Slashdot Mirror
Apple Removes the 'Time Remaining' Battery Indicator In New macOS Update (loopinsight.com)
Apple has removed the "time remaining" battery life indicator with the new macOS Sierra update following complaints from several users of new MacBook Pro models. Apple says it stands by its 10-hour battery life claim in the new MacBook Pro models, and adds that the battery life indicator didn't show accurate information. From a report on The Loop: You can still see the image on the top of the screen, and you can see the percentage, but you will no longer be able to see how much time is remaining before your battery dies. [...] Apple said the percentage is accurate, but because of the dynamic ways we use the computer, the time remaining indicator couldn't accurately keep up with what users were doing. Everything we do on the MacBook affects battery life in different ways and not having an accurate indicator is confusing. Besides the apps we are working on all the time, there are a lot of things that are happening in the background that users may not be aware of that affects battery life.
The big gripe here is that Apple's 15" 2015 MBP had a 99.5 watt-hour battery (rated for 9 hours wireless web) while the 2016 15" MBP has a 76 watt-hour battery that's rated for 10 hours. The 2015 model came very close to the rated time, which makes sense with its 31% larger battery.
Apple removing the estimated time, which it's provided for a long time, feels like a really childish response to the backlash they're receiving. It's been largely understood by most that these times are simply estimates based on the recent rate of consumption.
These 2016 MacBook Pros are great machines, but they should've been in the 'MacBook' or 'MacBook Air' product lines.. not Pro.
I will add that, unlike them, I did it properly; I peeled off the hygiene seal rather than leaving it in place so it got rammed inside the container by the spigot. Cunts.
I used to be an operator on a Burroughs B4700 mainframe (which shows you how old I am). It used to blow these 100 amp fuses in the power supply cabinet periodically. We'd call Burroughs, they'd send someone out when they could fit it in their schedule and we'd be down for hours. Finally we found the spare fuses in the engineer cabinet so we'd pop the breakers and replace the fuses ourself. One day a Burroughs FE happened to be in when a fuse blew and we started to replace it when he blew a gasket, telling us how dangerous that was. He proceeded to start changing the fuse but neglected to throw the breakers - and knocked his ass across the room.
To stay on the subject: the B4700 did not have a battery indicator.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Light work naturally will show more time left than playing a video game.
Well that's just it, isn't it? The time-remaining figure, even if calculated accurately based on what you're currently doing still likely bears little resemblance to the actual time you have left before your battery runs out.
Say I'm editing my source code in a text editor -- zero CPU / disk / network usage, very light load, and so my time-remaining figure is 9 hours.
Then I decide it's time to do a fresh compile, and my "make clean; make -j4" drives all cores to 100% and exercises the internal drive for several minutes. Now my time-remaining figure is 2 hours.
Then the compile ends, and the time-remaining figure is back to 8 hours.
Which of those figures was correct? Answer: none of them was. The only way to get a correct figure would be to predict how many times I'm going to recompile in the future. So why bother making up a number that clearly is not going to be correct anyway? It only confuses the issue.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.