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Well, I'm using my 15" for over 9 hours and estimating it will go well beyond 10 hours!

Pulled the laptop off the charger this morning. I've been mostly reading iBook, typing in Evernote, Notes, Xcode and Numbers throughout the day.

I have not been using the dGPU, even though the screenshot says it's on. It must've switched on briefly. Otherwise it wouldn't have coped being on so long. Like if I would be transcoding video, I would be surprised if I could get more than an hour (or two) out of it.

So, the estimation is still available in 'System Monitor'.
 

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The users complaining in this thread don't get it.

That metric was so useless and inaccurate, just simply opening a new app would drastically change the "time remaining" for some time. So people would open up their favorite apps and then immediately check the "time remaining" and see that they're only expected to get 3 hours of battery life.

Since it was so adaptive, it was highly inaccurate. People can complain Apple is hiding the issue or whatever, but to me, percentage will tell you more about the actual battery life that the machine is expected to get.
You don't understand the main complaint. No-one here has said they trusted that estimated time value with their life. But unlike the percentage, the estimated time would give you an early warning something is drawing power from the battery (most of the time CPU). Relying on percentage hides that as it's not immediately obvious when you last checked the value between two time periods.

Removing it has screwed over use of a simple function that maybe needed replacing in the future for something more useful, but not removing. The timing is bad and signals (as I've said before), a panic over some possible software/hardware issues with the new products regardless of the lab tests.
 
Does anyone really believe that in 2016 with all of our technology, it is difficult to have a software algorithm estimate remaining battery life? We're dealing with a fixed battery of known capacity with real time current and voltage sensors that work at a high sampling rate. Sure there will be some errors due to sampling error, but seriously? I'd love to hear a real answer from an electrical engineer about why this is all of a sudden such a difficult calculation given the minimal change in technology between 2015 and 2016.

To those who say "the battery estimate was never accurate anyway," do you see any massive complaint threads on MacRumors about it? Did you take your machine to the Genius Bar to get these horribly inaccurate estimates fixed? To say you never looked at the estimates is one thing, but to say they were never really accurate is a lie.

For Apple to backpedal and remove the feature once battery life complaints surfaced adds fuel to the fire and insults the intelligence of the consumers.
 
Well, I'm using my 15" for over 9 hours and estimating it will go well beyond 10 hours!

Pulled the laptop off the charger this morning. I've been mostly reading iBook, typing in Evernote, Notes, Xcode and Numbers throughout the day.

I have not been using the dGPU, even though the screenshot says it's on. It must've switched on briefly. Otherwise it wouldn't have coped being on so long. Like if I would be transcoding video, I would be surprised if I could get more than an hour (or two) out of it.

So, the estimation is still available in 'System Monitor'.
Which looks like stellar battery performance. Would you also agree that the time remaining estimate is pretty accurate - and useful?
 
Cars do have displays that estimate exactly that...this really isn't rocket science.

Apple is perfectly capable of doing a high precision gauge which is very accurate. But then they would face angry people (more than they already are) in the stores asking where why the heck they advertise up to 10 hours and last the whole day battery life... Anyone with a MBP could walk in to an Apple Store launch Mail and Safari and begin putting a small load on the cpu by scrolling etc and thus prove that Apple is advertising lies.

Therefor, the wisest thing is to just remove that gauge. Personally, I wonder why it took them so long. My colleagues and I have been laughing over this gauge vs. Apple's promised Battery Life since years...

Never made me angry though, as I know that a high performance device will never be able to achieve 6-10 hours of battery life and be that thin... I wonder where people's common sense has gone the past decade.. Small thin Computer with Professional Capabilities and 10 hours battery life... That pig won't ever fly ! Never !

PS - with the 2016 MBP they could have made the battery last longer.. But they just HAD to make it thinner and thus you have a MORE powerful computer with an even smaller battery supposedly capable of lasting longer than the last generation.

