A number of non-Apple netbook users that have installed Mac OS X on their systems are reporting that the recent update to 10.5.7 for Leopard has brought significant improvements to the diminutive mobile computers. "A bunch of people running a hackintoshed Dell Mini 9 or MSI Wind are reporting an extra hour of battery life with 10.5.7 over 10.5.6," a developer told Ars.

This is corroborated by a user at MSI Wind forums, who says he is seeing a full five hours from a six-cell battery with the update—a 33 percent improvement over the 3:45 he was able to get out of 10.5.6. "I can verify this to be true," he wrote. I've fully charged and used it till it went dead twice now."

Currently, there appears to be no known cause of the improvement, as AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext is generally disabled on hackintoshed netbooks to eliminate crashing associated with that kernel extension. While the improvement could be due to overall optimizations in the OS, no one in Ars Orbiting HQ has noticed any appreciable improvement in battery life with our current Apple laptops.

Since the phenomenon appears to be limited to Atom-based netbooks (as far as we can tell), this could be an indicator that Apple may yet have a product that's smaller than a notebook but bigger than an iPhone up its sleeve. "When I look at what's being sold in the netbook space today, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens," Apple COO Tim Cook told analysts last month. That doesn't preclude Apple from introducing something to compete with netbooks, but you can expect anything that Apple might unveil in this space to address those issues.