Hey, remember how in the recent article on boosting battery life on Windows laptops I mentioned how power efficient Apple laptops were? And how one of the factors playing into that was the following:
The OS is bespoke. That means, MacOS runs only on Apple devices and therefore has less overhead compared to multi-platform operating systems like Windows (x86, ARM) or Linux (x86, ARM, MIPS, RISC-V and more)
Well, about that...
Apparently, Apple decided that battery life on their machines was not a priority, and more overhead is better! That includes phones and tablets, BTW, since these also received the dreaded iOS 26 update. You know, the "Liquid Glass" one.
The one, which is absolutely nothing like Windows Vista. Not at all. And stop comparing the two!
Naturally, users were pleased with the new design direction, better UI element readability, and highly praised the decision.
In a hilarious development, seems like there are actually even more similarities between macOS Tahoe and Windows Vista in yet another metric — battery life.
Beauty Demands Power
Those who back in the day purchased PC laptops with Microsoft Windows Vista preinstalled, or upgraded to Vista on their existing PC hardware were quick to notice that having to cope with the increased CPU and RAM requirements was not the only outcome of using the new OS. It was power-hungry. All of those transparency effects had a hidden computational cost, which over hours of use would compound into a noticeable reduction of battery life off a single charge.
Imagine upgrading to get a degraded experience. Preposterous!
Apple folk used to laugh at PC crowd back then, and rightfully so. But the turns have tabled.
Now Apple users will get to experience the 15-20% battery life reduction after updating to the latest and greatest Apple OS on their devices.
"Why Do You Care?"
Here's why I chose to bring this up:
The fact that all Apple macs that got updated to macOS Tahoe automatically lost 15-20% of their battery life, makes the battery runtime of my Windows 10 Lenovo 14ACN6 that much more impressive, seemingly out of nowhere, now that the main competitor has decided to shoot itself in the foot. Basically, what Apple did to their user-base with Tahoe is what Microsoft did to the PC users with Windows 11. Now everyone is equally miserable!
Thanks Apple!
(I know that this is a full screen video playback test, and battery life difference probably wouldn't be as drastic in this special case, but you know what I mean. Feel free to do your own benchmarks before and after updating to macOS Tahoe)
I for one welcome the changes in macOS Tahoe and agree with Apple: their M-chips were way too good for their own sake, and needed to be dialed back a notch.
Oh wait... Macs and iPhones already have notches... Uhm...
Oh, I know! — Apple users have had too much free fun with their excessively cool and powerful, energy-efficient machines. All of these perks need to be scaled back, so that one day Apple could re-introduce them as improvements, through incredible software updates or as new paid subscriptions. In the name of progress!
Sounds like a great business plan.
Think different.