Haswell Has Arrived, So Where’s The Battery Life In Windows Devices?

The Register’s Neil McAllister notes that Microsoft’s Surface Pro 2 tablet PCs arrive Today, bringing various improvements over the first-generation models. But one area where the new tablets still don’t wow is battery life – and he observes that mediocre battery life is a disturbing trend for Windows devices in general.

McAllister cites hacker Jeff Atwood and AnandTech’s Anand Lal Shimpi determining that the Surface Pro 2 averages around 6.68 hours of battery life while browsing the web – a 41.5 percent improvement on the original Surface Pro’s 4.72 hours, but 29.5 per cent less battery life than Apple’s iPad 4 and 45.3 per cent less than Google’s Nexus 7.

He acknowledges that he Surface Pro 2 sports a full Intel PC with a quad-core, 1.7GHz Core i7 processor, while both the iPad and the Nexus 7 are based on power-sipping ARM chips, so of course the Surface will have shorter battery life.

However, he also notes that it so happens that Microsoft has put together some ARM-based tablets, too, and you’d think they’d offer markedly better battery life. But no – the original Surface RT offered web-browsing battery life of 6.81 hours just a hair over what the Surface Pro 2 can achieve today, and even the latest Surface 2 can only do 8.07 hours, which is still 14.9 per cent worse than the iPad 4 and 34 per cent worse than the 2013 Nexus 7.

Meanwhile, in AnandTech’s tests, the 13-inch 2013 MacBook Air (with roughly equivalent power to the Microsoft Surface Pro 2) scored a web browsing battery life of 14.28 hours, even longer than Apple’s 12 hour claim, and a whopping 113.8 per cent more than the Surface Pro 2, and even the 11-inch MacBook Air model, with its 38Wh battery (the Pro 2 has 42 Wh capacity), lasted 66 per cent longer than the Surface Pro 2.

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