Apple removing battery life estimates following MacBook Pro complaints
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
To get that far with my MBP I'd need to essentially disable the screen, disable all backgrounding, turn off incremental compiles, and try to be careful about using my clojure repl. You immediately stop using Chrome (despite being a better overall browser) and go to the inferior Safari for battery life, etc.
The tradeoff is that the MBP compiles about 10-15% faster, but as it only lives about 1/2-2/3 as long on a single charge it is not worth it to me.
I do a bit of light web development work every now and then but I'm not really qualified to comment on how good the developer tools in question actually are. To me, they seem to have some nice features and they do what I need.
I'm aware, as I stated above. I know they consume a lot of power, but I'm tired of the apple ecosystem being like '__NEW THING__ that doesn't actually help me in any measurable way.! Buy now for only two easy payments of 1 arm and 1 leg.!'
I'm switching because I can get hardware that's just as good with the surface, and still keep my linux environment, and not have to worry about some fucking stupid ass touch bar and shitty specs being forced down my throat come upgrade time.
There are, however, things like ack, that I have running linux (out of the box, btw) that I had to find a replacement for on macOS.
It's mostly small stuff.
I just had my late 2013 MBP batteries replaced by Apple 2 months ago (machine purchased July 2014). Battery life is already dropping precipitously - so perhaps it's how I charge the machine? I can't find any background services that should cause this to happen. When I got the machine I could easily do 8 hours now 6.5 if I'm very lucky
Everytime there is a macOS vs Linux thread it is repeated that things are quite bad on Linux. I kind of accepted it as the major downside.
I easily get 6h on my Ubuntu machine (Dell XPS 13, 2015) though. If others don't, the difference must be TLP?
Edit: answered in another response (older MBP)
Though Arch linux has an amazing trove of documentation on installing Arch on a Macbook. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBook
It might go down to about 7hs of intensive work, or about 4hs gaming.
Ironically, the only thing my MBP is better at is gaming.
To be fair, others dont have the same workflows, and see far greater than 10-15% CPU+IO improvements.
And people got enraged when the new MBPs wasn't that faster compared to last year. Imagine if it merely had that Surface cpu...
""To be fair"" I don't think my workflow is exceptional for this environment. It varies from big compiles (android) to small compiles (webpack) and web work. It's quite normal for this audience, as far as I can ascertain.
But... I'm not sure why you are commanding me to imagine something here. I have 0 interest in imagining what excuses people make to keep or stop buying hardware from Apple.
I have my own reasons, and I've been pretty public with them. They extend well beyond recent hardware revisions, and have to do a lot more with software and the refusal to ship a touch screen.
This audience isn't the only audience. Video processing/export pipelines, for one, show more than 10-20% improvement in Premiere, and close to 50-100% in FCPX in the new machines.
The Surface Book is probably a better choice for you, though. My workflow sounds pretty similar to yours (maybe not quite as heavy a background load, though I do some incremental compiling and whatnot), and I have the mid-spec 12" Macbook which routinely gives me 10+ hours of programming and web browsing (I use Opera with the adblocker and battery saver turned on). I simply didn't need more power; this little machine handles everything I throw at it. I think a lot of people fetishize computing power to the detriment of their own convenience.
On the contrary, I think many developers here would be interested in the actual difference observed as opposed to benchmarked. My workflow is unusual in the wider world, but compiling Clojure, running webpack, compiling Android executables with Gradle, and running ocaml's compiler are all somewhat unique to this sphere. I feel comfortable talking about it.
> I think a lot of people fetishize computing power to the detriment of their own convenience.
I agree with this. That's why I think my surface book is a good compromise. A nice medium of a lot of things, acceptable speed at standard tasks with excellent battery life, a touch laptop for when touch-centric work and usability arises, and for my eyes the nicest screen shipped on a laptop right now.
I bought this model for the extra battery life. But I'm also far from impressed. It's my main complaint tbh.
I find that my typical usage which is on the heavier side (chrome, + 1hr of facetime) I get about 3.5 hrs battery life.
But the days of 10 hour batter time are over. Regular use on Macbooks is now around five hours and will continue to fall in future versions.
Professional doesn't mean power hungry number cruncher as some people seem to understand it.
A doctor or a lawyer is also a professional.
As for designers and their Adobe products, Adobe would probably release an ARM version pretty fast.
The Macbook Pro is around 50 Wh IIRC, which means if you replaced it with the most expensive cells I use it'd cost $17. And although you do pay more for different cell form factors (typically a decent amount more for flat batteries) the enormous scale that Apple operates at means there's no way the batteries are going to be a price concern no matter their size.
Nobody? Besides the great sales whenever they put out lighter models (the Air, which was booed for not having high cpu, enough connections, etc, Macbook, the same, etc), how's that for "somebody":
"I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light. (...) I’m personally just hoping that I’m ahead of the curve in my strict requirement for “small and silent”. It’s not just laptops, btw – Intel sometimes gives me pre-release hardware, and the people inside Intel I work with have learnt that being whisper-quiet is one of my primary requirements for desktops too. I am sometimes surprised at what leaf-blowers some people seem to put up with under their desks. (...) I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit)"
Linus Torvalds, APRIL 24, 2012
2. Its from 2012, and Torvalds has since picked up a Dell XPS13.
Apple keeps pushing the limits despite annoying some of their customer base. And often times, the bet pays off in the long term - but not always. In the case of battery life, the tech hasn't caught up enough to make it not a problem for customers yet. Example: I have a battery case on my phone that looks like crap.
Just accept that you're not going to make a touchscreen Mac. Accept it. That's fine. I don't want one anyway.
Give me a quad-core newish processor with 32GB of RAM, the fastest SSD that I can imagine, and ten hours of battery life.
