Is there a background for this? I don't understand the article.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/13/13939278/apple-macos-sier...
No idea why this came up at the same time as the hardware launch. macOS has had various background sync tasks for a while — iCloud sync, Photos, Time Machine, etc. Sierra adds some background services (specifically, "Optimized Storage") that might have a bigger effect.
And quite annoying that they're "recognizing" this, when it's often quite useful and not at all misleading. I made good use of that display before, and now they've taken it away.
Personally I've now disabled Apple's battery menu extra and replaced it with the one from iStat Menus because that still has a time estimate.
It's an $18 utility, but it's very well designed and has a clock menu extra that's similarly more useful than the one Apple gives you (calendar and multiple time zones in the dropdown).
iStat battery screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/bi95Fs9.jpg
b) It's not sold through the App Store anyway
Take your pick.
Or was reported to have "failed to live up to expectations", by idiots who merely assumed the estimate and didn't bother to do an actual clock wall check.
Rather they decided to cut the fake precision (X hours YY minutes) and stick to the segmented-battery icon display.
It's like some statistics were saying there's a 45.32% chance of something, just because that's what their simplistic division of the samples gives them, despite the confidence margin being plus/minus 5 percentage points.
Instead, they now tell you it's "between 40% and 50%".
The target audience of the statistics is not "punished because some idiots took 45.32% literally". They are just shown a better value.
I'd argue that more correct is by definition more useful.
Projections about Earth's global warming are undoubtedly less correct but far more useful because they are actionable.
Correctness is not synonymous with usefulness.
Also related around that time: Apple pushed an update for AT&T that changed their HSPA indicator from 3G to 4G without any upgrade haven taken place.
Same as any other kind of estimate (yes, even the legendarily-terrible Windows file copy dialog). It's not misleading, you just have to understand what the numbers mean.