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Comment by neverm0re | Hacker News Reader

I'd really like to see Snow Leopard added to this, because absolutely all personal testing I've done has shown that we've been in a steady descent from that point if you care about things like battery life and performance. I simply don't have enough time to objectively measure this, unfortunately, but if you take the aggregate of various benchmarks and reviews, that seems to be the consensus anyway.

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I posted a very similar reply to a post a couple of days ago linking to the same article (uh..see EDIT below, this is slightly different article), submitted by the same person, who also happens to be the the author of the story (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4425673). It appears that post was either flagged or downvoted into oblivion, because it disappeared shortly thereafter (and after seeing this hit again 2 days later, I'm thinking it was pretty justifiable...)

EDIT: okay, so I missed a small detail, the other was about the MBP, this one is about the MBA. My bad..I guess.

Anyway, my experience has been largely the same as yours...I lost a significant amount of battery life when I upgraded to Lion, and apparently it seems like the problem is only getting worse.

The author replied in the other post that he would add Snow Leopard to the test, which should be interesting...I'm expecting that the difference between Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion will be huge.

Hi toadkick,

Yep, I'm currently sitting here running 10.6.8 battery life tests as we speak. I'm going to make it as comprehensive as I can and run multiple tests on each build of OS X from 10.6.8 to 10.8.2 (prerelease). It will take a while; should be ready by the middle of this coming week.

...and that is after 10.6 supposedly lowered battery life too:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2870/done-for-2009-the-holiday...

I tried 10.5-10.8 on the same MacBook Pro and anecdotally, it really is a downward trend. Looking forward to your benchmarks.

Though 10.6 did improve overall benchmark performance from 10.5 which was arguably the first regression in OS X, which from its rough inception managed to get better by the point release. It's actually rather alarming that 10.8 is a continuation in decline rather than making up from 10.7's failings.

I switched from using OpenBSD on all my laptops at 10.3 and now I find it very difficult to continue justifying OS X with all of these performance regressions and how increasingly annoying it is to treat the OS as a solid desktop *nix, which is all I ever wanted. As much as I admire DragonflyBSD, I'm likely going to Linux next.

(What I really miss was how snappy and responsive IRIX was...)

The most frustrating thing is that both "the internet" (the blogosphere or whatever you'd call it) and sales numbers are absolutely in favor of Apple's strategy. Sometimes I need to open up the Mac App Store to look at all the grumpy one-star reviews for 10.8, just to know that humanity hasn't completely lost its mind.

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