6 ms·

The point is that those estimates aren't actually accurate. That they mislead the end user so they don't belong in primary UI. This article is nice to show tha

The point is that those estimates aren't actually accurate. That they mislead the end user so they don't belong in primary UI. This article is nice to show that you can get the data from the command line (you can still get it elsewhere in macOS too) but the snark at Apple for saying they can't do it when it's in fact a deliberate design choice just makes the author look uninformed & petty.

wyager 10y ago
It doesn't matter if they aren't perfectly accurate. Neither is the battery "percentage"; it's a constructed number that usually has an unintuitive relationship with the actual physical state of the battery. The point is that it's a useful number, as it answers the question "approximately how much longer can I keep doing what I'm doing right now?".
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  Percentage is pretty darn accurate actually. Mostly because it's based on remaining charge not fluctuations in load like time. You can measure this yourself with any lipoly batteries you have at home. It's quite reliable
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Mostly because it's based on remaining charge not fluctuations in load like time. It should display "remaining charge" then, not absolute hours and minutes.
    - lightedman 10y ago
      Most people aren't educated enough to know what math operations to do in order to convert and get a time estimate.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        Most people don't understand that "1 hour remaining" will actually be "20 minutes remaining" if they start some heavy gaming either...
  - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    Percentage is a dynamically constructed estimate too. It's more accurate because the underlying variables tend to change more slowly and predictably, but the actual charge levels corresponding to "0%" and "100%" aren't fixed, and the calculations do sometimes drift noticeably from reality.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Incidentally, this is why you'll sometimes see an improvement in battery life if you do a full discharge. It's not that it's good for the battery itself (quite the opposite, in fact), but it gives the estimator a better view of how the battery is behaving, so it can better estimate the charge level at any given point.
  - wyager 10y ago
    > Percentage is pretty darn accurate actually. Mostly because it's based on remaining charge This is incorrect on both counts. It's based on remaining available energy, which is actually quite hard to calculate. There are two ways you can estimate the remaining energy in a battery under load, and neither of them are very accurate. You can measure the voltage, the relationship between which and remaining energy depends on a huge number of factors including effective internal resistance (which changes with battery age, temperature, and across batches), particulars of the chosen chemistry, physical profile of the cells, current draw, etc. This is probably what you're talking about when you suggest measuring this "at home". It's not what any decent quality laptops use. It works OK at equilibrium though. The other approach is dead reckoning. This involves estimating the discharge profile of the battery (which isn't as simple as "how much charge" the battery holds) and then integrating a non-linear function of the measured current draw based on the discharge profile. This works OK, but you need to combine it with occasional voltage-based recalibration to avoid integration error drift. That usually happens during charging. Either way, not as accurate as you think, and you have to make assumptions about future current draw. If you give me a AA battery, it's literally impossible for me to tell you how much energy you're going to get out of it. It can easily vary by a factor of 20 depending on how you're going to use it. Once you have a rough estimate of the remaining energy (which, again, is different from remaining charge), you can use that to formulate a percentage. But for human factors reasons, the displayed percentage almost never correspond to the actual remaining safe power. Most products stretch out percentages near 100% and 0% to give an impression of longer battery life and to give the user plenty of warning to find a charger.
- bartread 10y ago
  This. I never expected the battery meter to be perfectly accurate, just to give me a rough idea of how much time I have left before I need to start worrying about looking for a power outlet. I find this more useful than a percentage.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >The point is that it's a useful number, as it answers the question "approximately how much longer can I keep doing what I'm doing right now?". If it's not accurate, as you admit, then it doesn't need to be shown with precision it doesn't actually have (X hours YY minutes). The segmented battery icon still shows the same information in a more fuzzy way that fits the accuracy (or lack thereof) better.
  - wyager 10y ago
    No, the percentage tells me nothing about how long I can expect to keep doing what I'm doing. I haven't memorized the power consumption profiles of every task I use my laptop for.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >No, the percentage tells me nothing about how long I can expect to keep doing what I'm doing. At least it misleads you LESS than the time estimate.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Go ahead and round it to nearest 15 or 30 minutes. But showing raw battery charge doesn't have the same info about whether my workload is going to drain that in 2 hours or 5 hours unless I pull out a stopwatch to help teach my computer to count.
