Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple: Get rid of battery bar and just do percent!
- Thread starter Black Magic
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
A Tesla or Nissan Leaf can't do it accurately, for the same reasons a phone can't. You simply cannot predict what usage is going to take place going forward. This isn't a thermostat which reacts to regular patterns.
Pretty defeatist. Past experience is always usable as a predictor of future behavior. It's only a problem until somebody else solves it and proves it can be done. Then suddenly the competition figure it out and deliver their own implementation. It just takes thinking out of the box but you're suggesting Apple is not capable of that.
Seems like plenty of people are just fine with and even like seeing remaining percentage of battery life and don't have any particular misunderstandings or fears of it. Not sure what "based on people" means as it doesn't seem to say anything in this context.
Yes, but to display on the corner all the different time of juice for web browsing, phone calls, video viewing, gaming, standby time would obviously not fit.
Even in a drop down view it wouldn't make sense to put something like that. We use our devices differently throughout the day by using a little of everything on that list.
So you want the phone to do even more work, constantly, just to show you a time that will always fluctuate based on what you’re doing? And you don’t think that would affect the battery life?
[doublepost=1512423889][/doublepost]
Percentage still makes a difference.
For example, the difference between 5% and 1% is huge.
At 5%, you know you can still do a few more things on your phone, like make a call, look something up, or finish whatever you were doing. Or at least feel comfortable that it will most likely remain on until you can get to a charger.
Meanwhile, at 1%, your phone could turn off any second, whether in use or on standby, and you really have absolutely no idea when.
You don’t get these tidbits of knowledge just from a little red sliver in a battery icon. Now people will chime in and say, “you can just look in Control Center!” Well, yes. Then you’re agreeing that seeing the percentage can be useful.
Long story short: there should be an option to choose our preference. Anyone who argues against having that option is really drinking the Kool-Aid hard, because if you don’t want to see it then you’d just not enable the option. Just like it has been for years.
Last edited:
Absolutely agreed, for all the reasons stated- an experienced user can both predict, and proactively adjust their use, as needed to meet a usage goal, so long as they know the actual charge state (as long as you don't have a wonky problem like that of some iPhone 6 Plus units where the thing would suddenly die with 65% battery)
Explain.
[doublepost=1512430134][/doublepost]
This would be insignificant relative to all the other memory sucking things Apple will add to iOS 12.
While I’m surprised how little I find myself looking st the actual percent (maybe because doing so is completely annoying), I’d love to just have a number. For the limited space that the area has I am surprised they chose to fill it with a large battery icon.
[doublepost=1512671850][/doublepost]
[doublepost=1512671850][/doublepost]
Nothing really wrong with it. Just an added step that hasn’t ever been necessary in the last decade of iOS use.
Not that I care for time remaining, but they would do it the same way a GPS can predict your arrival time. If your usage goes up (for GPS, if you speed up) the time remaining decreases in real time. As your usage goes down (for GPS, if you slow down or hit traffic) the time remaining increases. It recalculates and adjust on the fly.
I miss the %, because there is no quick way for me to tell if my phone is actually at 100% when I pick it up off the charger. When I put it down on the wireless charger it will say the % below the over-sized green battery symbol.
Others have said you can check the % under the battery widget. This is true, and a workaround that does work, but it is an extra step.
The current battery symbol is so small, it actually hard to tell if you have 90% or if you are at 100%...
Give the option to put a number inside of the battery icon. Let the user choose. Battery percentage wasn’t always an option, but Apple gave us the choice to enable it in iOS 3.
In 2017, as evidenced by this thread, there is the same need to implement a choice.
In 2017, as evidenced by this thread, there is the same need to implement a choice.
It's easy to see that they couldn't fit both the graphic and the percent in there along with the cellular and WiFI connectivity indicators. It's a bit odd that we can't choose whether percent is displayed instead of the graphic, but I bet that will come with a future update.
Better yet: Make all of the data displayed left and right of the notch behave like Apple Watch complications and let us customize each one to display what we want. I don't usually pay attention to the cellular and WiFi indicators unless I'm having connectivity issues, so perhaps I would rather go to the control panel to check those and instead display battery graphic + percentage and today's date?
Better yet: Make all of the data displayed left and right of the notch behave like Apple Watch complications and let us customize each one to display what we want. I don't usually pay attention to the cellular and WiFi indicators unless I'm having connectivity issues, so perhaps I would rather go to the control panel to check those and instead display battery graphic + percentage and today's date?
Future update now that we discussed it perhaps? We are on iOS 11 and they haven't thought of it yet?
I thought I’d really miss having the percentage at a glance, but I’ve gotten used to not having it there. Besides, it’s really easy to do just a slight pull-down of the right “ear” to reveal the percentage.
O
Originally I was pissed that you just had the icon, but I've come to agree that seeing the percentage made me paranoid. That being said, I do think we should have a choice.
GPS has much more going for it as far as known quantities. Speed limits and traffic on routes probably account for 95% of the time estimate. Phone usage is much more random. You can be on standby waiting for a call all day, but at the end of the day you decide to use Waze to drive home. Phones can't predict what you'll do with it, and they have a big disparity in the battery usage of different activities. GPS time estimates is a much simpler formula.
I don't obsess over battery, especially now that the battery has zero degradation. But in 9 months, on a heavy usage day, I'll want to know if I can make it to the next charge or not. Maybe have the meter switch over to numbers below 40%? That might be the smartest thing I've said in my life.
While I can live with the battery percentage being hidden and going into the control center. I do have one problem and that would be no alerts when you're at 5/10/15%, I have had my iPhone X die on me because I didn't realize it was at 1%
Maybe a jingle of haptic/vibration feedback when you reach 10%?
Maybe a jingle of haptic/vibration feedback when you reach 10%?
It hasn’t been that long. Development pipelines are not as agile or reactive as everyone would like. Ask for something now and if you’re lucky you’ll get it it about 4 months to a year later. That’s because there are many things in the pipeline and they have to be prioritized.
I like what Microsoft has been doing with office365. You can vote for new features and they will email you when status changes to in development or in production.
All it has to do is calculate based off of current usage. It really is much more simple then you make it out to be. If you are on the phone and look at it, it will tell you how long you have if you keep talking on the phone until it is dead. As soon as you hang up, that time remaining increases based off of the now current usage (not on the phone, but still in non-standby mode). Once it goes into standby, this can be recalculated based off of low power mode.
I could easily program this in windows, All it has to do is calculate based off of current voltage usage, as it goes up, the time remaining is decreased, as it goes down, time remaining is increased. I would need to know the minimum voltage of the battery when the device shuts off. I am not an iOS programmer, so I would have no idea how to do this in iOS, but it would be easy enough to do in windows.
Now, I see no real need for this, but wouldn't hate it if they implemented it with an on/off switch. Just like numeric % of battery remaining, love it or hate it, there are people who want it back, and if it is implemented like it was in the past (on/off switch), no one is forced either way.
Would that kind of information be useful though and, more so, perhaps even just be misleading and more of nuisance than anything else?
You look at the home screen and see you have X time left, then as soon as you launch an app now it's Y time left, as you use the app a bit now it's Z time left, as you perhaps move through locations (let's say you are commuting) the time changes again every minute or so as your signal changes, as soon as you close an app it changes once again, if you go into Notification Center and look at your widgets for a moment it changes yet again based on that usage. Not sure anyone would really get anything useful from it with it all constantly going up and down (sometimes by not too much but often enough by enough to be different).