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There’s no denying that Apple makes handsome hardware. Its MacBook Air line, for example, started out as an underpowered and overpriced novelty, but thanks to SSDs and faster Intel CPUs it’s now a powerful little machine.
Apple’s hardware designs are so handsome, in fact, that some people are willing to buy a Mac just to run Windows. But is that a good idea? Maybe not—at least not if you want to get the power and battery life you expect from the components inside.
The problem is Apple’s Boot Camp, which is the only supported way to run Windows directly on Apple hardware. The Apple-supplied drivers are substandard, and they don’t allow Windows to take full advantage of the underlying hardware. I’ve written about this problem previously in terms of its impact on disk and graphics subsystem performance.
And now there’s a body of evidence that documents another hidden cost of running Windows on a Mac. You’ll lose a substantial amount of battery such as Acer BATSQU410 battery , Acer Ferrari 4000 battery , Acer Ferrari 5000 battery , Acer TravelMate 8210 battery , Acer BATBL50L8H battery , Acer LC.BTP01.019 battery , Acer TravelMate 2100 battery , Acer TravelMate 8106 battery , Acer TravelMate 8200 battery , Acer LC.BTP01.016 battery , Acer TravelMate 3040 battery , Acer AS10D81 battery life by doing so.
The good folks at Engadget have been using a consistent test methodology on MacBooks and Windows-powered Ultrabooks for the past year. That collection of data makes it possible to compare machines easily, as they’ve done in a recent review of the new Lenovo IdeaPad U310.
What’s especially interesting is that their battery-life tests on the brand-new 2012 MacBook Air and its 2011 counterpart were done with OS X and with Windows 7. (Engadget’s 2012 MacBook Air review confirms that the Windows tests were performed using Boot Camp.)
I’ve taken the liberty of borrowing that data and refactoring it into a table that ranks the current crop of Ultrabooks and MacBook Airs according to battery life. The results are eye-opening.