> Edit: AFAICT a lot of the battery life on a MacBook comes from the way OS X works - friends who use Bootcamp tell me it significantly reduces their battery time.

It's not just OSX—even using Safari instead of Chrome or Firefox adds over an hour to my battery life (god knows there's no other reason to use it). As of ~1 year ago when I worked somewhere that required me to use lots of tablets from both Apple and a variety of top Android manufacturers on a regular basis, battery life (especially idle battery life) on the Apple devices was borderline miraculous while the Android devices seemed to treat the battery like an infinite resource—the difference was not subtle.

I'd love a world in which it seems like any company other than Apple holds battery life as a high priority. My observation has been that we do not live in that world. They're the only hardware manufacturer I've seen that gives more-or-less honest battery life estimates in their marketing, and those figures are not low. It'd be really, really hard for me to jump ship solely for that reason.

> I think the OP has missed the Microsoft "Signature" edition products. They're a clean Windows 10 image

Yeah that sounds interesting. Looks like they have Lenovo hardware too. I'll check them out.

They do. I bought a Lenovo from the Microsoft store. No crapware at all (well, you can debate about some of the driver update software both from Lenovo and Intel, but definitely no added root certificates and such).

If Windows gets bad battery life on MacBooks then that's an indictment of Apple's windows drivers.

Just one poorly written driver can ruin your battery life, and that's a place where the MS "hardware manufacturers write the drivers for their hardware" model really falls down - there are Windows laptops where you can nearly double the battery life by fixing the touchpad driver, or the webcam driver, or, .... In theory a manufacturer/integrator should be auditing the drivers they're shipping and making sure the whole thing works together. Maybe the signature edition programme will improve this.

On Windows, is there any way to tell if one driver in particular is behaving badly?

There are tools, I remember reading a blog post that did an analysis. I don't know the details though.

That's lame they don't sell those there. I got a 9350 myself and loaded Ubuntu onto it and it's been fantastic. What do they limit you to? Just the basic XPS 13 models?

Also, what if someone in the US bought one and had it shipped to Australia? Is that doable?

I shouldn't complain too much, the 8GB / 256GB version is the highest they offer here. It's just that I'd like to run VMs on the thing and 16GB of RAM is needed.

My other constraint is weight, for $REASONS - I don't really want something >1.5KG.

Depending on how many rules you'd like to break I'd be likely to be charged 10% GST on import when it got to Australian Customs.

Correct, using OSX I still get 7-8hrs battery life from a 2 year old MBP.

Windows 10 via dual-boot empties the battery in around 3hrs.