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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, having both a new gen Surface book and a new MBP, the difference is stark for CPU and I/O intensive tasks. With battery saver on, the Surface Book can easily last 6-8 hours of use.

To get that far with my MBP I'd need to essentially disable the screen, disable all backgrounding, turn off incremental compiles, and try to be careful about using my clojure repl. You immediately stop using Chrome (despite being a better overall browser) and go to the inferior Safari for battery life, etc.

The tradeoff is that the MBP compiles about 10-15% faster, but as it only lives about 1/2-2/3 as long on a single charge it is not worth it to me.

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Wait, you are saying you get less than 6 hours for average use?

Everytime there is a macOS vs Linux thread it is repeated that things are quite bad on Linux. I kind of accepted it as the major downside.

I easily get 6h on my Ubuntu machine (Dell XPS 13, 2015) though. If others don't, the difference must be TLP?

Edit: answered in another response (older MBP)

Linux and Windows suffer on Mac Hardware. You get a hotter laptop with much less battery life due to the firmware not working as well.

Though Arch linux has an amazing trove of documentation on installing Arch on a Macbook. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook

I get about 10hours on a 2013 MBA (and the battery must be degraded after 3 years of intense use!).

It might go down to about 7hs of intensive work, or about 4hs gaming.

This is why the MBA may still be a good option for a lot of people considering upgrading and concerned about battery life (assuming they don't have a MBA now).

You should upgrade to the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro, battery life is easily 8 hours.

It is most definitely not. I can barely squeeze 6 hours out of mine. Running chrone, small node servers, and mongo processes, keeping background processes to a minimum and screen brightness as low as I can stand. It's deplorable, and I'll be switching to the Surface Pro to run linux as my next machine. At least then I'll get a proper command line for 'meh' battery life.

In my tests Chrome uses far more power than Safari and significantly more than Firefox.

Yup, Chrome does that for me, too. But I find firefox's UI just...so fucking awful. And the dev tools are simply inferior. Need chrome, if only Apple would pay attention to user needs.

I'm not sure exactly what the difference (if any) is between Chrome's dev tools and Chromium's dev tools, but Opera AFAIK uses Chromium's tools and the battery life on my 12" Macbook under normal web browsing in Opera (with adblocker and battery saver turned on) routinely exceeds 10 hours.

I do a bit of light web development work every now and then but I'm not really qualified to comment on how good the developer tools in question actually are. To me, they seem to have some nice features and they do what I need.

I switched to Opera a long time ago. It has the same backends as Chrome (webkit/v8), and the same developer tools but muuuuuuch better battery life.

I haven't used Opera. I'll check that out, thanks.

There's also an Opera extension to install Chrome extensions for the Chrome marketplace, it's really awesome so you don't need always need Opera specific extensions...most of the super popular ones like ublock, https everywhere, etc. are already there.

I found that modgod used to cause my battery life to suffer. Completely idle, it hovered around .5 - 1.0% CPU. Looking at the issue [1], it seems that they solved the issue this summer (I haven't been doing anything with mongo lately, so I can't say if it helped my battery life or not).

[1] https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114

You'll see the same problems of short runtime. All those processes are causing the CPU and hardware to wake up more frequently, tanking your battery life.

> At least then I'll get a proper command line for 'meh' battery life.

I'm aware, as I stated above. I know they consume a lot of power, but I'm tired of the apple ecosystem being like '__NEW THING__ that doesn't actually help me in any measurable way.! Buy now for only two easy payments of 1 arm and 1 leg.!'

I'm switching because I can get hardware that's just as good with the surface, and still keep my linux environment, and not have to worry about some fucking stupid ass touch bar and shitty specs being forced down my throat come upgrade time.

I don't begrudge you the best hardware to scratch your particular itch. But if I may ask what's improper about bash on a Mac?

Tbh, it's mostly the lack of a full keyboard. I'm kinda irked by not having the key combinations and shortcuts I'm used to. Also, I use Vim as my editor and it's impacted similarly.

There are, however, things like ack, that I have running linux (out of the box, btw) that I had to find a replacement for on macOS.

It's mostly small stuff.

I still get between 8-10 hours on my 2013 15" MBP. The new one does seem like a major downgrade, which is too bad as I was thinking about a replacement.

What's your pattern for charging? Almost always plugged in? Use until dead then recharge and only plugin until full, etc?