One day Apple will make it so thin that they will remove the battery altogether. Then sell it like this... The MacBook Pro that lasts all day and year that you will NEVER have to charge... And people will love it and buy it. Until they feel it !
[doublepost=1481752180][/doublepost]
Wow. :eek:

So a features that lets the user get a feel on whether they need to plug in sooner or later on a laptop, will now be disabled because all of a sudden it is giving a bad impression of battery life? for real? what are these guys smoking?

Nothing. They are just ordinary people with no vision nor intuition. That all went away with Steve. Cook and the current team are great at what they do if they have a leader with vision and intuition. But they dont have any.

All they have left if Jony Ive and his design. If he leaves the company looses its last valuable asset that sets them apart.

Microsoft have been much more inventive the past 5 years than Apple... And it is beginning to show.

A toddler could have been made CEO of Apple after Steve's passing and the company would still have surged but now when the other guys are catching up the company needs a leader that has strong visions. And that they just dont have.
 
You're going around in circles and missing the point entirely.

No one in real world, aka outside the macrumors-apple-troll-echo-chamber, takes seriously people who say things like, "Apple has lost their way."

Include youtube, engadget, reviewers, forbes, investor letters, etc in your list of "troll-echo-chamber"s. I'm sure they are all trolls in macrumors and just echo each other. Clearly for you the "Real world" doesn't include the actual real world, but just some place where apple is magical for you and that they are as strong as ever and everyone is just stupid and not using the product correctly. I recommend stay in that world, I miss the days when my ignorance towards apple was bliss and all was well.

Clearly this has nothing to do with mac rumors or trolls.. Why are you hanging on and defending apple like it was god for you? Did you invest a lot into them? Stock? Or just trying to get everyone to be an exactly like you, want the same things as you, see things the way you do, and only want things that you do?
[doublepost=1481752575][/doublepost]
Well, I'm using my 15" for over 9 hours and estimating it will go well beyond 10 hours!

Pulled the laptop off the charger this morning. I've been mostly reading iBook, typing in Evernote, Notes, Xcode and Numbers throughout the day.

I have not been using the dGPU, even though the screenshot says it's on. It must've switched on briefly. Otherwise it wouldn't have coped being on so long. Like if I would be transcoding video, I would be surprised if I could get more than an hour (or two) out of it.

So, the estimation is still available in 'System Monitor'.

Is that typical for you, or just after this update?
 
Tim: Greg, can we improve the menubar percentage ?
Greg: Sure, but I am constantly being interrupted by Joni. He wants the whole thing out. I'm afraid he wants to get rid of the menubar altogether.
Phil: Well, simplicity rules. It marks our next step in the TouchBar transition. Also, it would improve overall performance by at least 0,0003 %. Gradual improvement - that's what drives us now.
Tim: Fine, but I am here to look after your cooperation, guys. So if Joni hammers on certain things, we must take that serious. Performance improvement is on anybodies' radar - even when incremental... Greg, you understand that, don't you ?
Greg: Happily. The more time I have to look after the current MacBook GPU artefacts...
Phil: Ooh - save my day please... we'd better get rid of that too. Let's remove the whole screen ! Joni will love it, it makes the device 0.7" thinner. And it will give the TouchBar the profile it deserves.
Greg: Well, in that case... it would save us the whole 5K discussion, all the buzz about OLED and make us independent from the Samsungs and LG's of this world that keep the best screens for themselves.
Tim: But the press will kill us...
Phil: Nothing new. Tell them it allows for a larger trackpad. Tell them they can keep their MacBook lids closed, also to avoid keyboard problems. And for the stubborn, we can temporarily offer the screen as a $1500 option. New dongles to be worked out.
Tim: Well, Phil clearly has the courage. With our Airpods success story, he can handle anything now.
Better for the environment too. And think of the visually impaired - no screens anymore will offer a level playing field. Diversity !
PostPC era !! Our shareholders will LOVE the improved margins.
I want a proposal tomorrow !!

