22 ms·

Apple removing battery life estimates following MacBook Pro complaints

110 points by zeitg3ist 10y ago

DoodleBuggy 10y ago
So basically in response to reports of lackluster battery life on the smaller battery equipped 2016 MacBook Pro, they remove the time remaining indicator? LOL! It wasn't an issue for 16 years, but now it's a problem? Does anyone buy that?
- partisan 10y ago
  That is the worst possible response to the situation. It's an insult to the users. There is a battery life problem. Hiding that issue in this way assumes that the users are too dumb to realize.
  - DoodleBuggy 10y ago
    >>>> It's an insult to the users. Can you remember the last time this company did something to delight their users?
- zaphoyd 10y ago
  The time estimates make an assumption that you can use a small sample of energy usage and project it linearly over the remaining battery capacity. 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.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    > 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. 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.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      Windows seems to have more hysteresis or longer sampling period on their estimates. I can light the CPU up, and battery won't drop from eight hours to two until it's been that way for a while.
      - zaphoyd 10y ago
        A longer sampling period could certainly be a potential solution. It could also cause a different sort of user confusion. If I start up a game, play for a few minutes and then worry about battery life and go check.. If I still see 8 hours I'm seeing the wrong info and may make a decision to keep playing that I will regret in two hours. 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."
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    They knew all this before they put it on the market. Why not use some of the hardware development budget - and it's not like Apple has to count pennies - in order to improve upon the existing estimation algorithm? 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.
- eridius 10y ago
  Yes, I do buy that. The article makes a good case that features like iCloud document syncing, Photos face detection, etc. make the battery life very unpredictable for the first few days, and it also doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the new low power + high power CPU setup makes battery life harder to predict.
  - gkop 10y ago
    > the new low power + high power CPU setup makes battery life harder to predict We've had CPU frequency scaling in laptops for at least a decade. What's different with the CPU in the new MacBook?
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    So I'm sure then, that they'll turn it back on in a few days, after everything settles down, right? 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...
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  RTFA. The problem was specifically that the time-remaining estimate was inaccurate and causing confusion.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    That's just BS. It's accurate enough to be useful for many common workloads.
  - DoodleBuggy 10y ago
    Oh but it wasn't a problem in Mac OS X 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12.0, 10.12.1. 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.
    - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
      It's not about which version of OSX you're running. It's about the software not adapting correctly to changes in the hardware, as Zaphoyd already explained to you. Yes, they should probably refine the software instead of just removing the display. But that's a different issue. I don't know why you're so determined to ignore the actual news and get angry at news you made up.
      - DoodleBuggy 10y ago
        >>> It's about the software not adapting correctly to changes in the hardware If it's that simple and it only applies to the miraculous battery of the 2016 MacBook Pro, why remove it from older hardware?
        PhasmaFelis 10y ago
        Because it's a single update for all platforms that does other things as well, and because Apple makes weird decisions sometimes. 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.
WildUtah 10y ago
They keep shrinking the battery to make the machine thinner. Nobody but their internal design team appears to care that the box is getting any thinner than it is already. 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.
- DoodleBuggy 10y ago
  They'll probably switch to ARM soon. The "pro" user need not apply.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Good thing you put the "pro" in quotes, because actual professionals of all kinds will apply en masse. Professional doesn't mean power hungry number cruncher as some people seem to understand it. A doctor or a lawyer is also a professional.
  - heywire 10y ago
    I have to say, I owned a Samsung ARM chromebook (which I promptly wiped and installed Linux on), and it was great. Fanless, and the battery outlasted me. Performance left a bit to be desired, however, but this was an older ARM chip too.
  - hobarrera 10y ago
    Steam and other binary-only software wouldn't work, but for developers and alike, this would be a non-issue. As for designers and their Adobe products, Adobe would probably release an ARM version pretty fast.
- criddell 10y ago
  A smaller battery is less expensive as well. If thinner helps bring the cost down, then I don't think it's just their design team pushing for thinner.