I just had my late 2013 MBP batteries replaced by Apple 2 months ago (machine purchased July 2014). Battery life is already dropping precipitously - so perhaps it's how I charge the machine? I can't find any background services that should cause this to happen. When I got the machine I could easily do 8 hours now 6.5 if I'm very lucky

I'm very rarely on battery. Cycle count says 180, but I've likely only full discharged a dozen times. But if I'm running Safari, VSCode and then a few background build watch tasks, it just sips juice from the battery.

I have a Macbook pro purchased this year. I didn't notice substantially better battery life with the older ones.

Used to be that osx was far better at this than windows. How times have changed. Also: You lucky git.

Why do you think Chrome is a better browser? Better for what? I find Safari more responsive, and since I'm already all in on the Apple ecosystem, the handoff, and iCloud syncing of bookmarks etc, works better for me. It also feels a bit faster to start up for me. Not sure what chrome is better for, except as a way to cast videos to a Chromecast on my TV.

To be fair, SurfaceBook has a 15W TDP dual core CPU.

I've got an XPS13 with an i7-6500U. That CPU is surprisingly powerful. I tend to throw quite a bit of multi-core C++ compilation or heavy Java workloads against it and so far it hasn't noticeably faltered once. Don't underestimate them just because of the low TDP!

"To be fair" if I can observe at most a 10-15% difference on my primary CPU+IO bottleneck with power consumption on then I do not care much about the specifics of the underlying hardware.

Ironically, the only thing my MBP is better at is gaming.

>"To be fair" if I can observe at most a 10-15% difference on my primary CPU+IO bottleneck with power consumption on then I do not care much about the specifics of the underlying hardware.

To be fair, others dont have the same workflows, and see far greater than 10-15% CPU+IO improvements.

And people got enraged when the new MBPs wasn't that faster compared to last year. Imagine if it merely had that Surface cpu...

> To be fair, others dont have the same workflows,

""To be fair"" I don't think my workflow is exceptional for this environment. It varies from big compiles (android) to small compiles (webpack) and web work. It's quite normal for this audience, as far as I can ascertain.

But... I'm not sure why you are commanding me to imagine something here. I have 0 interest in imagining what excuses people make to keep or stop buying hardware from Apple.

I have my own reasons, and I've been pretty public with them. They extend well beyond recent hardware revisions, and have to do a lot more with software and the refusal to ship a touch screen.

>It's quite normal for this audience, as far as I can ascertain.

This audience isn't the only audience. Video processing/export pipelines, for one, show more than 10-20% improvement in Premiere, and close to 50-100% in FCPX in the new machines.

Your personal workflow isn't really a generally applicable benchmark, and if Apple had gone with the 15W TDP processor people would just have more ammunition for the "it's not pro enough" argument.

The Surface Book is probably a better choice for you, though. My workflow sounds pretty similar to yours (maybe not quite as heavy a background load, though I do some incremental compiling and whatnot), and I have the mid-spec 12" Macbook which routinely gives me 10+ hours of programming and web browsing (I use Opera with the adblocker and battery saver turned on). I simply didn't need more power; this little machine handles everything I throw at it. I think a lot of people fetishize computing power to the detriment of their own convenience.

> Your personal workflow isn't really a generally applicable benchmark,

On the contrary, I think many developers here would be interested in the actual difference observed as opposed to benchmarked. My workflow is unusual in the wider world, but compiling Clojure, running webpack, compiling Android executables with Gradle, and running ocaml's compiler are all somewhat unique to this sphere. I feel comfortable talking about it.

> I think a lot of people fetishize computing power to the detriment of their own convenience.

I agree with this. That's why I think my surface book is a good compromise. A nice medium of a lot of things, acceptable speed at standard tasks with excellent battery life, a touch laptop for when touch-centric work and usability arises, and for my eyes the nicest screen shipped on a laptop right now.

So does my Macbook pro 2016 =) The touchbar-less model.

I bought this model for the extra battery life. But I'm also far from impressed. It's my main complaint tbh.

I find that my typical usage which is on the heavier side (chrome, + 1hr of facetime) I get about 3.5 hrs battery life.

SurfaceBook is dual core, not quad core (but you'll be hard pressed to find this via any Microsoft marketing of surface - has only been confirmed by PR, no mention on any official press sites)

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