How do you all feel about Apple removing the battery estimator in Mac OS?

[oktane]

Leman - I agree with you. But how many people have come on saying "my estimate was 3 hours but it actually lasted closer to 10 hours."

I haven't seen those posts.

I have seen my own experience with 2:45 battery life using Photos and web surfing at 70% brightness, and getting a shutdown warning pretty close to 3 hours.

However the more I'm using the MacBook, battery life seems to be improving after a handful of restarts I'm getting 7 hour estimates now. I have no explanation for any of this. It took about a week for things to improve in my case. I still get a lot of graphical glitches so I guess the poor battery life and graphic glitches might be related.
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Download any 3rd party utility you please. Better yet, use the built in % and a watch. The % doesn't fluctuate illogically. It actually goes DOWN over time, not both up and down.

Why would Apple get rid of something that is only a "PERCEPTION" of bad battery life? Simply because it's wrong. I don't jump for joy when my time remaining says 15 hours. It's wrong both favorably and unfavorably. It's only right when you do exactly the same thing until the battery dies. For me, that means 8-10 hours on my normal light usage. YMMV.

You power users might be different, but for my typical usage pattern (web, photos, word processing, email) the battery estimator has been dead-on accurate on all my MacBook products thus far, including the late 2016. It closely matches time until forced shutdown, I just don't like what it tells me at times. This might not apply to you if you are intermittently putting high load on your setup while on battery power. If I'm doing anything processor intensive, I'm plugged in.

 

[BeagleMeister]

Not quite. Temperatures do not fluctuate wildly, leaving riders completely confused about how hot or not the temp is. Next analogue please.

Too funny. I'm guessing you don't own, ride, or are familiar with Harleys and their gauges.
Nonetheless, I'll refine it further: It's about the same as if Harley-Davidson were to remove the fuel gauge from FLH models.

 

[Timmy D]

never ever looked at it in the last four years to be honest

 

[thesaint024]

Leman - I agree with you. But how many people have come on saying "my estimate was 3 hours but it actually lasted closer to 10 hours."

I haven't seen those posts.

I have seen my own experience with 2:45 battery life using Photos and web surfing at 70% brightness, and getting a shutdown warning pretty close to 3 hours.

However the more I'm using the MacBook, battery life seems to be improving after a handful of restarts I'm getting 7 hour estimates now. I have no explanation for any of this. It took about a week for things to improve in my case. I still get a lot of graphical glitches so I guess the poor battery life and graphic glitches might be related.
[doublepost=1481683378][/doublepost]


You power users might be different, but for my typical usage pattern (web, photos, word processing, email) the battery estimator has been dead-on accurate on all my MacBook products thus far, including the late 2016. It closely matches time until forced shutdown, I just don't like what it tells me at times. This might not apply to you if you are intermittently putting high load on your setup while on battery power. If I'm doing anything processor intensive, I'm plugged in.

Yes, you might be a more rare case. So I don't doubt what you're saying. With these new processors switching between high power mode and low throws a wrench into it. What I've read, and there's a hundred of these in the battery thread, people will boot up and immediately post there battery estimate. This doesn't factor the relatively high cpu usage during boot up. This was causing more misinformation than anything. That's why I'm thrilled. Those that get higher battery life got to the point of understanding that these cpu's are multi speed.

 

[Karnicopia]

I'm good with the move just because people seemed to take it as the gospel truth for how long they could run when it's really a indicator of your current workload. It would have been cool if Apple offered two options for the estimation one that took your recent workload into account and one that took an average of your usage on battery since charging or something like that to give a longer term estimate. Problem with that is people would be doing intensive tasks and complaining that the battery life didn't last as long as the timer said because it would average intensive work with light work. So that just hast the potential to be "inaccurate" in a completely different way.

Overall the best option I would like is just a option to show how many watts are being burned. That's really what the time estimate was getting at and what I used it for. If they show the current wattage it wouldn't create as much confusion either as that is clearly your current consumption. So in that case the % remaining would be your long term capacity measure and current wattage would be your short term measure of current impact on the battery.

 

[kb3tzt]

the estimate is not the only thing not correct with sierras battery readings. has anyone ever checked the system information when Sierra reported 100%. I did, and my battery still had over 400 mph left to go. thats almost 10%. thats one whopper of a difference.

 

[leman]

Leman - I agree with you. But how many people have come on saying "my estimate was 3 hours but it actually lasted closer to 10 hours."

I haven't seen those posts.