  - zaphoyd 10y ago
guitarbill 10y ago
I thought having some way of knowing "how long can I keep doing the thing I'm currently doing" is basic functionality you'd expect in a laptop (or any powered device, phone, camera, gps/navigation, etc.)
- alyandon 10y ago
  It is basic functionality until it results in bad PR for Apple. :-D 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.
  - jimmaswell 10y ago
    When's the last time Apple introduced a useful feature instead of removing one?
- slantyyz 10y ago
  Well, you can still base it on the % indicator for the battery. It may not tell you a time, but those times have always been a guess at best.
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    Actually, I guess you're right. All the other examples I listed usually only show %. Still, previously I've found the time estimates to be pretty accurate.
- joevandyk 10y ago
  The problem as I understand it is that the "thing you are currently doing" is constantly changing due to changing processors, increasing and decreasing network sync activity, and so on.
tedunangst 10y ago
Would it have killed the author to clarify whether they were over or under estimates? I can maybe guess under estimates, but people also get really angry when an over estimate suddenly drops to zero.
- pfranz 10y ago
  I get the feeling the estimates were "correct" but the load for background tasks is so volatile (heavy indexing and syncing, then nothing after they complete) that Apple now considers them misleading. I guess technically that'd be an underestimate.
- greedo 10y ago
  I doubt that Apple provided any info in that regard. The downsides are too large to warrant any further comment from them.
KirinDave 10y ago
Yeah, having both a new gen Surface book and a new MBP, the difference is stark for CPU and I/O intensive tasks. With battery saver on, the Surface Book can easily last 6-8 hours of use. 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.
- roryisok 10y ago
  Used to be that osx was far better at this than windows. How times have changed. Also: You lucky git.
- DoodleBuggy 10y ago
  You should upgrade to the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro, battery life is easily 8 hours.
  - wcarron 10y ago
    It is most definitely not. I can barely squeeze 6 hours out of mine. Running chrone, small node servers, and mongo processes, keeping background processes to a minimum and screen brightness as low as I can stand. It's deplorable, and I'll be switching to the Surface Pro to run linux as my next machine. At least then I'll get a proper command line for 'meh' battery life.
    - heywire 10y ago
      I found that modgod used to cause my battery life to suffer. Completely idle, it hovered around .5 - 1.0% CPU. Looking at the issue [1], it seems that they solved the issue this summer (I haven't been doing anything with mongo lately, so I can't say if it helped my battery life or not). [1] https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114
    - 10y ago
wlesieutre 10y ago
Does anyone make a USB-C battery pack that can put out enough power to sustain the new MBPs during use? IMO that's going to be the fix for Apple's thinness fetish, a return to the days of replaceable batteries except now they're external. 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.
- CharlesW 10y ago
  Yep, here's a bunch. http://www.macworld.com/article/3028132/consumer-electronics/best-usb-c-battery-pack-review.html http://www.macworld.com/article/3028132/consumer-electronics...
  - wlesieutre 10y ago
    That article's geared toward the 12" MacBook, which uses a 29W power brick. MacBook Pro is either 61W (13") or 87W (15"). I'm not sure that any of these are up to the task yet. 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.
draw_down 10y ago
Jeez, come on. I mean, maybe I think a lot of the griping about new MacBooks is a bit much, but this is just embarrassing. They really do need to figure out what the hell they're doing with Macs.
dang 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534 is a related recent thread.
millzlane 10y ago
Reminds me of when they stopped calling the powerpc Macbooks 'Laptops' and started calling them 'portables' everywhere. To avoid customers placing the hot griddles into their laps.
- andrewpi 10y ago
  Apple's very first "laptop" was called the Macintosh Portable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
- canuckintime 10y ago
  The change was from 'laptops' to 'notebooks' iirc. And those griddles were hot[1] [1]http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/09/09/blotchy_burns_o.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/09/09/blotchy...
  - millzlane 10y ago
    You're right. I stand corrected. Funny how 10 years seems like a long time.
smegel 10y ago
It would be ironic if that new touch bar was draining too much power.
themagician 10y ago
I don't have one of the new ones (yet), and maybe it's just me, but I find the battery life to be completely bananas for the few week or so after a reinstall. Even more so today with iCloud. The amount of background downloading and indexing for iDrive, iCloud, Photos, etc. is bananas for the first week. I recently re-installed on my older MacBook Air and the battery life was like 1.5-4 hours for the first week or so. Now it seems back to the normal range. 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."
- dawnerd 10y ago
