Mavericks introduced a lot of tangible under the hood improvements that perhaps you missed, Ars did a thorough review, perhaps start with how the OS was changed to improve energy consumption: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/12/#energy-sa...
Yes, linux geeks can school Apple on systems engineering when they can deliver laptops with a better battery life than Macs get. As for this latest release, what, adding a new systems programming language and a whole new graphics API isn't enough?
At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in, unlike the bloody Fedora 19 box that I use at work. And don't get me started on that second graphics card that the system can't figure out how to use! And the wifi Just Works(tm), unlike the Ubuntu laptop that I had before that.
Also, I had issues with sound going out and not returning until after a reboot on OS X. This drove me nuts.
Thing is your points only apply to OS X if you run it on Apple hardware. If you get ubuntu certified hardware you will have no problem running ubuntu either. Ubuntu is going to run on more devices with less issues simply because the linux kernel is designed to target more hardware than the OS X kernel.
This is a fair point: Apple has carefully selected the hardware that OS X runs on. Most people interested in Linux expect it to support, without issue, whatever laptop happens to be lying around.
I had the sound issue as well. When I close my laptop lid with an headset plugged in (and especially if I unplug it before opening the lid), Mavericks totally looses track of audio and behave erratically.
I have been able to make sound work again by killing the coreaudiod process. it is very brutal, but it works.
> Also, I had issues with sound going out and not returning until after a reboot on OS X. This drove me nuts.
This one bothers me endlessly. I got my first Macbook in '09 and have had two others since, and every single one of them has had this problem. I just don't get it.
My 15" rMBP running Mavericks randomly reboots on occasion, and to this day still requires me to manually disable / enable WiFi almost every time I open the lid.
Meanwhile Homebrew is a poor substitute for aptitude and PPAs, multi-monitor support is relatively poor (xmonad excels here), and the Apple keyboard is missing a bunch of keys I use on a regular basis.
This. People sing to the heavens of how stable OSX is and how it just works. I've had as many if not more issues than with my Windows 7 Samsung laptop.
Wifi constantly needs manually disabling/enabling, Bluetooth Audio crashes are common, I average one full system crash per month, display settings reset themselves magically and Finder is infuriating. I should be keeping a log of all the issues I have.
Latest Macbook Pro here and have that same WIFI issue. I still have 5 year old Lenovo with windows 7 on it that is just as, if not more, stable than the Mac.
On Mac things like Alfred (probably will drop this for the new spotlight), better touch tool, some capabilities like ability to swap USB MIDI controllers without restarting OS are cool. Honestly though, performance wise there isn't that much difference between my Mac and Win Machines and being in programs full screen most of the day I notice much difference at all. The really flexible information moving things I've grown accustomed to on Win seem a bit crippled on Mac because of lack of a filesystem.
That's still awful, though. Why should I have to go to imore.com to fix an issue in my OS? This has been in OSX since launch and Apple hasn't fixed it. Mad.
Dell XPS Ultrabook with Kubuntu 14.04 here, without any patches or extra settings. 11W consumption with medium screen brightness, works for ~5 hours with normal browsing (occasional compiling)
Recognizes all monitors and projectors (even the ones Macs fail at) at my work place. The WiFi just works (TM).
You are not using a "Ubuntu laptop". As danford said, just pick a Ubuntu certified machine* and things will just work (TM). And, you will still have more choice than OSX ;)
Sorry, but 5 hours on an ultrabook is not competitive. Current Macbook Airs are rated for 12 hours with normal use, and third-party testing has found 10 to be realistic.
demallien is right. Nobody on the Linux side has done this kind of aggressive power engineering for consumer-oriented x86 hardware. Google might, for Chromebooks, but it's not clear how portable that will be to the rest of the ecosystem.
It just depends on the 'linux side of things' group your talking about. My T420s runs a full featured GNOME desktop on Arch at 5.5w idle, 7w browsing, 10w loaded. 136 watt hours total battery capacity with three batteries.
"Hours" is a really poor way to gauge these things, because while it may seem practically applicable , we're really comparing apples and oranges.
My T420 before my T420s had a battery run-time of 15 hours. I could fail to mention that it had a slice battery and an ultrabay on top of the primary battery and tell everyone that the particular model and OS ran for 15 hours straight, but that would be disingenuous. If I was a marketer I could run the processor at lower voltages, dim the screen unread-ably, turn WiFi off, etc etc until I got whatever numbers I wanted.
As i'm not a marketer, I also feel as if the claims people make about Apple's hardware being better at power management are also somewhat dishonest.
They are a company that has ultimate say in their hardware platform and software ecosystem. No other computer company locks down production that much in an effort to increase the individual experience of each consumer. That lock-down allows for an amount of control that would be unrealistic to expect from the FLOSS community, as they have little power or say in production and ultimately must code to support a wider range of people rather than a narrow set of known hardware packages that are available.
