This update not only improved the expected battery of the Touch Bar Models, but the older ones as well. My 2013 13" would estimate about 6-7 hours before, but now it is around 9.5.
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New MacBook Pro Users Report Improved Battery Life on macOS 10.12.2
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Placebo/coincidence/whatever you want to call it, it wasn't the update:
Just to chime in here: the Creative Cloud app that comes with your subscription is definitely one of the culprits. You only need to boot it up once every 30 days to keep everything running well, and leaving it on has a massive effect on battery life. It's best just to quit the app, and let it turn on when you boot up the computer. If you're like me, you end up rebooting at least once a month. After a reboot, just quit the app again, and your apps continue to run without issue.
Helps a ton with battery life.
oneMadRssn, Its like you are trying to explain it to someone who does not understand math beyond deriving the mean. I'm going to resort to The Dreaded Car Simile.
Example 1: A car is cruising down the highway. Speed is varying between 45 and 70, with an average [mean] of 62. Gas mileage and range are easy to calculate. More importantly, knowing average speed, fuel consumption and remaining fuel; it is pretty easy to derive how long the car can continue in TIME.
Example 2: A car is idled from a shop to a drag strip. The order of the heats is not random. But it is secret. If the car wins, it races again in 5 minutes. If it loses, the next opportunity is between 10 minutes and 7 days. Unless its July or August or the track has a special. Also, the owners are superstitious and never race on a new moon, or if they are hung over. The car idles between races. Yes. All week if it doesn't get a race. The car has enough fuel to idle for 15 days or run 4 races. But you can't know if its going to race again immediately, or come back another day, or which day. Gas mileage and range are still easy to calculate [bad]. Now estimate how many HOURS the car can go on a tank of gas? @Spectrum - Feel free to take a 10 minute average. This is why deviation matters.
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Yes, that's a great analogy. And perhaps my explanation was too mathy, but I'm not sure how else to demonstrate that variability and fluctuations during a 10-minute sample have great influence over how useful the average of that 10-minute sample will be. The greater the variability, or the bigger the fluctuations, the less useful the average becomes. I know it, and you know it. But how do you prove it without math?
Unfortunately I've learned to refrain from using analogy whenever possible on this forum, as seems to invite folks to critique the specifics of the analogy rather than debate the original point at hand.
They are leaving the percentage indicator, which is a much more reliable measurement.
Plus, people will have their clock to help keep them informed as to the "real world" battery life.
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Prove it.Meanwhile engineers in Cupertino are spitting out their coffee in laughter at this because they changed nothing affecting power consumption...
#placeboeffect
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Right. Because most users don't have an abundance of clocks around them at all times; like, for example, on their Menu Bar, right next to the Battery Indicator...
Look just four posts up!
I'll even link it for you: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...n-macos-10-12-2.2021719/page-10#post-24076253
I've often wondered about that with iOS Updates, too; which almost always seem to carry a "Battery Life Issue" at first. In fact, when I updated my iPhone 6 Plus to iOS 10, it's battery life was really stinky for the first day or two, then leveled-off, with no additional OS updates, tweaking, etc. So I suspected Spotlight.I often wonder how many of these "poor battery life" complaints are due to Spotlight indexing all the new stuff that just got dumped onto the machine when people upgrade to a new laptop, and then when spotlight is done doing its thing, battery life goes back to normal.. which may coincidentally coincide with a minor OS update.
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This is what we get for Apple becoming more popular... We accidently let all the Windows-whiners in!
Sorry to keep labouring my point
but the moving average will still be fine so long as the window of time is long enough to smooth out the bumps. In your analogy it would need to be many days long. (What would be essential however would be to have an accurate measure of exactly how much a gas was still in the tank at any point you wish to sample.)By contrast, it seems to me that 10-15 mins would be more than enough to smooth out the microsecond long power spikes a CPU experiences during general use. But it for some reason it wasn't, then a 60 minute window could be used. The only downside of a longer time window is that it is less reactive/agile to new *sustained* changes in power drop.
Of course, a moving average estimator will not be able to accomodate the fact that in an hours time you might start to render video at 400% CPU usage, but that is impossible to know, and is not what anyone would reasonably expect.
However, what would happen is that as soon as you start to render the video, the sustained CPU usage would be monitored as a sustained drop in mAh on the battery and lead to an updated estimate of how long the battery will now last given the new workload.
And once that intensive CPU task has finished, it will gradually revert back to a longer estimate of time remaining based on current power drop on the battery (over a 15 min window) and whatever the remaining mAh is left in the battery (fuel gauge).
In all these discussions I am assuming the measurement of mAh remaining in a battery is accurate.
Thought: Are we arguing about two different things here?
1. Is the estimate useful to know how long the battery will last given current usage?
2. Is the total estimate useful if a user's CPU workload is highly variable from one hour to the next?
Number 1 is what I am arguing for - and what is useful. It's what the time remaining meter has done for years.
Number 2 is pretty much impossible to accomodate - and it makes no sense to try to do so, IMO.