  I have a full 200 gig icloud drive filled with photos and when I got my 2016 macbook earlier this year it took a couple weeks for it to finally finish processing everything. Here I thought the point of having all the images in the cloud was so the devices didn't have to process all the images every time you re-install/get a new device. Is it really too much to ask for photos to simply pull images only on demand and not try to download as much as it can if there's space available? This laptop is supposed to have an "all day battery" but in reality I only get 5-6 hours of fairly lightweight usage.
- dimfeld 10y ago
  This fits with what I've seen. Got the new 15" a few weeks ago, and transferred my old system over to it. Battery life was 5 hours at best, usually less (actual usage, not estimated). But then just a day or two ago I'm suddenly getting 8-9 hours with no problem, no change in usage or applications. I don't have much data in iCloud either, as far as I know. 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.
  - eric_h 10y ago
    I've noticed mds (the spotlight indexer) will occasionally, and randomly peg one or more cores on my machine. It seems to come in fits and starts, but it's definitely a battery hog when it's running.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
I can't help but feel amused that a company that bashes others for battery life stamina has now built a computer with battery life that is so bad that it's removing their claims. This is false advertising at its finest and I expect class action lawsuits to follow.
serkanyersen 10y ago
I got the new macbook pro 15' first two days batter life was really bad, 2 hours most. but on the 3rd day it went back to normal. now I get around 10 hours. I think it had something to do with Firevault. Encryption was running in the background and draining the battery now that it's done it's back to normal. I think there is no need to freak out over this
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  Encryption on a brand new Mac typically takes about an hour or so, unless you're dumping a whole load of data. I've always installed (via Homebrew Cask) a bunch of software on my new Macs and FileVault is caught up by the time it's done. 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.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    To put some numbers on this, `cryptsetup benchmark` on my Linux notebook reports 1329 MiB/s encryption speed and 1346 MiB/s decryption speed for 256-bit AES in XTS mode (which is the default stream cipher for Linux's LUKS disk encryption). And that's on a 2012 Core i3. 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.)
hw 10y ago
Even on the older rMBP (mine is 2012) my system just goes on suspend mode at 15-20% battery, even when I'm not doing much so the estimates shouldnt have been that far off. Did all the SMC reset steps and same issue.
amitutk 10y ago
I was waiting for an Anandtech review to get definite answers to questions about the new MBP. Isn't it strange Anandtech hasn't reviewed the new MBP yet?
- zaphoyd 10y ago
  Still waiting for their review of the iPhone 7 SoC...
leggomylibro 10y ago
It's easy to scoff at the timing, but as someone who's had laptops with Nvidia's optimus tech for the past 5-6 years, I can understand why. When you spin up the discrete GPU, even a weak mobile chipset, you can easily halve your battery life. If Apple hasn't quite perfected the decision around when to switch between the integrated and discrete GPUs, then that estimate won't seem very accurate to the average user. Watching youtube/netflix may or may not wake up the beefier GPU depending on how busy the machine is at the time, that sort of thing. 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.
- dimfeld 10y ago
  With a workload of text editing, compiling code, and light web browsing I never saw the new MBP switch to the discrete GPU when I looked at the activity monitor, and I was still getting battery life or 4-5 hours at best (much improved over the past few days though, for some reason). So I suspect this particular issue is not related to discrete GPU switching.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I think this just makes the estimate more important. When your estimated remaining time goes from 6 hours to 3 hours when you fire up a YouTube video, you'll immediately understand that you've started doing something that will greatly impact your battery life.
wlesieutre 10y ago
Just installed the update. The "time remaining" estimate is still present in Activity Monitor, it's only gone from the menu.
throwaway420 10y ago
I almost feel sorry for Apple. Almost. 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.
limeyx 10y ago
Customer: My keyboard isn't working right Apple: Give it here (takes it and doesn't give it back) Customer: My Mouse isn't working right Apple: Give it here (takes it and doesn't give it back) Customer: My laptop isn't working right Apple: Give it here (takes it and doesn't give it back) End
iwritestuff 10y ago
I do dev work. I easily get all day battery life. People complain, people take those complaints as truth for all the MBP 15". None of those complaints about battery life have proven true for mine.
cwisecarver 10y ago
I honestly wish they'd focus on battery tech instead of whiz-bang features like the touchbar. 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.
- stevefeinstein 10y ago
  It's not a zero sum game.
rzhikharevich 10y ago
You can still use this though. pmset -g batt

