Reviews like at The Verge[1] measured the battery life at 6.5 hours.
I trust Anandtech more than The Verge to conduct properly controlled tests, but it really does illustrate the point that usage has a far bigger impact on battery life on modern notebooks than it did in the past.
1: http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/13/8030821/dell-xps-13-laptop...
Toss up some terminus and vim and the FHD model sounds like a great all day coding machine.
I couldn't find anything on hdmi/4k, but this seems to suggest it doesn't make much difference (compared to what I assume the backlight and screen draws): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)
At any rate, if we assume it takes 4 times as much power, and we know that phones do just fine with 1080p+ displays -- I doubt the signal is the problem. Maybe it's the RAM used for the videoframes?
I always assumed it was the screen that consumed power with HDPI displays (flipping more pixels) -- but maybe it's something else.
I could be wrong about how significant the backlight is on an LED display though.
I also thought that modern video cards (as in from the last 15-20 years) optimized 2D graphics so that regular desktop use didn't require pushing a screen full of pixels to the GPU on every frame. That would seem to diminish the significance of the actual number of pixels at QHD+.
I don't have a good answer.
This is a fairly useless metric. Since different displays have a different max brightness (and perhaps even different brightness curves, I feel like the "percents" aren't always linear), testing at a certain brightness value is the only way to go.
Thankfully AnandTech uses 200 nits for all laptops so we can actually compare these numbers.
1) Launch mmc (Win+R, "mmc")
2) File -> Add/Remove Snap-In
3) Group Policy Object Editor -> Add -> Local Computer -> Ok
4) Expand Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Search
5) Find "Prevent indexing when running on battery power to conserve energy"
6) Enable -> OK -> Close
If you're on Home Edition then make a new *.reg file with the following content:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search]
"PreventIndexOnBattery"=dword:00000001
Going through MMC works even on virgin Windows 7 pro/ent without installing anything.
https://i.imgur.com/ZHzEDrC.png
I've updated the original instructions a little to be more clear.
I work on the indexer and am always looking for more data about what we are doing wrong.
A commenter pointed out to the author that Windows Indexing was responsible for significant battery drain and the author confirmed by running the test again with it disabled.
Yes, I understand this could be seen as feature creep but I think if the savings in battery life are as much as the grandfather says then it is worth the extra complication of a setting. What do you think?
How often do users search in Outlook? I'd say maybe 5-10 times a day, and if it's already indexed, I won't notice.
> Dell claims that the battery life of the XPS 13 is an impressive 15 hours for the 1920×1080 model and 11 hours for the 3200×1800 version. Our own battery testing is a little more punishing than Dell's, but the company's numbers seem to be in the right ballpark. In our test of light Web browsing, the XPS 13 came in just shy of nine hours
Usage pattern is definitely a huge factor though:
> in a more intensive WebGL test, it hit five hours on the dot.
and so is software running (using Chrome is a terrible idea if you want battery life, for instance)
If you meant Anand, they tested both. Look for "Dell XPS 13 (9343) QHD+" and "Dell XPS 13 (9343) FHD" values in the charts.
Look at the little sliver of black that represents Mac computer sales (looks like ~5m sales/quarter) and compare with the orange line that represents Windows computer sales (just under 80m sales/quarter).
Even if 100% of the Macs are laptops and only 10% (as a pessimistic guess) of the Windows machines are laptops, sales are still heavily in the Windows territory.