TiBook 15" Battery Vs Dell Inspiron i8500

texanpenguin

texanpenguin

Registered Penguin
My friend bought a Dell Inspiron laptop mid-last year. It's a Pentium 4M 2.4GHz, with 512MB RAM and an incredible WUXGA+ screen (which runs at a res of 1680 x 1050px) under Windows XP Professional.

This computer came with two batteries, and both were capable of sustaining that beast for 6 hours on normal consumption, with the processor operating intermittently, and around 2 to 2.5 hours battery when using full processor power and lots of processor-intensive things such as compiling of programs.


So why is it that my brand new (four or five weeks old) PowerBook G4 1GHz, which also has 512MB of RAM and a much lower screen resolution (1280 x 854px) under OS X chews through the batteries? I can tend to rely on about three hours worth of battery at normal use, and have used the whole battery in under 1.5 hours before (during intensive compiling and Wi-Fi use and the like)...


I'm not complaining - I love my PowerBook, and if I owned a Dell Inspiron Laptop the only thing that would stop me from trading it in for a PowerBook is the screen-res, but I just want to know what it is that Dell has done with their batteries that allow them to go for so long, even though they're powering 453,280 more pixels, with a hotter (and thus more power-intensive) processor?

I don't want a fix so much as an explanation - I've been trying to work out where the weak link is for the Mac in terms of battery consumption. Am I right when I say I'm leaning toward OSX, particularly Quartz/Q.Extreme...
 
First of all I believe the dell batteries are a lot bigger than those of the powerbooks. Take a look at your slim powerbook and compare it to the fat dell. On the other hand the powerbook screen is much brighter than the dell. We have some slightly older inspirons here as well which are using such high resolutions up to 1600x...
and my tibooks screen is A LOT brighter. The amount of pixels doesn't influence the battery consumption as much as the brighter backlight.
 
Guess you guys never had to argue with ppl from the darkside about the - at the first sight - week features of your wonderful mac :) ;)
Thanks for the praise!
 
Heh, lately I've been really noticing how nice the screen really is.

Why, oh why can't Apple release nice super-high res displays with THAT backlight?

I mean, Exposé is great, and it minimises the pain of finding those other windows, but I want to be able to see a whole page of data at once. TWO even.

That's what I want.

But the Mac is good too :).
 
When you increase the resolution, you also increase the number of transistors (Thin Film Transistor). The more transistors you have, the higher your resolution, but the lower the backlight transparency. Thus such screens get darker. So, one might criticize my previous arguement saying that the backlight of the dell and mac are the same but because of the higher amount of transistors, the dell screen looks less bright. I am not sure about this, but I find apples the 15inch resolution just perfect. It's big enough for any mobile task. Once you think of it as some desktop replacement, you should pick a second screen..
 
texanpenguin said:
This computer came with two batteries, and both were capable of sustaining that beast for 6 hours on normal consumption, with the processor operating intermittently, and around 2 to 2.5 hours battery when using full processor power and lots of processor-intensive things such as compiling of programs.
Click to expand...

I am a bit confused is he getting 6 hours using both batteries at the same time, right? I had a dell 8200 until recently with only one battery and I was lucky to get 1.5-2 hours out of it. Six hours on two batteries if you are really gentile with it maybe but not a total of 12...

So assume that it is 6 for both batteries. If you look on Dell's website you will see that the Inspiron batteries are 66 WHr batteries which basically describes how much energy they can hold. So if he runs two of them his laptop has 132 WHr of juice. If that lasts for 6 hours he is burning 22 W of energy an hour, in the 2 hour case he is burning 66 W per hour.

Now Apple lists the 15 inch Albook's battery at 46 WH so when it lasts 3 hours you are burning about 15 Watts and hour and if it only lasts 1.5 hours then you are burning about 30 Watts an hour. So the Powerbook is much more efficient and is able to get by with a smaller battery. If they tripled its size so you could fit two honking Dell batteries inside then it would last for more than 7 hours normally and under your worst case use pattern it would still last for 3.5 - 4 hours which is almost double what the Dell lasts.

One interesting point is that TiBooks have 61 WHr batteries and I do not remember there being a big drop in lifetime when the AL came out so I assume that they get about the same runtime. That means that on the whole Apple has made the machines that much more efficient.

-Eric
 
The office laptop (Dell Inspiron 8100) only gets 2 hours out of it's single battery if we're lucky, under light use. It's a 4600MaH version...the original 3800MaH version was very sad...maybe an hour max <G>.

Definitely sounds like it's running on both batteries...
 
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