I think there is one just two post above yours in that thread But I digress. It is true that there is some wide variance in the battery life of these new models and it would be interesting to find out what the issue is exactly. Did you try to track the average energy consumptions of your running apps in the Activity Monitor? There might be a black sheep there...

 

[thesaint024]

Too funny. I'm guessing you don't own, ride, or are familiar with Harleys and their gauges.
Nonetheless, I'll refine it further: It's about the same as if Harley-Davidson were to remove the fuel gauge from FLH models.

Actually I do ride, just not Harleys. My temp gauge works like a car's temperature gauge. It goes up and down very steady. My bike doesn't cool completely for an hour, just like a car's. If Harley temp gauges are so specifically different than other motor vehicles, I stand corrected. But I don't think many others would get your analogy either in that case. (Computer forum)

 

[duervo]

Don't care. If I want to find out that bad, I can still get the data using either Coconut or iStat.

Relative to the rest of Apple things going on right now, this is totally off my radar and is a non-issue to me.

 

[montanaco]

Leman - I agree with you. But how many people have come on saying "my estimate was 3 hours but it actually lasted closer to 10 hours."

I haven't seen those posts.

I have seen my own experience with 2:45 battery life using Photos and web surfing at 70% brightness, and getting a shutdown warning pretty close to 3 hours.

However the more I'm using the MacBook, battery life seems to be improving after a handful of restarts I'm getting 7 hour estimates now. I have no explanation for any of this. It took about a week for things to improve in my case. I still get a lot of graphical glitches so I guess the poor battery life and graphic glitches might be related.
[doublepost=1481683378][/doublepost]


You power users might be different, but for my typical usage pattern (web, photos, word processing, email) the battery estimator has been dead-on accurate on all my MacBook products thus far, including the late 2016. It closely matches time until forced shutdown, I just don't like what it tells me at times. This might not apply to you if you are intermittently putting high load on your setup while on battery power. If I'm doing anything processor intensive, I'm plugged in.

I've posted this a couple times actually and it certainly happened to me. 3:45 estimates, but following Activity Monitor's time on battery I was getting close to 10 hours--I actually got just over 10 hours once.

 

[alex2016g]

More fuel for the anti apple crowd

To say the truth I feel more and more like an anti Apple crowd my self. They just keep doing stupid stuff that doesn't go in line with what I want. Even though for the time being I am an all Apple user.

 

[Ghost31]

To say the truth I feel more and more like an anti Apple crowd my self. They just keep doing stupid stuff that doesn't go in line with what I want. Even though for the time being I am an all Apple user.

I hate that I used to be able to have arguments to defend Apple a bit on different things. In the past year or so whenever someone comes in bashing apole for X reason, I just say "I know" and most of the time have the same complaints myself.

IE:unless you work in iOS development, I don't know why I would recommend a Mac over a windows computer anymore

 

[KirekkusuPT]

I don't care.

I always get at the end of the day and make my estimates of "hours spend using the laptop" vs "% of battery left". I never checked the estimates of time remaining on any of my laptops. Not windows, not Ubuntu, not macOS.

I only need to know how many time it takes for a charge to be complete, and that is still there. It's inaccurate as hell too, it always says it will take more time to charge than it does, but oh well. At least the laptop is incredibly fast at charging.

IE:unless you work in iOS development, I don't know why I would recommend a Mac over a windows computer anymore

This is my first Mac.

I code C, Java, Python, Haskell... And do some stuff on Ubuntu with a core network emulator.

Honestly yeah I don't see a reason why anyone would need a Mac, but I think it still feels damn good to have one. I see Apple as a luxury. You don't need it, but if you can have it, it's good. I find new things in macOS everyday that make me feel in love with the OS. I hope Apple keeps doing computers for many years to come, for the uses that I have I don't have complaints about them, so... (I was a bit sad about the battery life, but it improoved with 10.12.2).

 

[Scuba629]

Has anyone noticed that iStat Menus and MacOS don't agree on what programs are using the most energy? The "Apps Using Significant Energy" never seems to match up. Maybe they need to update iStat Menus or are they using different thresholds? Anyone know?

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

kind of a dick move but that thing was hardly correct in the first place. not sure why they didn't fix it instead of remove it though

Fix what? It was always an estimate based on what user was currently doing, not a magical time machine who would correctly predict how the user would use the machine the next 10 hours.

 

[rocknblogger]

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/13/13939278/apple-macos-sierra-new-macbook-pros-battery-life

I have no opinion on it as of yet. Tell me how I'm supposed to feeeeeeel!