This is hilarious. Obviously that's probably not what they said but still so funny. Greatest joke on here :D
 
Include youtube, engadget, reviewers, forbes, investor letters, etc in your list of "troll-echo-chamber"s. I'm sure they are all trolls in macrumors and just echo each other. Clearly for you the "Real world" doesn't include the actual real world, but just some place where apple is magical for you and that they are as strong as ever and everyone is just stupid and not using the product correctly. I recommend stay in that world, I miss the days when my ignorance towards apple was bliss and all was well.

Yes, its giant joke of non-journalistic tech blog anti-apple echo chamber. Its pathetic.
 
Yes, its giant joke of non-journalistic tech blog anti-apple echo chamber. Its pathetic.

OK, so who else is on that list since now that you've expanded to hundreds if not thousands of writers, bloggers, etc, all of which are trolls or are anti-apple and also added pathetic? Is everyone who is unhappy with a product apple makes anti-apple pathetic echo chambering troll? If I keep asking questions will that list eventually grow to "everyone but me"? There is a word for that and you kind of just reiterated my point.

Do answer my question though. Why so personal? Don't just say "it annoys me". That's BS. You are emotionally charged over people not liking Apple, regardless what the actual issue is, or whether it's real or not. You don't even seem to care what the argument is about, you just go after the people that might not like apple for some reason and you immediately try to hit them on a personal level, which I can only assume is your only argument (if you can call it that).

So why such an unhealthy relationship with a corporation that doesn't care or know that you exist and why are you parting with so much anger, and hatred to defend them? Not argue, not make points, not call out people on anything, but literally, just burn up in rage and spew hatred without cause when someone says they have a problem with an apple product or apple as a company... why? I am genuinely interested. I'm assuming they don't pay you. You don't strike me as the demographic they'd be interested in to represent them or their products.
 
So basically a few stupid customers don't understand how the battery life indicator works, and so Apple decides to remove the feature, thereby punishing all the rest of us who do understand what it means and are able to gain useful information from it? A better tactic would be to explain to customers that are confused how the estimate works (and fix the estimate if there are new problems created by the new MBPs that didn't exist before). Should we all have to live with tools that cater to the lowest common denominator to the detriment of everyone else? Based on this and past actions, I think we know where Apple stands.

For all the people that know how to interpret the battery life indicator, or those that use their computers in a consistent fashion, this feature was very useful.

Everybody thinks they're smarter than average. It seems to me that, if the indicator is necessarily wrong more frequently than it is right, fair to remove it. Percentage is actually accurate.
 
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macOS Sierra 10.12.2, released this morning, features several key bug fixes and addresses an issue that has plagued some customers who purchased a new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar -- battery life.

Apple believes that the battery life indicator in macOS Sierra is ultimately inaccurate and has led to some confusion about battery performance, and so it has been removed in macOS Sierra 10.12.2.

batterylifeindicator.jpg

Going forward, the battery icon in the Mac's menu bar will offer a look at remaining battery percentage, but it won't provide estimates on how long the MacBook Pro's battery will last. Here's what Apple said about it to The Loop:MacBook Pro buyers have complained about getting less than 10 hours of battery life, reporting as little as three hours of battery life in some cases, but battery performance can vary significantly based on the apps and processes that are running.

Customers with poor performance may be using apps that are not optimized for the new MacBook Pro, and on the 15-inch machine, if an app engages the discrete GPU, battery life takes a significant hit. For MacBook Pro owners who are seeing bad battery life, it's worth checking the Activity Monitor to make sure the dGPU is not in use.

Spotlight indexing, iCloud photo syncing, and other behind-the-scenes processes can also have an impact on battery life, especially when a machine is new.

According to The Loop, Apple has done extensive battery life testing on the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and continues to stand by its battery life estimates of up to 10 hours. It seems Apple believes reports of bad battery life are largely based on the faulty indicator, but there have been some real world tests that don't rely on the estimate and still show poor performance.

