Apple Says Latest macOS Sierra Update 10.12.2 Does Not Improve MacBook Pro Battery Life

[MarsViolet]

What is sad is that Photos isn't even their worst application. iTunes and Apple Music are even worse - and that is saying a lot.

True. But I hate Photos more because Apple killed Aperture for it, and Aperture was an actual world-class application sadly ignored and neglected and finally discontinued by the brain-dead peddlers of wristwatches that Apple has become.

I won’t go near Apple Music.

 

[Nilhum]

Best software?

Like Pages? The Mail App for the Mac? Like Notes?

Other than Final Cut, what is Apple making that is superior to software that other companies have made? Pages, Keynotes, and Numbers are inferior to Office. Google Docs and related are a better free alternative.

Windows 10 currently is very stable and currently my Windows 10 computers gives me less problems than my 2016 Macbook Pro did.

 

[MarsViolet]

Best software?

Like Pages? The Mail App for the Mac? Like Notes?

Other than Final Cut, what is Apple making that is superior to software that other companies have made? Pages, Keynotes, and Numbers are inferior to Office. Google Docs and related are a better free alternative.

Windows 10 currently is very stable and currently my Windows 10 computers gives me less problems than my 2016 Macbook Pro did.

I would argue that the gutted version of Pages, Mail (provided you don't use a Gmail account with it), and Notes are actually excellent basic apps. For doing simple everyday stuff they're close to being perfect. When I think of bad Apple software I think of clumsy junk like Photos, iTunes, the Finder, and iMovie which make doing even simple things harder and more annoying than they should be.

And Keynote is magnitudes better than PowerPoint, even if Numbers falls on its face compared to Excel. And of course nothing beats Word if what you need is Word, but the truth is that most people don't need Word. All they need is Pages.

 

[jk76]

You all should know that Apple never confirmed that there was a battery issue at all. Apple said it was the missing calculation of the indicator software, which was removed in macOS 10.12.2.

Since there was no battery issue at all, there was no room to improve it, right?

I definitely experienced a dramatic decrease in the amperage reading in System information view for several kinds of usage scenarios. When earlier getting wattage down to 7 watts was a real stretch, now seeing even under 3 watts on minimum display brightness (display is really a major energy hog at those levels) is completely achievable, although not necessarily a typical workload.

There may be multiple different mechanisms which have improved the situation despite Apple would claim they haven't worked on the subject intentionally. I would expect the amperage reading is relatively reliable - at least there should be no reason why it shouldn't, and it would have very little value if it would be untrustworthy at the scale of these changes.

 

[therealseebs]

True. But I hate Photos more because Apple killed Aperture for it, and Aperture was an actual world-class application sadly ignored and neglected and finally discontinued by the brain-dead peddlers of wristwatches that Apple has become.

Exactly.

So now I'm moving all my photos into darktable on Linux, because guess what, it's way better at doing the job than Photos is.

I was happy with Aperture as a $300 application. I got my $300 worth from it. Photos is bad enough that I was unhappy with it at $0.

 

[MarsViolet]

Exactly.

So now I'm moving all my photos into darktable on Linux, because guess what, it's way better at doing the job than Photos is.

I was happy with Aperture as a $300 application. I got my $300 worth from it. Photos is bad enough that I was unhappy with it at $0.

Well put. Incredibly, I paid $500 for Aperture 1.0. Ouch.

I'm curious to know which Linux distro you've chosen, and on which hardware you intend to run it. I've been experimenting with different flavors for years, but none of them worked satisfactorily on any of the Macs I've tried or in Virtual Machines. I've finally come to the conclusion that one has to use real PC hardware to glean the true benefits, and to this end the new rumored 15-inch XPS is looking tantalizing.

 

[therealseebs]

Well put. Incredibly, I paid $500 for Aperture 1.0. Ouch.

I'm curious to know which Linux distro you've chosen, and on which hardware you intend to run it. I've been experimenting with different flavors for years, but none of them worked satisfactorily on any of the Macs I've tried or in Virtual Machines. I've finally come to the conclusion that one has to use real PC hardware to glean the true benefits, and to this end the new rumored 15-inch XPS is looking tantalizing.

