Who's your Daddy MacBook Pro? The ThinkPad T61p
I've been hearing for months and months how great the Apple MacBook Pro is at suspending and resuming from sleep, and how Windows Vista sucks. Don't believe it. My Lenovo ThinkPad T61p thumped the MacBook Pro handily in my testing yesterday afternoon.
Just like my previous testing, I decided to time a series of tests that seem pretty real world to me. This time around I didn't test Windows XP. I tested the Apple MacBook Pro and OS X against the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p with Windows Vista x64 SP1. For this round, I decided to do nothing but sleep/resume testing. I tested the time it took to sleep by closing the lid with and without applications running. Resume times were tested by opening the lid with and without applications running. I also tested sleep/resume times with the lid open.
Both machines are set to sleep if the lid closes. No password was needed on resume. The ThinkPad was set so that power button presses put the machine to sleep.
Who owned who?
I never expected the results I saw yesterday. I was a little worried about it because of the great Apple hype machine. But man, the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p obliterated the MacBook Pro in some of the tests. I'll get to the actual data points in a moment.
Before I did the testing, I asked our internal Lenovo discussion alias for advice on what I should be using in terms of drivers and software before the testing. I was being pretty cocky about it, but as usual our dedicated Lenovo engineer offered up what turned out to be great advice. I updated the BIOS on my ThinkPad, and also updated the system interface, wireless, power management, and sata disk drivers. In short, my 64 bit machine is performing extremely well from a power management perspective. All of the drivers came from the public download area. I reset the Windows Vista Power profiles to default settings and set my machine on the Power Saver.
OS Only
With no applications running other than the operating system, the ThinkPad T61p took on average 13.5 seconds to fully sleep. The MacBook Pro took on average 27.6 seconds to full sleep with no apps running. With no applications running, the ThinkPad T61p took 7.8 seconds to resume. The MacBook Pro took 3.2 seconds to resume.
When I added applications to the mix, things changed pretty drastically. I didn't fire a lot of applications up, but I did make sure to run Outlook 2007 and IE7 on Windows Vista. On the Mac, I had Safari and Entourage 2008 running. Both of the email clients were fully synced prior to testing.
Running Applications
With the applications running, the ThinkPad T61p took only slightly more time to sleep, but the MacBook Pro took a pretty big time hit. The T61p took on average 15.5 seconds to sleep. The MacBook Pro nearly doubled it's time to 47.4 seconds on average to sleep.
Here's the strange part. With the applications running, the T61p resumed from sleep more quickly than if no apps were running. Don't ask me why. Strange. It took on average 3.7 seconds to resume. The MacBook Pro also improved with applications running and averaged 2.75 seconds.
Summary
The results weren't what I expected. I fully expected the MacBook Pro and OS X to dominate the ThinkPad T61p and Windows Vista. That didn't turn out to be the case as the Lenovo ThinkPad did very well on all of the suspend timings, and was right there with the MacBook Pro on resumes. Congrats to the Lenovo and Windows teams. You rock.
Like I mentioned in the previous round of file copy tests, the differences weren't drastic. Even if we are looking at the extremes for putting one of these machines to sleep, there was still only a 30 second difference. The gap on resume times was much smaller and frankly, both machines wake up and display a screen near instantly. I was also impressed at how quickly the network was available and in use by the email clients.
You might be wondering if I did any special tweaking of the ThinkPad. Nope. The Thinkpad T61p is running the retail version of Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and all of the drivers or system software came from either the Lenovo download area, or the update.microsoft.com servers. Now granted this is not the OEM image Lenovo ships, but it is basically a stock Windows Vista x64 system.
The next round of tests I have planned will be more subjective. I'm going to describe my likes/dislikes of OS X, Windows Vista and SUSE 10. I plan to look first at the graphical interface in each OS, then probably the apps that ship with the OS. I'm also thinking about doing a comparison of Apple Final Cut and Sony Vegas on these two machines with my HD video camera.
To be continued...