Apple says its new MacBook Pros can get up to 10 hours of battery life when browsing the web or when watching iTunes movies.

Article Link: macOS Sierra 10.12.2 Removes 'Time Remaining' Battery Life Indicator
[doublepost=1481754466][/doublepost]It also locks up Safari at quit Safari, have to force guit
 
Clever move Apple. Now nobody can blame you for poor battery life, it's the fault of the user.

Lately Apple looks like a truck with no brakes going downhill ...it's so depressing!
Thanks goodness there are a lot of Mac Users that are helping each other with good alternatives.
Beside all the tips on MacRumors I found few extras on OSXDaily page
 
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Everybody thinks they're smarter than average. Fact is, if the indicator is necessarily wrong more frequently than it is right, it is fair to remove it. Percentage is actually accurate.
Facts have become people's opinion these days. My fact is that the time left indicator was never used as an actual estimate, but as an early warning sign of some process going rogue and draining the battery abnormally. Second indicator is fans spinning up loudly.

Like the mileage estimate on my car, I don't pretend to believe I'll get 800 clicks when rolling downhill in Eco mode, nor 200 clicks when driving aggressively up hills. For the past 2 decades most laptop users understood that.

Apple just caters to the fashionable coffee shop crowd today and not technical or professional people.
 
Well I won't be downloading this in my 2015 (which gets great battery life, BTW).
Apples new motto; "If the news ain't great, kill the messenger".
This company is a joke. The demise of timmy boy and his team of idiots will be greatly appreciated.
Hopefully happening soon.
 
You have to admit the timing of this change is suspicious to say the least. And why was the estimate good enough for decades but now suddenly isn't?
Because decades ago we had hardware that ran at a fixed speed, then we had hardware that ran between certain speeds that was very easy to predict but now we have hardware that is increasingly more aggressive in doing very short burst and that makes it almost impossible to make any useful estimation. Add to that people in general have great difficulty in correctly interpreting data and you end up with the current situation.

This is exactly the sort of thing Apple should do if they want to incite criticism and foster disappointment from their users.
Keeping the increasingly inaccurate estimation which almost no user interprets correctly (just take a look in just about any thread here about battery life and you'll see 99% of the people thinking that the estimation is the actual battery life) would do exactly that: incite criticism, foster disappointment and infuriate users. Apple should have removed it some years ago.

The alternative would be something like the background service in iOS. That technology is based on usage of the apps. Unfortunately this will also mean that there will be invasion of privacy as the system is monitoring very closely what you are doing on the machine. The question remains how much of an invasion it really is and whether you'd want something like that. Judging by the Windows 10 privacy concerns I'd say that this would be unwanted behaviour. In that case the only option left is to remove the estimation.

I'd advise to have the menu item show the percentage and monitor this yourself. That way you build up a very good sense of how much your battery is going to last. Something that is probably going to be far better than whatever system Apple can come up and without the privacy invasion. Some people might recognise it from their watches (lots of automatic watches out there that will drift over time so you have to adjust the time eventually; after some use the watch wearer knows when he has to do that).

My fact is that the time left indicator was never used as an actual estimate, but as an early warning sign of some process going rogue and draining the battery abnormally. Second indicator is fans spinning up loudly.
That's not a very good way of telling that. Monitoring CPU/mem activity in Activity Monitor or apps like iStat Menus are a much better way of doing that. I'm using iStat Menus and have the CPU graph set up to show the load number.
 
How would you fix it?

That's Apple's job to figure out.

Up until this latest fiasco it worked well enough the old way that few people complained. We all understood that the time remaining was a guesstimate based on screen brightness and whatever we were doing at the time. Apparently something about the new MacBook Pros broke the illusory effectiveness of the old method, and instead of trying to fix it, they removed the feature so people would stop complaining.

It feels like an act of spite.
 