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Do you know about the "Automatic Graphics Switching" Checkbox in System Preferences? I don't have a machine running Sierra, but I assume it's there, too...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202043
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/10/22/automatic-graphics-switching/
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Sure.
A company that has invested who-knows-how-much R&D effort into fancy stuff like Timer Coalescing, App-Napping, etc. is now just going to "cripple the cpu scheduler" (whatever that means!). Makes sense to me!
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From what I understand Battery PERCENTAGE stayed, Battery TIME was removed.
The percentage indicator tells you nothing about how *long* the battery will last unless you know the current usage...
75% could mean anything from 9 hours to 1 hour depending on the task(s) you are running. That's why the time remaining estimate is so valuable!
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In fact, what I think you are both doing is confusing the variation within any given 10 minute sampling window (which I fully admit is high - but which I also state does not matter) and the variation between any two adjacent 10 minute moving average sampling windows (which will be much much lower - unless there is a period of sustained altered activity - or unless the sampling window is too short such that it is not sufficiently averaging out the variation in the usage).
In the previous example data with 1,1,1,1,1,1... and an occasional 20 thrown in, 10 minute windows may give a range of as low as 1/min (if there was no "20" spike in a given 10 min window), up to 4.8/min (if there were two).
Yes that is a 4.8-fold variation, but far lower than the 20-fold variation in the raw data.
A wider average window (or less extreme data, something that is probably more likely than the example) would reduce the inter-interval variation even if the variation within an interval remained high.
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I understand Spectrum. So many people see it as a dumbing down design change. Its the removal of something from the days of the one button mouse, floppy disks, and notebook batteries that lasted ~40 minutes whether idle or processing. "Battery red. Crap < 5 minutes, must save before the hard disk parks!"Sorry to keep labouring my point
By contrast, it seems to me that 10-15 mins would be more than enough to smooth out the microsecond long power spikes a CPU experiences during general use. But it for some reason it wasn't, then a 60 minute window could be used. The only downside of a longer time window is that it is less reactive/agile to new *sustained* changes in power drop.
Of course, a moving average estimator will not be able to accomodate the fact that in an hours time you might start to render video at 400% CPU usage, but that is impossible to know, and is not what anyone would reasonably expect.
However, what would happen is that as soon as you start to render the video, the sustained CPU usage would be monitored as a sustained drop in mAh on the battery and lead to an updated estimate of how long the battery will now last given the new workload.
And once that intensive CPU task has finished, it will gradually revert back to a longer estimate of time remaining based on current power drop on the battery (over a 15 min window) and whatever the remaining mAh is left in the battery (fuel gauge).
In all these discussions I am assuming the measurement of mAh remaining in a battery is accurate.
New hardware/software can sleep for days with open files, run low resource tasks for 10 hours plus, or crunch big tasks that eats the battery in < 4 hours. That's the higher deviation that means a time estimate will only be accurate under specific steady use. Obviously it was misleading a lot of people. The only mistake Apple made was not quietly moving it out of the menu bar, into a utility back around Leopard.
Lets say we average it over 10 minutes. I've been using my rMBP in my dark den to read an eBook offline for the last 8 hours. It says I have another 8 hours. Misleading. All that really means is 50% battery.
It clearly gets used like a meter to see how fast battery is being used. I think a watt meter would be more "pro". There are good ones easily obtained. Many screen shots in this very thread, with useful reports similar to [gasp] iOS battery use since last charge. Then people can see what apps are important to actively manage.
Which leads me to, "The hell all the anguish on this forum over something so minor?" New Machine. High battery use reported under certain circumstances. Next update - reports of improvement. Where's the drama?
I'm pretty sure the power draw numbers are reasonably accurate. But I think they are derived from testing and system resource use, not a directly reading volt/amp meter. In other words the OS estimates it based on some system statistics and known values.
The estimates will have to catch up to third party software, unless they sandbox everything like iOS does. e.g. Some people are reporting Adobe Cloud processes having more impact than activity monitor would suggest. But we don't want everything sandboxed on Mac OS. Trusted software with direct access to certain system resources is better for us, and that's what we have.
There are a million different use cases. That's why they ask if they can collect generic system information, crash reports, etc. - to optimize. Give Adobe, Apple, everyone else, a few weeks. This is all normal.
[edit] You clearly understand it was an estimate based on current use. Just download one of the excellent battery utilities if you need it in the menu bar.
But if you have followed these forums over the the past couple weeks you can see that's beyond a large number of users jumping on the I have battery issues bandwagon. "All I did was load Chrome with all my default tabs to social media sites, enable Flash and a bunch of other free Cloud services and hook to an external monitor and I'm not getting the guaranteed 10 hours - Wahhh! Tim Cook thin courage. Look here is a screen shot of the battery estimate. I'm a pro but I didn't include a system report or realize my GPU was in use and the freeware was running 50 flash videos in the background to generate add hits."
Meanwhile Apple has already optimized some use cases. Because you get 1 year real support.