So I'm currently running an Ubuntu variant on a Dell precision. I originally picked xubuntu, but I regret that severely, because XFCE has a really fascinating "feature" in how it interacts with display hardware: If my external monitor is powered off, XFCE recognizes that the monitor has left, and unconfigures it. It then continues running with that monitor disabled. If I turn the monitor back on, XFCE recognizes that it's come back... and attempts to display a window on another display to ask whether I'd like to use the newly-attached monitor.

Switched to LXDE and life is okay.

None of them are going to be quite as smooth and unified as MacOS, which is one of the reasons I was using a Mac as my primary desktop despite knowing my way around Linux better in general. However, "smooth and unified" has been gradually turning into "hostile to me and not configurable", and I've been unhappy with that, and I've been unhappy with the lack of maintenance and development for core OS features. (Why isn't MacOS using ZFS? Because Apple doesn't want to waste money developing MacOS.)

And I've been on this as my primary personal machine for a few weeks now, and honestly, I'm not particularly more bothered by it than I was by various problems I had with MacOS. Some stuff requires a lot more technical ability to set up, but hey, I was a Linux distro build system engineer and toolchain guy for years, I can deal.

I picked a Dell Precision 7510. Things it gives me that I care about, which no Apple hardware offered:

• Docking connector. I got a port replicator. I love it.
• Ethernet port.
• 32GB DDR4 memory, upgradeable to 64GB.
• Anti-glare display. It's 1920x1080, and crystal-clear at that size; my 15" MBP looks like crap scaled to "looks like 1920x1200". I'd have preferred 16:10, but I prefer 1:1 pixels even more, and anti-glare is a huge win for me, I hate glossy displays.
• Actual touchpad buttons which are not part of the touchpad surface. Three of them.
• Two drives. One PCIe drive bay (NVME), one 2.5" SATA bay.
• Actual keyboard, including function keys. (Okay, SOME apple hardware has that, but they're discontinuing it, and none of the recent stuff has it.)
• Decent supply of expansion ports.
• Large enough power supply to run this under load.
• Decent video card. (Okay, to be fair, I think technically the R460 would be as good or better, if it were in a machine with a power supply that could run it under load.)
• Smart card reader.
• LEDs for power, charging, on/off, and hard drive activity. I had no idea how much I was missing those, but I was missing those.

Overall, I'd say it's a definite and large improvement. This is roughly the machine I wished Apple were making.

BTW, if you liked Aperture, check out Darktable under Linux. It's not the same, and it's not quite as slick, but it's a lot closer to actually doing the job than Photos will ever be.

 

[MarsViolet]

So I'm currently running an Ubuntu variant on a Dell precision. I originally picked xubuntu, but I regret that severely, because XFCE has a really fascinating "feature" in how it interacts with display hardware: If my external monitor is powered off, XFCE recognizes that the monitor has left, and unconfigures it. It then continues running with that monitor disabled. If I turn the monitor back on, XFCE recognizes that it's come back... and attempts to display a window on another display to ask whether I'd like to use the newly-attached monitor.

Switched to LXDE and life is okay.

None of them are going to be quite as smooth and unified as MacOS, which is one of the reasons I was using a Mac as my primary desktop despite knowing my way around Linux better in general. However, "smooth and unified" has been gradually turning into "hostile to me and not configurable", and I've been unhappy with that, and I've been unhappy with the lack of maintenance and development for core OS features. (Why isn't MacOS using ZFS? Because Apple doesn't want to waste money developing MacOS.)

And I've been on this as my primary personal machine for a few weeks now, and honestly, I'm not particularly more bothered by it than I was by various problems I had with MacOS. Some stuff requires a lot more technical ability to set up, but hey, I was a Linux distro build system engineer and toolchain guy for years, I can deal.

