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Comment by da_n | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal, but on an older 11" MacBook Air I have a dual-boot with elementary OS (Ubuntu derivative) and I get around 20-30% better battery life with Linux than OS X (using laptop-mode-tools etc). I think this is probably due to all the iCloud crap going on with OS X these days, but I have no proof of that.

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Anectotical counter point:

I have a old netbook that I've had running win7 starter, win7 ultimate running from the old SSD i had in my desktop, and a bunch of linux distros. So far, the win7 ultimate configured for a desktop pc has been the most energy efficient.

That's probably true if they are running older versions of the kernel, which were not optimised for battery. If you install a recent kernel and load laptop-mode-tools I'm sure you might see different results, if not that is a strange result for sure.

I was about to say the same. My Dell laptop had better battery life with Windows 7 than Ubuntu 11.

I've just disabled iCloud on my iMac, many things got faster, such as the Preview app. Previously it could take 3 to 5 seconds to load a trivial png image, now it's less than a second. But unfortunately I'm a bit dependent on the iCloud already...

The biggest background drain on my MacBook Air is DropBox. It keeps trying to make a network connection when there is no wi fi available. Pause syncing on DropBox and the battery life improves.

And then as soon as there is, slam an entire core for about 30sec to calculate diffs. [MBP Quad i7, 16GB, 500GB SSD].

If it makes you feel better, Dropbox does the same thing across a few cores on my Xeon E5 under Mavericks.

Check TimeMachine also (if you're running it). It's a beast.

Time Machine doesn't run on battery power by default.

I just recently had to replace my external hard drive I use for TM backups and whenever it would start to backup it would bring the computer to a grinding halt (2013? MBPr, it's from work). I ended up disconnecting it and taking it home on the weekend to do the initial backup.

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