Some of the big PC vendors have started catching up. I just bought an HP Envy for my father in law, and the hardware is pretty solid, and it had some features I really like(256GB ssd and 1TB hybrid drive, 16gb ram stock, nice display). It is really snappy, and despite his being non technical and wary of moving from Windows 7 to 10, he got on with it really quickly.
I think there is another issue with PC battery life here. Nothing heats up/drains my macbook pro's battery life quicker than windows 10. I have tried various power settings, but nothing ever quite "fixes" it. I have had to do the following "tweaks" to improve battery performance of Windows 10:
1)Disable Cortana(at least as much as you are able to)
2)remove this "phone companion" app that seems to reinstall with every new update
3)adjust power management which noticeably slows performance and or annoyingly shuts down the screen.
4)randomly go in and kill rogue battery robbing processes
Mac OS seems to seamlessly handle power management regardless of what Im doing- including multitrack audio recording/processing. I never hear the fan while running OSX only. But without fail my laptop heats up and the fan starts cranking while I have Windows running. I am getting closer to not ever needing to run windows, but I still do some .NET work and work with Sql Server. For me, its a huge turn off to hear a laptop constantly fighting to stay cool. In fact this is the major flaw I saw with the HP laptop I got my father in law. It would get hot and crank the fan. In my anecdotal opinion, windows is a poor laptop OS, and I don't see how there could be a better pc/laptop/tablet until Microsoft figures out how to manage power. I don't have a use case for Linux, so things could be better there, but Linux is still relegated to niche users for the most part in laptops.
I think there is another issue with PC battery life here. Nothing heats up/drains my macbook pro's battery life quicker than windows 10. I have tried various power settings, but nothing ever quite "fixes" it. I have had to do the following "tweaks" to improve battery performance of Windows 10: 1)Disable Cortana(at least as much as you are able to) 2)remove this "phone companion" app that seems to reinstall with every new update 3)adjust power management which noticeably slows performance and or annoyingly shuts down the screen. 4)randomly go in and kill rogue battery robbing processes
Mac OS seems to seamlessly handle power management regardless of what Im doing- including multitrack audio recording/processing. I never hear the fan while running OSX only. But without fail my laptop heats up and the fan starts cranking while I have Windows running. I am getting closer to not ever needing to run windows, but I still do some .NET work and work with Sql Server. For me, its a huge turn off to hear a laptop constantly fighting to stay cool. In fact this is the major flaw I saw with the HP laptop I got my father in law. It would get hot and crank the fan. In my anecdotal opinion, windows is a poor laptop OS, and I don't see how there could be a better pc/laptop/tablet until Microsoft figures out how to manage power. I don't have a use case for Linux, so things could be better there, but Linux is still relegated to niche users for the most part in laptops.