I picked a Dell Precision 7510. Things it gives me that I care about, which no Apple hardware offered:

• Docking connector. I got a port replicator. I love it.
• Ethernet port.
• 32GB DDR4 memory, upgradeable to 64GB.
• Anti-glare display. It's 1920x1080, and crystal-clear at that size; my 15" MBP looks like crap scaled to "looks like 1920x1200". I'd have preferred 16:10, but I prefer 1:1 pixels even more, and anti-glare is a huge win for me, I hate glossy displays.
• Actual touchpad buttons which are not part of the touchpad surface. Three of them.
• Two drives. One PCIe drive bay (NVME), one 2.5" SATA bay.
• Actual keyboard, including function keys. (Okay, SOME apple hardware has that, but they're discontinuing it, and none of the recent stuff has it.)
• Decent supply of expansion ports.
• Large enough power supply to run this under load.
• Decent video card. (Okay, to be fair, I think technically the R460 would be as good or better, if it were in a machine with a power supply that could run it under load.)
• Smart card reader.
• LEDs for power, charging, on/off, and hard drive activity. I had no idea how much I was missing those, but I was missing those.

Overall, I'd say it's a definite and large improvement. This is roughly the machine I wished Apple were making.

BTW, if you liked Aperture, check out Darktable under Linux. It's not the same, and it's not quite as slick, but it's a lot closer to actually doing the job than Photos will ever be.

Thanks for the info!

I too prefer non-glossy, squarer displays over glossy 16:9 models.

My loathing for Photos is beyond measure. It was bad enough that Apple killed Aperture — unforgivable, in fact — but for them to replace it with such craptastic junkware as Photos was the final insult. They don't get to get away with that.

Darktable is solid. I tried the Mac version, and it was buggy as hell, so then I tried it under VM in Mint, and what a difference! On the Mac, I could never even manage to get numeric entry to work, but everything works under Linux.

I agree completely that OS X, in its drive to appeal to soccer moms (sorry, soccer moms), has become hostile to advanced users, a shame considering what a cool thing its ancestor, NeXTSTEP, was (I have a working NeXT Cube in my closet). This is the primary reason why my 2009 MacBook Pro will never move beyond Snow Leopard, but Snow Leopard is a dead-end, and I need to move on to a platform which won't try to snare me into a subscription. Lightroom is almost certainly headed there, and my personal feeling/suspicion is that the endgame for the Mac will involve only being able to lease glued-together Macs and store everything in the cloud. No thanks!

 

[kyykesko]

Which would mean that the reports of the laptops having bad battery life really were just because people were misunderstanding how the indicator works. Which again would mean that Apple was right about removing it

P.S. Don't forget that ALL major independent battery benchmarks out there show the new models having better battery life than the old models.

I understand that when the battery runs out and the computer shuts down the battery is empty. How am I understanding the indicator wrong?

 

[dotnet]

Have those who experience poor battery life found the culprits, i.e. the apps that used the most energy? Or are they just running the screen on full brightness?

 

[DeltaMac]

Of course, if the indicator shows no battery left, and the computer shuts down, the reading won't be interpreted as anything else except "empty" Nothing to misinterpret at that point, is there?

I think the misunderstanding comes from intermediate readings, and assuming that the actual battery life is identical (or even close) to time remaining as displayed on the menu indicator.
And, Apple fixed that for you.

 

[thadoggfather]

I swear on .2 I get better battery, nTB base

 

[matram]

I understand that when the battery runs out and the computer shuts down the battery is empty. How am I understanding the indicator wrong?

I have 10+ hours under light conditions (surfing or iTunes) but I can easily make that 3 - 4 hours by cranking up brightness to 100% and activate the dGPU, e.g. by opening a PDF document in Adobe Acrobat.

The 2016 model has more variation in current draw based on load than the old models. Hence more instantaneous variation in Wattage and instantaneous Remaining Battery Time. I guess the widget was not doing the best job of integrating a prediction.

Of course if we have a continuous high load (100% brightness + dGPU) the point is moot. The remaining battery time would show this and that would be correct.

I am just guessing Apple wanted to get around some noise from people expecting 10 hours regardless of load while they figure out a better algorithm.

I am currently using iStat menu to show % charge, battery time and current Wattage drawn.