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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

When you aren't creating the hardware, it is harder to care about power management in the software because that is seen as "someone else's problem". It is easy to blame things on terrible drivers or whatever, but no matter how you look at it, the product is worse as a result.

This is why Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware like the Surface. As time goes on, if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going to be the best Windows experience. At least, I would hope so.

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Microsoft needs to keep building their own hardware because 3rd party manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in the early 90s.

The Surface is absolutely gorgeous. If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made. I would love to see MS try to build its own 'Yoga' type laptop...provided I can still install Linux on it.

Dell, Lenovo, Sony, and HP should be ashamed of themselves. Apple makes the best hardware to run Windows on and they don't even like that you can.

> If they softened the edges on the tablet portion it would be on my list of greatest pieces of tech hardware ever made.

I actually like Surface's edges quite a lot, I think it looks brilliant and stands out from the army of cheap looking iPad clones most of which look exactly the same. And the magnesium casing is also a great choice by MS, it makes it look expensive and well built (which it really is)

No doubt on the quality but the reality here is that even with proprietary hardware and thus able to optimize everything for the surface like apple does it this has a low battery life.

It's all the x86 baggage windows has, osx threw everything from the powerpc years away, let alone the stuff from the previous 20 years of systemOS. Windows still carries crap from when 32mb of ram was more expensive than a computer today.

And for what? I got several winxp apps that don't work with 7 or 8, it's pointless.

I seriously doubt it's x86 baggage. You don't pay a battery life penalty for code you don't execute.

True. What is fun is that you could imagine a technology where you would (powering down some unused memory chips), but I don't know if this would be worth it.

Attended a lecture by a grad who implemented this back in 2006. Code resided on the southbridge. Never got commercialized as the penalty of waking/sleeping the chip was not worth the few watts saved. Plus, most servers used all their ram, or near it, all the time.

While you don't use the battery for code you don't execute, when your code is finely tuned to a single machine (as in CPU + auxiliary chips) architecture rather than able to run on a wider choice of hardware, you may be able to squeeze some extra juice from your battery.

Except MacOS X ships fat binaries for multiple CPU architectures and uses a kernel originally designed in the 1980's for an m68k machine.

Shipping fat binaries with different versions for every different Atom/Core/Xeon/FX/Phenom/Opteron Intel/AMD/Nvidia + chipset glue combination would be quite a feat.

This could go well beyond what compiling every package for your specific machine can do.

Openstep supported quad fat binaries iirc, supporting x86, sparc, mips, and I think pa-risc. Gotta say the NeXT software architecture has aged well.

That's not what I was talking about. I said that, if all you support is a specific Intel Atom processor, you can tweak your kernel to support every bit of energy-saving performance-enhancing silicon in there.

Shipping fat binaries is not new. I remember them (not very fondly) from the MacOS 7/PPC days.

Mac OSX runs all of that x86 baggage as well.

I don’t know much about semiconductors, but Apple started shipping x86 Macs when Intel had just switched to the Core architecture. I can imagine that Apple didn’t bother to write for technologies that were present in earlier Intel chips. Apple has only shipped Intel-powered computers with Core and Xeon chipsets (the first gen AppleTV ran on a Pentium M, though).

“The Core microarchitecture is a major architectural revision”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_(microarchitecture)

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/what-is-pae-nx-...

Microsoft didn't bother either. SSE2 and PAE requirements mean a Netburst or later Intel Chip. (or K8 or later from AMD). So Windows8 requires a relatively modern chip, and ignores the earlier ones.

IIRC, Windows 8 and 8.1 take advantage of the new P-States in Haswell / Clover Trail. (And connected standby on Clover Trail definitely shows that Microsoft is working hard on the power problem).

I definitely think its an issue with Apple Marketing. Apple is basically selling Y-class processors in their MBA. 1.3 GHz max speed is some 25% slower than the 1.6 GHz that Surface Pros ship with. The Surface Pro also has a superior screen and active digitizer, so it isn't too curious why it would use more power.

BTW: Xeon has been shipping for like 15 years. When talking about architectures, it tends to be more precise to use the core architcture names. IE: Netburst (P4), Nehelem, etc. etc. "Xeon", "Core", and "Pentium" are marketing names that barely mean anything technically.

Thanks, that was very informative.

I was actually wondering about that... most of these ultrabooks have a Y or U trail which basically translates to underpowered and throttled CPU.

Apple doesn't really say which SKU they're using, Microsoft also hides that info. Which kinda makes you wonder...

> 3rd party manufacturers are doing to Microsoft's brand what Mac clones did to Apple in the early 90s.

