Why better Mac battery life is a big deal for Apple
For nearly three decades, the personal computer market has been all about more: more speed, more RAM, more pixels, more features. And sure enough, when Apple introduced OS X Mavericks at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the company highlighted plenty of the operating system’s new capabilities, such as better support for multiple displays and iCloud Keychain.
The keystone of Apple’s tenth release of OS X, however, is firmly positioned in the less category—specifically, a dramatic reduction in power consumption, achieved through all sorts of cool software tricks, such as exerting more control over the way apps run to increase the time CPUs spend idle, throttling down apps that are not being actively used, and even compressing memory to reduce swap disk access. According to the company, these changes could boost the average MacBook’s battery life by a factor of 50 percent; coupled with the recent introduction of Intel’s new low-power Haswell chipset, such improvements could easily mean going an entire day—or more—without having to plug in.
Despite representing a radical departure from the way computers and operating systems are marketed, this newfound fondness for saving electricity makes a lot of strategic sense for Apple.
Laptops on top
Putting so much emphasis on battery life may seem like an odd choice, considering that OS X runs both on portable computers and on machines that usually call a desk home, but it’s an obvious one if you consider that Apple laptops have outsold their desktop counterparts for some time. After all, as early as 2010, nearly three-quarters of all Macs the company sold were MacBooks.
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