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Ditto, I have ALWAYS updated on day one to the latest and greatest OSX, but this time there was this little voice in the back of my head that told me not too (I think it was related to the mediocre 2016 MBPs) so I held off. The more I observe, the happier I am that I did. What a dud of a year for apple. I really hope they get their act together. I LOVE(d) their products, but for the time being at least I'm on a buying freeze to see if things get better. If not... well... theirs always linux...

Linux - I can't for the life of me understand how that hasn't become a more viable option by now. My new dream is a Cannonlake or Ice Lake laptop with Debian fully optimized for power efficiency, Vulkan, and eGPU. All the pieces of that exist today in various stages of development - can't wait to see how it plays out.
 
Facts have become people's opinion these days. My fact is that the time left indicator was never used as an actual estimate, but as an early warning sign of some process going rogue and draining the battery abnormally. Second indicator is fans spinning up loudly.

Like the mileage estimate on my car, I don't pretend to believe I'll get 800 clicks when rolling downhill in Eco mode, nor 200 clicks when driving aggressively up hills. For the past 2 decades most laptop users understood that.

Apple just caters to the fashionable coffee shop crowd today and not technical or professional people.
*suspects rogue process or app*

*opens up Activity Monitor*

"Oh look there's the time remaining estimate, yup problem!" / "Oh look there's the time remaining estimate, nah no issue!"

What a fiasco, truly.
 



macOS Sierra 10.12.2, released this morning, features several key bug fixes and addresses an issue that has plagued some customers who purchased a new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar -- battery life.

Apple believes that the battery life indicator in macOS Sierra is ultimately inaccurate and has led to some confusion about battery performance, and so it has been removed in macOS Sierra 10.12.2.

batterylifeindicator.jpg

Going forward, the battery icon in the Mac's menu bar will offer a look at remaining battery percentage, but it won't provide estimates on how long the MacBook Pro's battery will last. Here's what Apple said about it to The Loop:MacBook Pro buyers have complained about getting less than 10 hours of battery life, reporting as little as three hours of battery life in some cases, but battery performance can vary significantly based on the apps and processes that are running.

Customers with poor performance may be using apps that are not optimized for the new MacBook Pro, and on the 15-inch machine, if an app engages the discrete GPU, battery life takes a significant hit. For MacBook Pro owners who are seeing bad battery life, it's worth checking the Activity Monitor to make sure the dGPU is not in use.

Spotlight indexing, iCloud photo syncing, and other behind-the-scenes processes can also have an impact on battery life, especially when a machine is new.

According to The Loop, Apple has done extensive battery life testing on the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and continues to stand by its battery life estimates of up to 10 hours. It seems Apple believes reports of bad battery life are largely based on the faulty indicator, but there have been some real world tests that don't rely on the estimate and still show poor performance.

Apple says its new MacBook Pros can get up to 10 hours of battery life when browsing the web or when watching iTunes movies.

Article Link: macOS Sierra 10.12.2 Removes 'Time Remaining' Battery Life Indicator
[doublepost=1481764427][/doublepost]I upgraded my Macbook to a Touchbar one and have seen time remaining stat in battery icon fluctuating widely between 16:00 to 4:00. I noticed that Spotlight and Chrome were consuming a lot of battery as per activity monitor. After I upgraded the Chrome to v55 I noticed that chrome is more battery friendly now.
Also the activity monitor still shows time remaining if one is interested in knowing it. Please see the attached screen grab. Then time remaining stat is present
Untitled.jpeg
 
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Facts have become people's opinion these days. My fact is that the time left indicator was never used as an actual estimate, but as an early warning sign of some process going rogue and draining the battery abnormally. Second indicator is fans spinning up loudly.

Like the mileage estimate on my car, I don't pretend to believe I'll get 800 clicks when rolling downhill in Eco mode, nor 200 clicks when driving aggressively up hills. For the past 2 decades most laptop users understood that.

Apple just caters to the fashionable coffee shop crowd today and not technical or professional people.

And i suppose you can't tell your percentage is dropping in the way you can tell you time is dropping?
 
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