An interesting advantage of MacBooks over Windows laptops

dada_dave

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This is actually really interesting. Basically why do Windows laptops asleep sometimes just die and get super hot while Apple ones generally don’t?

It ties into Apple’s vertical integration and lower power chips - although not completely absent as a problem on Macs it is mitigable unlike on most modern Windows laptops. Basically OEMs fail to implement all possible sleep states in their firmware, power hungry Intel chips wake for network access and drain battery life, and Windows disabled the ability to toggle that off because of the first issue. On Macs, just disable wake for network access and it’s good to go (though if you don’t, you can still run into this issue).

Bottom line: Linus says he can’t recommend a Windows laptop over a MacBook until this fixed.
 

throAU

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This has been a thing since windows 95. Microsoft can’t get sleeping working properly because drivers are done by the OEM, many of which farm that task out to the cheapest coders they can get.

Stuff like the small dollar items, which is why Bluetooth on windows universally sucks. Low profit parts get no money or effort spent on drivers.

Apple owning the entire stack means they can subsidise development of the smaller items with the rest of the device.

I don’t see Microsoft ever getting this fixed until they make driver testing more stringent.

You would think that maybe buying Microsoft hardware may help but it doesn’t. Because they don’t even write the drivers for their own device. It’s just a collection of parts with the same crap driver development.

I had a surface pro 3 that would be on 5% battery on Monday morning after being on the dock idle all weekend. Why? Dock firmware crashed at some point and it stopped charging. Probably on the Saturday.

Surface pro 4. Constant display driver crash. Microsoft blamed intel. Intel blamed Microsoft. No resolution for over 6 months.
 
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throAU

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As above given it’s been a thing since windows 95 I won’t hold my breath. Linux has had better wake from sleep than windows for decades at this point.

Maybe that’s the long term way forward. Just containerise win32/win64 api to run on top of the Linux kernel and make use of the superior driver support developed for free.
 
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