developed by MS and it still has bad battery life when compared with Nexus 7 and iPad (it has half the battery life of the Nexus 7).
How much will a user notice that performance difference in everyday use? Maybe they are putting in more power than is needed. Also the Surface RT battery performance is just as bad and it's running ARM I think.
