Do mac laptops still have longer battery life than PC equivalents (now Intel versions of both are available)? Does OS X use less power than the various versions of Windows, or does it depend on what software is running? I find running Parallels on my apple laptop, to use Windows XP, drains the battery pretty quickly - probably due to running 2 operating systems on one machine.

With a quick search, i found a comparison of various Unix operating systems, and Windows XP - on the same hardware - here. It’s not that thorough an article - but interestingly Windows uses less power. I wouldn’t be surprised if OSX (Leopard) with all it’s fancy flying windows uses more than XP (SP2), but i’ve not really used Vista. XP can appear to work more quickly if you switch off all the visual effects, and probably uses less power without them. Some testing required, though not much time for that at the moment.

I’m sure someone out there will be comparing this soon, and maybe we’ll all be optimising our code to reduce power consumption in the future