110 points by zeitg3ist 10y ago

So basically in response to reports of lackluster battery life on the smaller battery equipped 2016 MacBook Pro, they remove the time remaining indicator? LOL! It wasn't an issue for 16 years, but now it's a problem? Does anyone buy that?

partisan 10y ago
That is the worst possible response to the situation. It's an insult to the users. There is a battery life problem. Hiding that issue in this way assumes that the users are too dumb to realize.
- DoodleBuggy 10y ago
  >>>> It's an insult to the users. Can you remember the last time this company did something to delight their users?
zaphoyd 10y ago
The time estimates make an assumption that you can use a small sample of energy usage and project it linearly over the remaining battery capacity. 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.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Windows seems to have more hysteresis or longer sampling period on their estimates. I can light the CPU up, and battery won't drop from eight hours to two until it's been that way for a while.
    - zaphoyd 10y ago
      A longer sampling period could certainly be a potential solution. It could also cause a different sort of user confusion. If I start up a game, play for a few minutes and then worry about battery life and go check.. If I still see 8 hours I'm seeing the wrong info and may make a decision to keep playing that I will regret in two hours. 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."
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  They knew all this before they put it on the market. Why not use some of the hardware development budget - and it's not like Apple has to count pennies - in order to improve upon the existing estimation algorithm? 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.
eridius 10y ago
Yes, I do buy that. The article makes a good case that features like iCloud document syncing, Photos face detection, etc. make the battery life very unpredictable for the first few days, and it also doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the new low power + high power CPU setup makes battery life harder to predict.
- gkop 10y ago
  > the new low power + high power CPU setup makes battery life harder to predict We've had CPU frequency scaling in laptops for at least a decade. What's different with the CPU in the new MacBook?
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  So I'm sure then, that they'll turn it back on in a few days, after everything settles down, right? 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...
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
RTFA. The problem was specifically that the time-remaining estimate was inaccurate and causing confusion.
- mikeash 10y ago
  That's just BS. It's accurate enough to be useful for many common workloads.
- DoodleBuggy 10y ago
  Oh but it wasn't a problem in Mac OS X 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12.0, 10.12.1. 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.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    It's not about which version of OSX you're running. It's about the software not adapting correctly to changes in the hardware, as Zaphoyd already explained to you. Yes, they should probably refine the software instead of just removing the display. But that's a different issue. I don't know why you're so determined to ignore the actual news and get angry at news you made up.
    - DoodleBuggy 10y ago
      >>> It's about the software not adapting correctly to changes in the hardware If it's that simple and it only applies to the miraculous battery of the 2016 MacBook Pro, why remove it from older hardware?
      - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
        Because it's a single update for all platforms that does other things as well, and because Apple makes weird decisions sometimes. 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.

WildUtah 10y ago

They keep shrinking the battery to make the machine thinner. Nobody but their internal design team appears to care that the box is getting any thinner than it is already. 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.

DoodleBuggy 10y ago
They'll probably switch to ARM soon. The "pro" user need not apply.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Good thing you put the "pro" in quotes, because actual professionals of all kinds will apply en masse. Professional doesn't mean power hungry number cruncher as some people seem to understand it. A doctor or a lawyer is also a professional.
- heywire 10y ago
  I have to say, I owned a Samsung ARM chromebook (which I promptly wiped and installed Linux on), and it was great. Fanless, and the battery outlasted me. Performance left a bit to be desired, however, but this was an older ARM chip too.
- hobarrera 10y ago
  Steam and other binary-only software wouldn't work, but for developers and alike, this would be a non-issue. As for designers and their Adobe products, Adobe would probably release an ARM version pretty fast.
criddell 10y ago
A smaller battery is less expensive as well. If thinner helps bring the cost down, then I don't think it's just their design team pushing for thinner.
- zaphoyd 10y ago

guitarbill 10y ago

I thought having some way of knowing "how long can I keep doing the thing I'm currently doing" is basic functionality you'd expect in a laptop (or any powered device, phone, camera, gps/navigation, etc.)

