Waiting for Battery Life and No Graphic Glitches

[jozero]

Here is what I don't understand. Remember the legendary WAITING FOR SKYLAKE thread ? It went on for THREE YEARS. For three years we all thought there was an imminent release of new MacBooks, they were WAY overdue. Didn't happen. Then SKYLAKE was released, bizarrely no new MacBooks. Then kaby lake was announced, and lot of us thought "oh Apple is huge, they will get early access to new intel chips". Nope. MacBooks announced, we got one year old SKYLAKE chips, wicked fast storage, and a ridiculously solid iterative design.

The new MacBooks come out, and there are an insane amount of reports of crap battery life and graphic issues. Apple, which usually under promises battery life, somehow releases a device which for a lot of people get half that.

WHY ?? HOW ?? These machines were expected three years ago ! The chipset was released a year ago for Pete Sake ! How for goodness sake did they not experience these issues internally ?

Something really isn't adding up. Please no TIM COOK posts. There is literally no better operations guy on the planet. If we assume these MacBooks were delayed by years, that they have been iterating on them internally for years, that Apple had SKYLAKE chips for at least a year, how is it possible these machines are having these basic issues ?

Was the touchbar the delay ? Was the touchbar and its software barely finished just in time and now it's running wild causing battery havoc and screen issues ? Or was this supposed to be the year of ARM macbooks, and for whatever reason they didn't work out, so glued together the touchbar and SKYLAKE ? Something doesn't make sense.

 

[chabig]

The new MacBooks come out, and there are an insane amount of reports of crap battery life and graphic issues. Apple, which usually under promises battery life, somehow releases a device which for a lot of people get half that.

I have one of the new 13" touch bar machines. This is only my option, but I think I get around 8 hours of battery life, which is good enough for me even though Apple says ten. I think the problem is that these new Intel chips try to be very power efficient, so they have gotten better at smartly managing power consumption based on demand. That means it's very difficult to make accurate predictions. As I said, I seem to get around 8 hours of operating time on this machine, but whenever I go to the battery menu, it's always predicting 3-5 hours remaining. I'm learning to ignore the prediction and just use the machine until I need to charge it.

 

[Ma2k5]

Graphical issues due to trusting AMD again - people who believe future software updates will fix it, I'd bet on it never being fixed or the fix involving heavy throttling. (I am talking about some of the graphical issues strictly around the 15", I know the other models have some weird glitches here and there but those are fixable).

As for battery that one is simple, before they had industry leading capacity (99wh and 76wh for 15"/13"). Now down to 75wh/49wh. They chose thinness and lightness over battery life. Simples.