I don't think this was a good move by Apple. I think that it was fairly accurate if you understood how to read it.
I think it's more that they didn't want to put any time into making the algorithm better or more accurate. Could be they don't have the time to do it this close to end of year vacation. I'm hoping they put some work into it and get right.

It's funny how over the years since we've had it, I don't remember reading any complaints about it. If it was so bad and so inaccurate wouldn't we have been reading complaints about it for all these years?

 

[calaverasgrande]

maybe it's confirmation bias on my part. But it almost seems like Apple is using their customers as punching bags?
The battery duration has only ever been a close estimate. I've never gotten red in the face when my laptop says '45 minutes' and it gives up the ghost in 30 minutes. I might have gotten more busy as I noticed my battery was running out. So it follows that I'd be asking more of the computer, hence draining battery faster.

 

[Balaamsdonkey]

I never used it. I used to but haven't in a few years, so I'm fine with it.

 

[keghunter]

It's a terrible move. It is nice to know how long it takes to charge or discharge the battery without having to open another application. Looks bad, too.

 

[thesaint024]

I don't think this was a good move by Apple. I think that it was fairly accurate if you understood how to read it.
I think it's more that they didn't want to put any time into making the algorithm better or more accurate. Could be they don't have the time to do it this close to end of year vacation. I'm hoping they put some work into it and get right.

It's funny how over the years since we've had it, I don't remember reading any complaints about it. If it was so bad and so inaccurate wouldn't we have been reading complaints about it for all these years?

You are taking for granted that most MBP buyers are rational or have some understanding of the new CPU/hardware. Most were actually using the fluctuating time estimate as real, hence all of the ignorant comments on the battery thread. This MBP's battery life is more volatile than in the past, that's why it wasn't an issue before. Bigger battery and more consistent power draw in the past. The algorithm is hard and will be very wrong in many cases no matter how they change it. Then we'll have everyone running around yelling about 3 hour battery life (incorrectly) again. No win.

 

[mmomega]

Not really upset whatsoever.

I only ocassionally looked at it to get a rough estimate of how long the battery was supposed to last but definitely not enough that I'm going to miss it.
I like the percentage more, I just use it until I see below 10-5% and I'll plug it up regardless of how long it actually lasts.

TBH I probably would have never even noticed had this not been an article on MR.

 

[tubeexperience]

#fail

Apple officially claims that the new MacBook Pro will deliver “up to 10 hours” of battery life while connected to Wi-Fi, but we couldn’t get more than about six hours of battery life out of this notebook even when we lowered the screen brightness to the minimum setting. The “time remaining” estimate that appears in the Touch Bar after you press the battery icon fluctuates far more wildly than any previous MacBook we’ve reviewed in recent memory. We’re not sure if this is due to the significantly brighter backlight in the new Retina Display or the way that the Intel processors scale power up and down based on current activity requirements … or if there is a much bigger problem with power management inside the latest MacBook Pro series.

As we prepared this review for publication Apple released a new update to macOS Sierra (10.12.2) which actually removes the “time remaining” estimate from the new MacBook Pro. We ran several new battery life tests and there is no clear improvement in battery life. At the time of this writing Apple seems to have fixed the issue with poor battery life and a wildly fluctuating battery life indicator by removing the visual indication of your remaining battery life. That’s not what our editors call a “fix” but that’s the closest thing to a solution that Apple has offered so far.

http://www.notebookreview.com/noteb...ok-pro-review-2016-touch-class-not-much-else/

 

[Queen6]

Never use it on either Windows 10 or OS X, as there`s really no way for it to be accurate unless your usage/workflows result in very consistent power consumption. I do think Apple timed the depreciation of the feature poorly, only adding fuel to the fire.

At best an estimation, at worst widely inaccurate, which makes sense given how these indicators work. Believe some 3rd party App`s can improve on this, equally they are just basically mapping your usage and building an estimate versus the same data and remaining battery capacity.

Q-6

 

[Mxbzz]

I quite liked it because it gave me an indication if I had a rogue app running in the background. If my estimated battery life was below 5 hours, then I'd likely have to restart my machine. I can still do the same thing with iStat or Activity Monitor, but it changes my previous workflow. It's not the end of the world, but an inconvenience.

I'd be more understanding if they removed it for the sake of something else, such as saving space, but that menu is far from cluttered. If anything, Apple should have just moved it to the advanced options, where you could hit Option + the battery icon.

 

[xmonkey]

It's a terrible move. It is nice to know how long it takes to charge or discharge the battery without having to open another application. Looks bad, too.

It will still tell you how long it's going to take to charge the battery to full like before.