alyandon 10y ago
It is basic functionality until it results in bad PR for Apple. :-D 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.
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  When's the last time Apple introduced a useful feature instead of removing one?
slantyyz 10y ago
Well, you can still base it on the % indicator for the battery. It may not tell you a time, but those times have always been a guess at best.
- guitarbill 10y ago
  Actually, I guess you're right. All the other examples I listed usually only show %. Still, previously I've found the time estimates to be pretty accurate.
joevandyk 10y ago
The problem as I understand it is that the "thing you are currently doing" is constantly changing due to changing processors, increasing and decreasing network sync activity, and so on.

tedunangst 10y ago

Would it have killed the author to clarify whether they were over or under estimates? I can maybe guess under estimates, but people also get really angry when an over estimate suddenly drops to zero.

pfranz 10y ago
I get the feeling the estimates were "correct" but the load for background tasks is so volatile (heavy indexing and syncing, then nothing after they complete) that Apple now considers them misleading. I guess technically that'd be an underestimate.
greedo 10y ago
I doubt that Apple provided any info in that regard. The downsides are too large to warrant any further comment from them.

KirinDave 10y ago

Yeah, having both a new gen Surface book and a new MBP, the difference is stark for CPU and I/O intensive tasks. With battery saver on, the Surface Book can easily last 6-8 hours of use. 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.

roryisok 10y ago
Used to be that osx was far better at this than windows. How times have changed. Also: You lucky git.
DoodleBuggy 10y ago
You should upgrade to the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro, battery life is easily 8 hours.
- wcarron 10y ago
  It is most definitely not. I can barely squeeze 6 hours out of mine. Running chrone, small node servers, and mongo processes, keeping background processes to a minimum and screen brightness as low as I can stand. It's deplorable, and I'll be switching to the Surface Pro to run linux as my next machine. At least then I'll get a proper command line for 'meh' battery life.
  - heywire 10y ago
    I found that modgod used to cause my battery life to suffer. Completely idle, it hovered around .5 - 1.0% CPU. Looking at the issue [1], it seems that they solved the issue this summer (I haven't been doing anything with mongo lately, so I can't say if it helped my battery life or not). [1] https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114 https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-2114
  - 10y ago

wlesieutre 10y ago

Does anyone make a USB-C battery pack that can put out enough power to sustain the new MBPs during use? IMO that's going to be the fix for Apple's thinness fetish, a return to the days of replaceable batteries except now they're external. 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.

CharlesW 10y ago
Yep, here's a bunch. http://www.macworld.com/article/3028132/consumer-electronics/best-usb-c-battery-pack-review.html http://www.macworld.com/article/3028132/consumer-electronics...
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  That article's geared toward the 12" MacBook, which uses a 29W power brick. MacBook Pro is either 61W (13") or 87W (15"). I'm not sure that any of these are up to the task yet. 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.

draw_down 10y ago

Jeez, come on. I mean, maybe I think a lot of the griping about new MacBooks is a bit much, but this is just embarrassing. They really do need to figure out what the hell they're doing with Macs.

dang 10y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534 is a related recent thread.

millzlane 10y ago

Reminds me of when they stopped calling the powerpc Macbooks 'Laptops' and started calling them 'portables' everywhere. To avoid customers placing the hot griddles into their laps.

andrewpi 10y ago
Apple's very first "laptop" was called the Macintosh Portable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable
canuckintime 10y ago
The change was from 'laptops' to 'notebooks' iirc. And those griddles were hot[1] [1]http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/09/09/blotchy_burns_o.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/09/09/blotchy...
- millzlane 10y ago
  You're right. I stand corrected. Funny how 10 years seems like a long time.

smegel 10y ago

It would be ironic if that new touch bar was draining too much power.

themagician 10y ago

I don't have one of the new ones (yet), and maybe it's just me, but I find the battery life to be completely bananas for the few week or so after a reinstall. Even more so today with iCloud. The amount of background downloading and indexing for iDrive, iCloud, Photos, etc. is bananas for the first week. I recently re-installed on my older MacBook Air and the battery life was like 1.5-4 hours for the first week or so. Now it seems back to the normal range. 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."