mikeash 10y ago
They were sufficiently accurate enough to be useful for a couple of decades. Are we supposed to believe that the release of 10.12.2 marks some watershed moment where they suddenly became useless? No, it's just BS. Apple doesn't want people paying attention to it anymore, so they removed a useful feature just to avoid complaints. The "Apple no longer knows how" bit is obviously a joke. I agree with petty, but it doesn't make them look misinformed.
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  They were pretty terrible all through those decades. They're second only to Windows "time remaining" dialogs as a joke. That's a terrible argument.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Not at all. They assumed a consistent workload, but given that assumption, they were quite good. Programming in a coffee shop, if the estimate said three hours, I'd get about three hours. If I fired up a game and the estimate dropped to 40 minutes, I'd get about 40 minutes. It failed if I took the estimate for one and applied it to the other, but, well, don't do that. I'm getting rather annoyed at people telling me the estimate was useless anyway. I used it!
    - mitchty 10y ago
      > I'm getting rather annoyed at people telling me the estimate was useless anyway. I used it! Indeed, but I think the argument is more: at best it was a current workload time indicator. I'm still on 10.11 but think I might just make a battery power indicator of my own. Been wanting a better one for a while anyway.
      - mikeash 10y ago
        Well, that's my argument. A current workload time indicator is really handy to have.
kristopolous 10y ago
Oh come on now, you can't be serious. The fluctuation, if it exists at all, has real meaning in how people are managing their system. It also gives an indication to the health of battery They could have showed a range, or a smoother average, or a prediction based on previous use. They could have a graphical interface illustrating what programs are causing the fluctuation. Many ways to improve something that's already perfectly adequate. A "people are stupid, let's tell them less" approach is one of the ones making software so profoundly terrible and increasingly less useful.
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  And this is why you don't design UI for major companies. Yes, the data has value to some users: which is why it's still available. It's completely misleading in the general case however which is why it's gone from the general UI
  - mikeash 10y ago
    It was optional and off by default. Why wasn't that good enough?
    - OskarS 10y ago
      Presumably this was their thinking: either the number is accurate, or it isn't. If it is accurate, then we can have a discussion about whether or not we should show it by default. In this case, you would probably decide to show it (or give the option to show or hide it), because it's a number that's highly valuable to the end user. However, if the number IS NOT accurate, then don't even give the user the option to see it. It's just going to be misleading.
      - mikeash 10y ago
        The problem with this thinking is that "accurate" is not a binary property.
      - ptaipale 10y ago
return0 10y ago
or maybe the author has a sense of humor which you lack
thinkMOAR 10y ago
Teds aren't very accurate either, haha Time remaining... 364 Time remaining... 327 - 37 Time remaining... 326 - 1 Time remaining... 361 + 35 Ted, i suggest you remove it too, and not mislead your users :D
tmd83 10y ago
I think the apple bashing was sarcasm and your comment is sillier than the article. It wasn't the primary UI, the primary UI just shows the percentage. Its useful for a lot of user to know some expected runtime given their current usage and now that is inaccessible for a whole lot of regular user. The only thing they needed to make it not confusing to the user was to change 'Time remaining' word to 'Estimated time remaining'. The only thing apple's change did was remove a useful feature from users and maybe make it harder to notice battery performance regression (not that I'm sure if there was any with the latest macbook).
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  The battery indicator menu in the main menu bar isn't primary UI? That's a novel argument.
  - tmd83 10y ago
    Its not what people look at first glance. You get the battery percentage as default. You get this when you actually want an estimate. The wrong thing apple did was calling it 'Time remaining' and not calling it in an estimate. If Microsoft or some Linux distro did this for user complaint I believe you would have been hard pressed to find anyone defending it. I'm typing this on a Macbook pro and while I think this is the best device for me for a lot of reason there so many idiotic Apple decisions out there that I have seen excused away that I'm frankly tired of it.
moolcool 10y ago
I find the time estimates quite useful. They're not 100% accurate, but they give a good idea of "If I keep doing whatever task I'm doing right now, I have X hours left".
terryf 10y ago
How are they not accurate? I'm watching a movie (a fairly common thing to do, I'd say) - the movie has 45 minutes left. I check the battery indicator if I can finish it or do I need to go get the charger. If it's telling me I have more than 50 minutes left I don't get the charger. So far for me, it has worked every single time that I can remember.