If a 15" laptop weights between 2 and 3.5 lbs I don't care. I'm carrying it in a backpack 99% of the time. I'm not going to notice the difference. I will notice the difference when it stops working because my 2.257lb laptop stopped working after 2hrs because it's thin and light.
It wasn't an issue for 16 years, but now it's a problem? Does anyone buy that?
Can you remember the last time this company did something to delight their users?
This assumption breaks down on modern processors that get much of their energy efficiency by non-linear usage techniques such as race to sleep, adjusting cpu clocks for workflow, coalescing interrupts, etc.
Additionally, modern OSes are doing more small random background tasks that are invisible to the user. A machine that is temporarily using a lot of CPU to perform a cloud sync or face detection on some new photos will report that at this level of energy usage you might not have much time left, when in reality the background operation is likely to end shortly and battery life estimates might spike up in 5 minutes.
A user seeing a 3 hour estimate (that is probably wrong per the reasons above) when they are doing nothing that seems energy intensive and concluding that their machine is broken is the problem that Apple is trying to solve here.
Might there be a better way of communicating the energy effect of background tasks on battery to users? Probably, but a single number time remaining is going to be a very hard way to do that (basically asking software to predict the future). The battery life graph over time found in activity monitor is much better.
Something else that would help, and would fit into Apple's MO of moving iOS features to macOS would be a method of allowing users to enter a low power mode that would forgo face detection and spotlight indexing temporarily in favor of more consistent battery life. If it could do this for network usage when I say I am on a slow or metered connection that would be super helpful too.
But uh, my Surface Book's battery indicator is pretty accurate.
This is about changing the estimate to bring it in line with the rest of the industry being a PR disaster. Removing it entirely is esoterica.
I still think something like the battery over time graph is a better solution than a single number with so many assumptions built in that are opaque to the end user. The graph can express "you've not been using a lot of power but whatever you started recently has caused it to drop a lot faster."
The battery life graph over time found in activity monitor is much better.
Obviously it isn't or everyone would be using it. It's more informative from an analytical point of view, but people don't want to do that sort of analysis, that's why they spent $$$$ on a fancy computer. To do simple things for them.
Sure, predicting the future is hard. But assessing how different people use their computers, fitting the pattern of a user's activity to an approximate profile, and interacting with them intelligently to discover which features they want always-available vs which ones can slow down a bit needn't be that hard.
"A user seeing a 3 hour estimate (that is probably wrong per the reasons above) when they are doing nothing that seems energy intensive and concluding that their machine is broken is the problem that Apple is trying to solve here."
I'm sure you're right, and this is a typical Apple move recently. Remove a useful feature because the bottom quartile of their users can't handle it. Never mind the rest of us who can.
We've had CPU frequency scaling in laptops for at least a decade. What's different with the CPU in the new MacBook?
Apparently one of the background tasks can't be to do decent modeling of use. That would be too hard to predict, not like face detection...
OK, got it. That makes sense.
Thanks I agree with you now. You are right, the battery estimator was a terrible idea. It is causing me confusion right now just thinking about it.
I don't know why you're so determined to ignore the actual news and get angry at news you made up.
If it's that simple and it only applies to the miraculous battery of the 2016 MacBook Pro, why remove it from older hardware?
You seem to think that Apple hopes that people will forget that their battery drains quicker if they don't tell them how much time is left in it. I don't think they're that stupid.
I wonder how people are really testing the battery life on these? It seems the only fair way to do it is not log into anything.
Maybe what macOS really needs is a system preference like, "Disable background tasks when running on battery."
This laptop is supposed to have an "all day battery" but in reality I only get 5-6 hours of fairly lightweight usage.
If it is related to background indexing, I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be much visibility into it. None of the Activity Monitor tabs or tools such as htop revealed any particular heavy CPU/disk usage to which I could attribute the poor battery life.
Seriously though, it's pretty insulting to their users to think that removing a basic feature like this is somehow going to change the perceptions about the battery life of the 2016 MBP.
I think the MacBook Pro actually looks like a better than average machine despite some of the issues.
But they squandered all of their goodwill through years of neglect. If they had a normal release schedule, many more people would be willing to give them a pass about the dongles and the battery or touchbar issues or low Max RAM or anything else that's been annoying people.
Personally, I'm starting to think that discrete GPUs are a bit overkill in laptops these days. More and more, I'm finding that modern integrated chipsets are up to the task of basic 3D modeling and graphical programming; the Linux Mesa drivers are even starting to support OpenGL 4.x and Vulkan.
Carry as large / as many batteries as you need, and if you're going somewhere with an outlet you get the benefits of thin/light.
http://www.macworld.com/article/3028132/consumer-electronics...
Granted you don't need to match the power brick unless you want to run the computer at full load while also charging its battery, but I don't know what the requirement is for the computer's max steady-state power draw.
Going to wait for a similar article written for the MBP.
EDIT: Added benefit, they're generic USB batteries and will charge your phone, tablet, eReader, headphones, and whatever else you've got. All things considered, I prefer this scenario to the directly replacable laptop battery, since you no longer have to use the laptop as a passthrough to charge other USB things.
[1]http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/09/09/blotchy...
Isn't it strange Anandtech hasn't reviewed the new MBP yet?
I think there is no need to freak out over this
AES-NI - hardware encryption. There's no way FileVault should be taking that long unless you dump hundreds of gigs of data on at once.
If a modern CPU has AES-NI, I would never expect disk access speed to be constrained by the disk encryption. (Unless, maybe, if you're copying from one internal disk to the other, or if you're copying across a 10gig ethernet.)
End
I can maybe guess under estimates, but people also get really angry when an over estimate suddenly drops to zero.
pmset -g batt