My point : optimizing narrowly for a single platform is much easier than the opposite; a more fair comparison of battery life would be watts-per-hour usage during a standardized testing/benchmarking suite of some sort, along with the watt hours of battery capacity(although historically handset manufacturers have sidestepped that issue by having the software recognize when it's being benchmarked..). "Hours of use" could be practical if it wasn't arbitrarily inflated or deflated by uncommon usage profile testing and specialty optimizations for the sake of marketing a bigger number.
It's not impossible to get good numbers out of a Linux build, it's just fairly difficult for someone unfamiliar with the system (and sometimes impossible without doing the work yourself with certain hardware stacks). There exists a whole subspecies of Linux users that are somewhat akin to hypermillers who turn this kind of dilemma into a game and compete for lowest wattage.
Apple states 9h for a contemporary 13" MBP. Mine (two weeks old) runs for 4h max, if I do any serious work on it. If I switch Wifi off an dim the screen, I can get 6-7h out of it.
The machine is dual boot as I'm using it to develop software that targets both OS X & Linux.
I run a Gentoo with all kernel- and other power saving features enabled, on a 2nd partition.
The time I get out of the battery on OS X vs Gentoo is pretty much the same.
What I do is "surf" (FF, mostly text/reading docs, flash blocked etc.) and code (I do a build roughly every 5-10mins that will probably touch 10 sources max).
Build environment matches except for compiler being used (gcc 4.1 on Linux, latest LLVM gcc frontend from XCode on OS X but I would think this is minor).
Bottom line for me: Linux is on par with OS X in terms of time you get out of a MBP, in my case specifically.
Caveat: I dunno ofc, how true this is, generally, if one ran something like a pre-configured Ubuntu kernel.
I used an Ubuntu certified desktop (well, laptop) and things did not just work (TM). It generally failed to recognise my second monitor unless I opened the system settings, then closed it. It also failed to recover from sleep on a regular basis and got terrible battery life. Needless to say, I ditched Ubuntu. I think it's junk, to be quite honest.
I'm using Crunchbang on that laptop now and it's mostly better.
> At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in, unlike the bloody Fedora 19 box that I use at work. And don't get me started on that second graphics card that the system can't figure out how to use! And the wifi Just Works(tm), unlike the Ubuntu laptop that I had before that.
For what it's worth my debian wheezy laptop detects second monitor just fine (and I am using awesome-wm) while my 2007 iMac randomly lose internet though it's connected to my routeur via wifi. So... data points.
> At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in
This is mostly a solved problem in linux these days. Macbooks have consistent and quality hardware. It's no surpised they work well. If you use a mainstream laptop or PC parts, it will 100% work with Linux. Using cheap noname parts or manufacturers with poor software support then you'll have issues.
For example, Macbooks + Fedora 19 work perfectly. So does the 3 Lenovos I tried and a Dell XPS.
> At least my Mac recognizes and uses a second monitor when I plug it in, unlike the bloody Fedora 19 box that I use at work. And don't get me started on that second graphics card that the system can't figure out how to use! And the wifi Just Works(tm), unlike the Ubuntu laptop that I had before that.
Yes, please, let me spend time fixing distro BS instead of, you know, working.
I don't remember any time when Wifi worked out-of-the-box in my previous Linux laptop. It worked if I did things manually (wpa-supplicant and stuff), the NM widget? Never worked and made things harder
Another issue: opening and closing the lid doesn't have a consistent result, and sometimes it just keeps the laptop running.
This is for the basic functionality, and sometimes even things that worked before stop working.
Older distros had to be more manually configured, but when that was done it was good to go, today it is even harder to shut down the non-working stuff.
So yeah, it's Mac for me from now on. Recovery from Time Machine needed some "Linux style hacking" once, but apart from that it's a breeze
My Thinkpad X1 Carbon draws something between 6W and 16W between idle and moderate use. I never measured it at full load. Perfectly acceptable, and way competitive with the equivalent Macbook Air, which draws 25W idle.
So, I guess, per your definition, that Linux geeks can school Apple today.
My 2010 MBP, which is obviously getting long in the tooth, saw its battery life double with the Mavericks upgrade. That alone made the transition worth while. Plus, there were a ton of small refinements that I got used to very quickly.
I didn't notice how quickly until I switched back to a Snow Leopard install I maintain for Final Cut Studio (don't get me started on FCP X). All of a sudden the old OS felt...outdated. Totally reliable, sure. But not quite as friendly.
One unexpected change is that Safari has become my favorite browser. Its integration with the OS and iOS, plus the integration of iOS and OS X gave it an edge that Chrome and FF can't match. Judging from what was revealed today, it's looks like that kind of seamless transition between devices is what we can expect a lot more of.
I think my Mac is a 2011, but I saw a similar thing when I upgraded to Mavericks. I've been pretty happy with it for the most part.
More recently I saw massive power savings by switching browsers. I love Chrome, I love its UI, I love its web devel tools. But even when I only have a few tabs open my Mac's fans just won't stop spinning. :( I kind of swapped back and forth between Safari and Firefox since then, but mostly settled on Firefox. I may give Safari another chance when I install Yosemite.
