It’s definitely the OS. Battery life on a Macbook Pro in Windows via Boot Camp tanks.

One could make the argument that substandard drivers for the Apple hardware is to blame here, so perhaps battery benchmarks on a Hackintosh vs the same hardware in Windows would settle the debate, but that's some tinfoil hat shit… Apple has been vocal about battery life as a top priority for the company going all the way back to the PowerPC/Intel switch.

I'm not so sure it's the OS. The new Pixel has even better battery life than the latest Macbooks, in a similar form factor, and it's all Linux underneath the hood. IMO it's more of a commitment to tweaking whatever OS you have, not necessarily to writing the whole thing.

I think we're saying the same thing just a little differently.

Apple didn't write Darwin from scratch, after all.

Maybe someone using Linux on Mac could tell us about the battery life they get.

I use XPS-13 (4k display version), and certainly don't get the battery life promised by Dell.

Ha! Sitting here with 15.10 running Gnome 3 on a 2013 Macbook Pro Retina. The battery life is noticeably worse than under OS X. I'd say I get about 2.5-3 hours of out it, unless I drop the screen brightness all the way down. But then how do I appreciate the beautiful screen? :)

Same here with Mint 17 on a 2010 MBP. The headphone jack lights up red and won't turn off. Weird...