As for power consumption, that one is obvious - the discrete graphic card is drawing power all the time, while in OSX it's off when not used. It should be possible to turn it off in Linux, but that's an area I don't have experience in. And even here you might need the 3.6 kernel.
]]>Just to give a little more information on the graphics problem. I can boot fine with KMS enabled for i915 and I see all the tty boot information fine and can use the tty consoles fine, but when I startx with the intel driver it looks like it is going to start fine for a second and then tty7 is just blank/black. I can go back to other tty's and when I look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log there are no errors that I can see. From the log it appears that the driver loaded fine but tty7 is just blank/black.
]]>Thanks
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