wyager 10y ago

It doesn't matter if they aren't perfectly accurate. Neither is the battery "percentage"; it's a constructed number that usually has an unintuitive relationship with the actual physical state of the battery. The point is that it's a useful number, as it answers the question "approximately how much longer can I keep doing what I'm doing right now?".

abritinthebay 10y ago
Percentage is pretty darn accurate actually. Mostly because it's based on remaining charge not fluctuations in load like time. You can measure this yourself with any lipoly batteries you have at home. It's quite reliable
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Mostly because it's based on remaining charge not fluctuations in load like time. It should display "remaining charge" then, not absolute hours and minutes.
  - lightedman 10y ago
    Most people aren't educated enough to know what math operations to do in order to convert and get a time estimate.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Most people don't understand that "1 hour remaining" will actually be "20 minutes remaining" if they start some heavy gaming either...
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  Percentage is a dynamically constructed estimate too. It's more accurate because the underlying variables tend to change more slowly and predictably, but the actual charge levels corresponding to "0%" and "100%" aren't fixed, and the calculations do sometimes drift noticeably from reality.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Incidentally, this is why you'll sometimes see an improvement in battery life if you do a full discharge. It's not that it's good for the battery itself (quite the opposite, in fact), but it gives the estimator a better view of how the battery is behaving, so it can better estimate the charge level at any given point.
- wyager 10y ago
  > Percentage is pretty darn accurate actually. Mostly because it's based on remaining charge This is incorrect on both counts. It's based on remaining available energy, which is actually quite hard to calculate. There are two ways you can estimate the remaining energy in a battery under load, and neither of them are very accurate. You can measure the voltage, the relationship between which and remaining energy depends on a huge number of factors including effective internal resistance (which changes with battery age, temperature, and across batches), particulars of the chosen chemistry, physical profile of the cells, current draw, etc. This is probably what you're talking about when you suggest measuring this "at home". It's not what any decent quality laptops use. It works OK at equilibrium though. The other approach is dead reckoning. This involves estimating the discharge profile of the battery (which isn't as simple as "how much charge" the battery holds) and then integrating a non-linear function of the measured current draw based on the discharge profile. This works OK, but you need to combine it with occasional voltage-based recalibration to avoid integration error drift. That usually happens during charging. Either way, not as accurate as you think, and you have to make assumptions about future current draw. If you give me a AA battery, it's literally impossible for me to tell you how much energy you're going to get out of it. It can easily vary by a factor of 20 depending on how you're going to use it. Once you have a rough estimate of the remaining energy (which, again, is different from remaining charge), you can use that to formulate a percentage. But for human factors reasons, the displayed percentage almost never correspond to the actual remaining safe power. Most products stretch out percentages near 100% and 0% to give an impression of longer battery life and to give the user plenty of warning to find a charger.
bartread 10y ago
This. I never expected the battery meter to be perfectly accurate, just to give me a rough idea of how much time I have left before I need to start worrying about looking for a power outlet. I find this more useful than a percentage.
coldtea 10y ago
>The point is that it's a useful number, as it answers the question "approximately how much longer can I keep doing what I'm doing right now?". If it's not accurate, as you admit, then it doesn't need to be shown with precision it doesn't actually have (X hours YY minutes). The segmented battery icon still shows the same information in a more fuzzy way that fits the accuracy (or lack thereof) better.
- wyager 10y ago
  No, the percentage tells me nothing about how long I can expect to keep doing what I'm doing. I haven't memorized the power consumption profiles of every task I use my laptop for.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >No, the percentage tells me nothing about how long I can expect to keep doing what I'm doing. At least it misleads you LESS than the time estimate.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Go ahead and round it to nearest 15 or 30 minutes. But showing raw battery charge doesn't have the same info about whether my workload is going to drain that in 2 hours or 5 hours unless I pull out a stopwatch to help teach my computer to count.

