OS X Mavericks' power saving magic


The power efficiency gains found in Intel's new Haswell CPUs should provide modest gains in battery life, and such gains were widely expected. Back in January, Intel claimed that the new Haswell CPUs featured the "largest generation-to-generation battery life increase in the history of Intel" and said that the chips were the first of its architectures designed "from the ground up" for Ultrabooks and tablets. The new chips run at lower clockspeeds and at lower wattages.

Less expected was the announcement of OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" and its own focus on mobile power usage. While Apple made a few comments during the keynote about the new technologies meant to enable longer battery life, more information appeared later in the day with the separate release of aCore Technology Overview (PDF) document that offers a high-level look at some of the Mavericks internals.


This is a good read that breaks down compressed memory, App Nap, and Timer Coalescing features in OS X Mavericks. Coupled with the energy savings in Intel's Haswell CPU 2013 Mac laptops should see a nice bump in battery life, perhaps even longer than what Apple announced with the MacBook Air. Even more interesting is features like App Nap and Compressed memory may make older systems even more responsive while saving battery power.