Dave Winer’s MacBook battery life
Dave Winer likes to talk about how bad the battery life is on MacBooks. He's always looking for a power outlet.
Maybe if Dave's OPML.app was a Universal binary and wasn't generally a CPU hog, his battery would last longer. OPML is built for PowerPC only, therefore it has to be emulated by Rosetta, and therefore using more energy than it would if it was native.
See for yourself. Download his OPML Editor, and launch it. Also launch Activity Monitor so you can watch OPML's CPU usage. Do some simple stuff in OPML like Cmd-N to open a new outline. Watch the CPU usage...
OPML's ancestor, Frontier, was written back in the day of cooperative multitasking on the classic MacOS. Yes it was multithreaded but it was never very good at yielding the CPU. Any app that sucks CPU time on a laptop (Mac, Windows, Linux or otherwise) is going to drain the battery.
This isn't the MacBook's problem.
Update: Rosyna corrects me on Rosetta - it's a dynamic binary translator, not an emulator. Thanks! So it doesn't have as much runtime overhead as an emulator (over time). As she says, "A CPU hog is a CPU hog." Gotcha.
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I run exactly the same apps on both the netbook and the Mac.
That said it would be great if we had a universal binary.
Maybe you could try to be a little less personal about it. You know the app was released under the GPL in 2004, five years ago. If there’s no universal binary, it’s pretty unfair to blame me for it. But you’ve always like to blame me for all the ills of the world right?
You want to snipe at Apple for what you say is their flaw, yet your decision to use a power-hungry emulated application at all times is the cause of your problem with the MacBook. It doesn’t matter whether that application is associated with you or anyone else, but its elevates the irony when it is the app you distribute.
GPL or otherwise.
Is your netbook running Windows? OPML for Windows doesn’t need to be emulated.
If your netbook is running Mac OS X, the difference in battery life would then likely being attributable to the difference in processors – a low-power Atom processor vs a Core 2 Duo. Of course, in that case you could still have even better battery life by running a native app.
My netbook is running Windows XP.
I’m really amazed at how ornery you are!
Give it up Jim, no one cares what either of us thinks.
You can conserve power on your MacBook by turning off bluetooth and dimming the screen brightness a touch.
I see on your latest blog you’re using Firefox on your MacBook. I had to give up Firefox on the Mac after using it for years because it used so much CPU all the time! It was making the computer so hot I couldn’t use it on my lap. The fans ran all the time and that was so loud it annoyed me constantly.
I switched to Safari. I miss some of its features, especially “Re-open the last closed tab”, but at least now my computer doesn’t burn me and it’s quiet. And of course that means the battery lasts a lot longer too. It’s too bad that Firefox is so bad on the Mac, because I’d much rather use it than Safari.
One thing you can do if you really want to use Firefox is install the Flashblock add-on. Flash is the worst offender for CPU usage in the browser, it could be it’s the cause of most of the CPU usage. With Flashblock, embedded Flash requires a click to be loaded into a web page.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433
Now that I use Safari I use ClickToFlash which does the same thing.
http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
Another Firefox add-on I installed before giving up on Firefox was TooManyTabs. If you have a lot of tabs open in Firefox, it uses a lot of CPU and memory (on all platforms). TooManyTabs lets you keep the tabs visible but doesn’t keep the pages loaded.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9429
Comparing a netbook to a notebook is an apples-to-oranges comparison (no pun intended). Netbooks have low-power components like Atom processors and weak integrated graphics. They’re designed to use much less power, and don’t run nearly as fast. You might not notice the performance difference if you’re just browsing and editing. Netbooks screens are smaller, not as bright, and thus don’t require as much power. So of course your netbook has better battery life.
Saying a MacBook has bad battery life because it doesn’t keep up with your netbook is just silly. It’s like complaining how much gas your SUV guzzled driving to LA compared to your Mini cooper. All I’m saying is if you want to drive your SUV and save some bucks, keep the speed down and don’t run the AC constantly.