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Thanks for your intelligent post here moonjelly, it make quite a change. However, I guess we disagree about the misleading part...to me, 8 hours remaining with 50% left is a perfectly useful and accurate information. It means you'll get another 8 hours of reading your ebook under your current conditions. It it were me reading that book, and I wanted to know how long the battery will last before it dies doing what I am doing right at that moment, that is exactly the information I'd want to know! Indeed, it's the type of information I always like to know, and use frequently, during my travels with a 2011 MBPro running Snow Leopard!
Does it mean the same 50% will get me 8 hours doing something else? Probably not. But then I'm not asking my Mac to be a mind reader...
Ever since first being exposed to OS9 on a blueberry iMac it is the small things that make a Mac a joy to use.
Everything is relative... 99% health? maybe it's a wrong measurement
(OSX Capitan macbook pro retina 15" mid2014)
(OSX Capitan macbook pro retina 15" mid2014)
Just want to say I've been enjoying reading your posts. Clear thinking at its finest! Have a feeling your background is in signal processing and electrical engineering...
Thanks and no worries. I didn't mean that it wasn't useful for you and I. I will probably get a battery analysis app myself. Only that it was too much information for some; either causing confusion or intentionally being used to mislead. People were freaking out watching it move up and down drastically. And they weren't looking past it to see the underlying causes. It makes sense its only available in activity monitor now, where you can [mostly] see where the power is going. Maybe they will put an iOS simple battery report in the drop down if you click on the battery icon in menu bar.
Some will say only cater to professional users. But this OS is used on the whole line. The GUI has always been a simplified interface making computers more approachable. Of course its useful for professionals too. There are good reasons some things are left to a third party, buried in a utility, require the option key to see in a menu, or can only be done from a command shell. All that 'NIX goodness is right under surface for us on MACs.
Cheers! Molecular biology actually...in my field the analysis of "genome-wide" data (for my current work this means population-average intensities of enzyme-DNA interactions at DNA basepair resolution) requires an understanding of signal processing, noise, and sampling variation/error.
Posting after years. Something has changed on Mac Rumors in last few years ... more haters and less Apple fans defending Apple.
I don't think it's a placebo effect if battery monitoring apps are reporting less utilization using the same workload. The key is same workload and this can be subjective. Has anybody done structured testing prior and post the upgrade to prove if the utilization has actually dropped.
Time remaining is a guesstimate based on current utilization but was a good indication of how long the battery will go on if the user continues with the same workload. If it's buried in the activity monitor, that just one additional click but I would have preferred it on the main screen instead of battery percentage.
There are several assumptions about Apple slowing down various devices to address GPU and battery issues. Has anybody run geekbench or other benchmarks pre and post the upgrade to qualify the claims if the CPU, GPU and RAM have been made to operate slower?
My 2016 MBP 15" - 2.9GHz, 460, 2TB which will replace my 2011 MBP is going to arrive before the new year and I am really interested in finding out if this update resolves the issues without any performance compromise.
I don't think it's a placebo effect if battery monitoring apps are reporting less utilization using the same workload. The key is same workload and this can be subjective. Has anybody done structured testing prior and post the upgrade to prove if the utilization has actually dropped.
Time remaining is a guesstimate based on current utilization but was a good indication of how long the battery will go on if the user continues with the same workload. If it's buried in the activity monitor, that just one additional click but I would have preferred it on the main screen instead of battery percentage.
There are several assumptions about Apple slowing down various devices to address GPU and battery issues. Has anybody run geekbench or other benchmarks pre and post the upgrade to qualify the claims if the CPU, GPU and RAM have been made to operate slower?
My 2016 MBP 15" - 2.9GHz, 460, 2TB which will replace my 2011 MBP is going to arrive before the new year and I am really interested in finding out if this update resolves the issues without any performance compromise.
That translates to about 8 hours of battery life. What were you getting before?
Ah yeah, NVRAM! That slipped my mind for some reason - I did the hardware test and everything came out fine. Got the following after doing the reset with common background processes and a few foreground applications up - roughly half the power draw I had before (it fluctuated between 8-11w instead of 17-23w):
Thanks!
Hey just wanted to mention - duet energy usage is very very low when idle (about 1/20th of Chrome or Slack). The average usually takes into account when it was being used as a second display, which is obviously more intense.
That being said, I'll look into ways we can reduce usage even further.
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Yes, tried the basic stiff. My machine just seems to NEVER switch to the intel graphics chip. I also tried killing off doc processes in the terminal (old home-brew "fix"), and reinstalling the OS. I only achieved minor gains for my efforts. 5 hrs or so max just reading iBooks with the screen at 25% brightness - kinda sucks.
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That makes sense - I tend to use Duet somewhat sporadically, so just using alfred to launch it on my macOS side isn't a huge deal. It's definitely some weirdness related to my dGPU drawing power when it shouldn't though, given the nvRAM reset finally giving me some reasonable battery life when not doing anything intensive.