mikeash 10y ago

They were sufficiently accurate enough to be useful for a couple of decades. Are we supposed to believe that the release of 10.12.2 marks some watershed moment where they suddenly became useless? No, it's just BS. Apple doesn't want people paying attention to it anymore, so they removed a useful feature just to avoid complaints. The "Apple no longer knows how" bit is obviously a joke. I agree with petty, but it doesn't make them look misinformed.

abritinthebay 10y ago
They were pretty terrible all through those decades. They're second only to Windows "time remaining" dialogs as a joke. That's a terrible argument.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Not at all. They assumed a consistent workload, but given that assumption, they were quite good. Programming in a coffee shop, if the estimate said three hours, I'd get about three hours. If I fired up a game and the estimate dropped to 40 minutes, I'd get about 40 minutes. It failed if I took the estimate for one and applied it to the other, but, well, don't do that. I'm getting rather annoyed at people telling me the estimate was useless anyway. I used it!
  - mitchty 10y ago
    > I'm getting rather annoyed at people telling me the estimate was useless anyway. I used it! Indeed, but I think the argument is more: at best it was a current workload time indicator. I'm still on 10.11 but think I might just make a battery power indicator of my own. Been wanting a better one for a while anyway.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Well, that's my argument. A current workload time indicator is really handy to have.

kristopolous 10y ago

Oh come on now, you can't be serious. The fluctuation, if it exists at all, has real meaning in how people are managing their system. It also gives an indication to the health of battery They could have showed a range, or a smoother average, or a prediction based on previous use. They could have a graphical interface illustrating what programs are causing the fluctuation. Many ways to improve something that's already perfectly adequate. A "people are stupid, let's tell them less" approach is one of the ones making software so profoundly terrible and increasingly less useful.

abritinthebay 10y ago
And this is why you don't design UI for major companies. Yes, the data has value to some users: which is why it's still available. It's completely misleading in the general case however which is why it's gone from the general UI
- mikeash 10y ago
  It was optional and off by default. Why wasn't that good enough?
  - OskarS 10y ago
    Presumably this was their thinking: either the number is accurate, or it isn't. If it is accurate, then we can have a discussion about whether or not we should show it by default. In this case, you would probably decide to show it (or give the option to show or hide it), because it's a number that's highly valuable to the end user. However, if the number IS NOT accurate, then don't even give the user the option to see it. It's just going to be misleading.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      The problem with this thinking is that "accurate" is not a binary property.
    - ptaipale 10y ago

return0 10y ago

or maybe the author has a sense of humor which you lack

thinkMOAR 10y ago

Teds aren't very accurate either, haha Time remaining... 364 Time remaining... 327 - 37 Time remaining... 326 - 1 Time remaining... 361 + 35 Ted, i suggest you remove it too, and not mislead your users :D

tmd83 10y ago

I think the apple bashing was sarcasm and your comment is sillier than the article. It wasn't the primary UI, the primary UI just shows the percentage. Its useful for a lot of user to know some expected runtime given their current usage and now that is inaccessible for a whole lot of regular user. The only thing they needed to make it not confusing to the user was to change 'Time remaining' word to 'Estimated time remaining'. The only thing apple's change did was remove a useful feature from users and maybe make it harder to notice battery performance regression (not that I'm sure if there was any with the latest macbook).

abritinthebay 10y ago
The battery indicator menu in the main menu bar isn't primary UI? That's a novel argument.
- tmd83 10y ago
  Its not what people look at first glance. You get the battery percentage as default. You get this when you actually want an estimate. The wrong thing apple did was calling it 'Time remaining' and not calling it in an estimate. If Microsoft or some Linux distro did this for user complaint I believe you would have been hard pressed to find anyone defending it. I'm typing this on a Macbook pro and while I think this is the best device for me for a lot of reason there so many idiotic Apple decisions out there that I have seen excused away that I'm frankly tired of it.

moolcool 10y ago

I find the time estimates quite useful. They're not 100% accurate, but they give a good idea of "If I keep doing whatever task I'm doing right now, I have X hours left".

terryf 10y ago

How are they not accurate? I'm watching a movie (a fairly common thing to do, I'd say) - the movie has 45 minutes left. I check the battery indicator if I can finish it or do I need to go get the charger. If it's telling me I have more than 50 minutes left I don't get the charger. So far for me, it has worked every single time that I can remember.