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.
New MacBook Pro Users Report Improved Battery Life on macOS 10.12.2
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
If this update reduced power consumption and improved battery life in some way it would have been stated, if only to offset the bad PR relating to the removal of the time estimate.
Terrible coincidence on this one that looks like a conspiracy... The Time Remaining indicator has been removed on some beta builds and there again on later builds over the last year or more. It's been the butt-end of a lot of jokes and was never considered accurate. It's been missing from all pre-beta and beta builds of 10.12.2. It was also missing from many, but not all pre-beta and beta builds of 10.12.1 and 10.12.0. They had it in the release builds of those latter two updates, looks like they finally removed it for good. We used to be able to have the time remaining displayable on the top bar, but that option was removed a while back. I think the only people who ever truly found value in the time estimate are those who do the same monotonous work all day long on their notebooks so it can actually provide an aura of accuracy. Spend 8 hours in Excel with Mail running in the background and occasionally flip between the two? That time estimate probably works awesome for you. Do that for one hour, it says you have 8+ hours remaining. Play a game for an hour, now it says you have 3 hours remaining. Do another 2 hours in Excel, says you have 4 hours remaining. Another hour in Photoshop -- 3% battery warning.
I've had my new MBP for 4 weeks now. On arrival I had some quirky behavior and apps crashing. Saw some screen flickers the one time Premiere crashed on me. Installed 10.12.2 beta (beta 4, IIRC) just because. Actually saw a report that it was running better on the new MBP. No graphics issues since. No weird crashing or other issues as of beta 6 and now the release is on there. Seems alright. Battery life is great, way better than my 2012 rMBP. The one thing I have noticed is apps which use the GPU really drink up the battery and bring battery life more into the realm of the 2012 rMBP for the same sort of tasks, but performance is better. I'm on a fully spec'd 2.9GHz, 460GPU, 2TB SSD in stylish Space Gray.
We used to have it a loooong time ago. Can't remember why Arn took it away. It was quite a storm for a bit. Email Arn. Tell him you want it back. Just don't let it be anonymous.
Unfortunately for me, this update hasn't fixed my problem. My machine will not switch to the integrated GPU when running on battery power even though Activity monitor shows no apps requiring the high performance discreet gpu. The RP 460 drains my battery in 4-5 hours while reading iBooks with the screen brightness at 25%. If I weren't using this machine for work 11 hrs a day, i'd try to get it swapped for a new one.
:-/
:-/
Great example of a dumb-witted comments on MR. Zero depth, Zero insight, Zero smarts
Definitely will do that. If we are allowed to have intensive and opinionated discussions, then we should have a down vote option. This isn't Facebook. Moderators can still moderate.We used to have it a loooong time ago. Can't remember why Arn took it away. It was quite a storm for a bit. Email Arn. Tell him you want it back. Just don't let it be anonymous.
In other news, the processor and graphics are now running under-clocked even more
Last edited:
You didn't read the story, or even look at the photo, did you? Shocker...
My 2016 15" MacBook Pro with Radeon Pro 460 has been in line with Apple's published battery life estimates since day 1. I'm glad to see other people's battery issues have also been sorted out.
But sure, stay woke y'all!
This kind of sounds like an Apple PR media release were it not for the factual inaccuracies. How much of this do you actually know verses guess or presume?
What you claim doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The estimate didn't update continuously and was clearly based on some sort of average. So I doubt it's based on a simple instantaneous power draw updated every so often as you suggest. If it did that it would lead to massive swings in the estimate that are just not observed in reality.
Many people are claiming they found the estimate reasonable and accurate enough to be useful, which wouldn't be the case if its method of calculation was as useless as suggested in your post.
Fortunately Apple were decent enough to keep the estimate in Activity Monitor.
Last edited:
Longer battery life is really easy, just cripple the cpu scheduler a bit and bang, battery last longer. For most power users, I mean Pro users according to MR forums, this will have no effect on their Pro usage for things like utube, emails, rredit, iMessage, twitter, word, etc.
Not sure if I trust estimates based off the wattage used as reported by coconut battery. It seems too early for many users to have actually timed how long the battery can last going from 100% -> ~0%. But I'm hopeful there was a fix. Pretty much the only thing I really didn't like about the 13" MBP w/ TB (after getting over the price and the ports) was the reports of poor battery life. There is always the 13" nTB MBP but I don't think I can live with only 2 ports.
It is a bit concerning that good battery life on these machines will be so dependent on software updates. In my experience future updates tend to forget about battery optimizations (especially for older machines) fairly quickly.
Still, I will choose to be hopeful that gen 2 of these MBPs will have this battery thing ironed out. I'll probably be ready to upgrade by then.
It is a bit concerning that good battery life on these machines will be so dependent on software updates. In my experience future updates tend to forget about battery optimizations (especially for older machines) fairly quickly.
Still, I will choose to be hopeful that gen 2 of these MBPs will have this battery thing ironed out. I'll probably be ready to upgrade by then.
Hmm. Still getting ~4 hours of actual use on my 2016 15" - I do have a few things running in the background / menu bar, but nothing on activity monitor seems to jump out. 460 but it switches to integrated fine. My idle draw is 8-11w. :/ Wifi on, bluetooth off, no apps open in foreground, screen dimmed. Any suggestions? It's better than the ~2 with my early 2011 (ssd + platter drives via owc, upgraded RAM)
Everything works fine aside from headphones while bootcamped in Windows 10 (and bootcamp assistant didn't copy over files to internal partition, had to do some jiggling with downloading drivers for my machine on top of an install made from a USB drive on someone else's).
Everything works fine aside from headphones while bootcamped in Windows 10 (and bootcamp assistant didn't copy over files to internal partition, had to do some jiggling with downloading drivers for my machine on top of an install made from a USB drive on someone else's).
Last edited:
I can ask you the same thing - how little do you actually know?
The estimate updated every minute. This forum is full of people describing massive swings in the estimate. Indeed, it was one of the main complaints with the new MBPs.
Also, my claim was a paraphrasing of Apple's own support article:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204054
So you're saying a company with the size and resources of Apple couldn't update a battery indicator alongside introducing those new features, and even so, after years of real usage feedback anonymously sent by its users?
Apparently you struggle with reading comprehension. What he said was that the battery estimate was never accurate to begin with. It may as well display any random number because the estimates are always based on what's happening at the time of the update. This leads to wildly changing remaining times and a really useless indication of time remaining.
Your iPhone doesn't tell you time remaining for this very reason and yet no one has been complaining about the lack of such indicators on the iPhone.
They only changed it because the numbers on the new (2016) MBP look like ****.
You know it and I know it.
It's a BS move.
Not sure if it's been asked yet, but I'd like to know does this also have an affect on the pre-2016 MacBook Pro's? Do those generations now get even more battery life they did also? 10+?
Indeed. On first use on battery mine was estimating 3-4 hours, indexing still running, along with initial Crashplan backup. After indexing and backup finished, next outing running on battery, estimate jumped to over 9 hours.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.