The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

Okay, it didn't eat my battery. But it appears to be devouring power from helpless Powerbooks and iBooks at an unholy rate. Just take a look at this XLR8 Your Mac page, for example.

There are two schools of thought on the problem. First, that running Jaguar does not run your battery down faster, but Jaguar may mis-report battery power levels so that it seems like it is running down the battery faster. Second, that Jaguar eats batteries faster than the Cookie Monster could take down a case of sandies.

Two factors weigh in favor of the Cookie Monster theory. Jaguar relies on disk-caching much more than OS9 and earlier versions of OS X (and there ain't nothing gonna run down your battery faster than keeping that hard drive spinning) and also, Quartz Extreme drives the video card harder, using more power.

So what shall we make of those rare claims that Jaguar improved battery life? I can't help but wonder how much some people are relying on reports from the Power Manager, which has been shown to be completely wonky in OS X.

Apple has yet to send me my Jaguar upgrade, so performing my own tests is not an option. I usually run OS 9 on my Powerbook because every version of OS X that I have tried seems to cut my battery time in half. If OS X 10.2 further reduces battery life then I don't see that policy changing soon.