dawnerd 10y ago
I have a full 200 gig icloud drive filled with photos and when I got my 2016 macbook earlier this year it took a couple weeks for it to finally finish processing everything. Here I thought the point of having all the images in the cloud was so the devices didn't have to process all the images every time you re-install/get a new device. Is it really too much to ask for photos to simply pull images only on demand and not try to download as much as it can if there's space available? This laptop is supposed to have an "all day battery" but in reality I only get 5-6 hours of fairly lightweight usage.
dimfeld 10y ago
This fits with what I've seen. Got the new 15" a few weeks ago, and transferred my old system over to it. Battery life was 5 hours at best, usually less (actual usage, not estimated). But then just a day or two ago I'm suddenly getting 8-9 hours with no problem, no change in usage or applications. I don't have much data in iCloud either, as far as I know. 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.
- eric_h 10y ago
  I've noticed mds (the spotlight indexer) will occasionally, and randomly peg one or more cores on my machine. It seems to come in fits and starts, but it's definitely a battery hog when it's running.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

I can't help but feel amused that a company that bashes others for battery life stamina has now built a computer with battery life that is so bad that it's removing their claims. This is false advertising at its finest and I expect class action lawsuits to follow.

serkanyersen 10y ago

I got the new macbook pro 15' first two days batter life was really bad, 2 hours most. but on the 3rd day it went back to normal. now I get around 10 hours. I think it had something to do with Firevault. Encryption was running in the background and draining the battery now that it's done it's back to normal. I think there is no need to freak out over this

FireBeyond 10y ago
Encryption on a brand new Mac typically takes about an hour or so, unless you're dumping a whole load of data. I've always installed (via Homebrew Cask) a bunch of software on my new Macs and FileVault is caught up by the time it's done. 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.
- majewsky 10y ago
  To put some numbers on this, `cryptsetup benchmark` on my Linux notebook reports 1329 MiB/s encryption speed and 1346 MiB/s decryption speed for 256-bit AES in XTS mode (which is the default stream cipher for Linux's LUKS disk encryption). And that's on a 2012 Core i3. 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.)

hw 10y ago

Even on the older rMBP (mine is 2012) my system just goes on suspend mode at 15-20% battery, even when I'm not doing much so the estimates shouldnt have been that far off. Did all the SMC reset steps and same issue.

amitutk 10y ago

I was waiting for an Anandtech review to get definite answers to questions about the new MBP. Isn't it strange Anandtech hasn't reviewed the new MBP yet?

zaphoyd 10y ago
Still waiting for their review of the iPhone 7 SoC...

leggomylibro 10y ago

It's easy to scoff at the timing, but as someone who's had laptops with Nvidia's optimus tech for the past 5-6 years, I can understand why. When you spin up the discrete GPU, even a weak mobile chipset, you can easily halve your battery life. If Apple hasn't quite perfected the decision around when to switch between the integrated and discrete GPUs, then that estimate won't seem very accurate to the average user. Watching youtube/netflix may or may not wake up the beefier GPU depending on how busy the machine is at the time, that sort of thing. 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.

dimfeld 10y ago
With a workload of text editing, compiling code, and light web browsing I never saw the new MBP switch to the discrete GPU when I looked at the activity monitor, and I was still getting battery life or 4-5 hours at best (much improved over the past few days though, for some reason). So I suspect this particular issue is not related to discrete GPU switching.
mikeash 10y ago
I think this just makes the estimate more important. When your estimated remaining time goes from 6 hours to 3 hours when you fire up a YouTube video, you'll immediately understand that you've started doing something that will greatly impact your battery life.

wlesieutre 10y ago

Just installed the update. The "time remaining" estimate is still present in Activity Monitor, it's only gone from the menu.

throwaway420 10y ago

I almost feel sorry for Apple. Almost. 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.

limeyx 10y ago

Customer: My keyboard isn't working right Apple: Give it here (takes it and doesn't give it back) Customer: My Mouse isn't working right Apple: Give it here (takes it and doesn't give it back) Customer: My laptop isn't working right Apple: Give it here (takes it and doesn't give it back) End

iwritestuff 10y ago

I do dev work. I easily get all day battery life. People complain, people take those complaints as truth for all the MBP 15". None of those complaints about battery life have proven true for mine.

cwisecarver 10y ago

I honestly wish they'd focus on battery tech instead of whiz-bang features like the touchbar. 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.

stevefeinstein 10y ago
It's not a zero sum game.

rzhikharevich 10y ago

You can still use this though. pmset -g batt