I’m not sure whether that’s a fitting analogy. The Mac clone program was launched for other companies to build cheap computers with low margins, so that Apple could continue serving the higher end markets while MacOS would gain marketshare. Instead, clone makers ended up building very high end machines that were faster than anything Apple offered. They hurt Apple’s brand because they were so much faster, not because they were cheap trash.

Daystar Digital’s Genesis had 4 processors, PPC 604e @233Mhz. It had 12 RAM slots and 6 PCI slots. It was a monster and it creamed Apple’s PowerMac 9600, but it was also considerably more expensive.

I agree. And some of the clone makers offered a better customer experience than Apple, too. For example, Power Computing had a great online store before Apple did.

True, and their ad campaigns were fresh too. “We’re fighting back for Mac!”

http://imgur.com/Bfl7LkZ

Power Computing was doing pretty well, even though Apple wouldn't allow it to make notebooks. And then, of course, Apple/Jobs bought back its license and eliminated the competition....

> provided I can still install Linux on it.

The chance that that happens, is abut the as Microsoft giving the physical devices out for free. Lock-in is the common way today to get market control.

Here you go: http://www.geek.com/microsoft/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-the-s...

The Pro is just another PC. I'd like to see the ARM-based Surface running Linux.

It's interesting to compare this to what I have read (and experienced) about Linux vs. Windows battery life on laptops. Maybe things have changed in the last few years, but it used to be that Linux delivered far worse battery life than Windows.

As of my last experiences, it still does.

Maybe it depends on the hardware; battery performance on my MacBook Air 3,2 with Fedora 19 is very good.

Running powertop and fixing things that it recommends helps immensely.

Ubuntu runs ~six hours on my 3 year old dell vostro that's rated for four hours on windows.

How long does it actually run on Windows?

> if Microsoft does it right, Surface is going to be the best Windows experience

If they do that, their OEM's will have to turn their backs on Microsoft in order to differentiate themselves. Dell can, if they want, provide a better Android experience than anyone else, but if Microsoft builds the hardware and has privileged access to Windows core developers, Dell can't hope to do better.

This is, perhaps, Microsoft's most delicate moment since negotiating the exclusivity of PC-DOS.

But that's the thing. They did create the hardware, and it isn't even the first generation, and it still performs poorly. The problem isn't the hardware. It's the software. So either Microsoft makes a new OS from scratch that only works on their hardware, or this problem won't be fixed anytime soon, either way.

Isn't Windows RT as close as it gets to a OS from scratch nowadays? (honest question)

Not really. As far as I know, Windows RT is essentially a port of the NT kernel, most Windows APIs and the new Metro/RT APIs to ARM.

Nope. Windows RT is ARM compiled Windows 8 with a little flag that prevents the installation of 3rd party desktop apps. It's not even a little bit different.

Technically speaking, the little flag does not prevent installation of third-party desktop apps. It prevents executing executables not signed by Microsoft. It is just a policy, that Microsoft will not sign classic win32 executables.

I think the point is that Apple has many, many more years of designing their software for a very specific list of hardware. MS software engineers are probably just starting to think about a closer relationship between code and hardware, and even then I'm sure there's a fair bit of distrust within MS as to how the market will respond. Will their OEM partners call foul on MS leveraging their position? It wouldn't be the first time.

imagine owning a race car team. For years you buy cars from Ferrari. Finally, you're forced to make your own. While in 5 years you will certainly have a better understanding of the car, V1 of your new product will certainly be a bit inferior.

S/Yugo/Ferrari/

Downvotes? The build quality on most PCs is atrocious compared to Apple.

This is exactly how Lamborghini got started.

Why do you think this is about the hardware at all? Most of the savings are down to software (try Windows or Linux on the Macbook Air). It requires lots of hard work to change the kernel to make better use of sleep state and to reduce CPU utilisation in apps.

The reality is that Apple cares about battery life, because they know users do, they work constantly on this. Numerous Apple announcements talk up battery life improvements, they are clearly very aware of this issue.

I've never got the impression that that Microsoft does care very much about this issue, in fact their kernel doesn't even sound like it gets much development in the core functions (it's all about fixing bugs and adding features).

This is exactly right. How many phone vendors besides Apple are shipping CPUs underclocked to 1.3 Ghz in their flagship phones?

Along these lines, Anand tested Windows on Mac hardware, but not also the other way around. Since OS X is so optimized for Mac hardware, this counterexample needs to be evaluated. I don't know... use a Dell and test OS X battery life.

It's not exactly a scientific test, but some measurements show "Hackintosh" laptops give 33% more battery life than Windows on the same laptop[1].

[1] http://www.mobilemag.com/2009/05/14/hackintosh-netbooks-expe...

The surface keyboards are horrible though.

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