7 ms·

MacBook Battery Time Remaining

65 points by konstruktors 10y ago

kalleboo 10y ago
Bring on the machine learning battery gauges?
- Jack000 10y ago
  if it runs on the GPU it will have to take its own power draw into account
  - whywhywhywhy 10y ago
    > if it runs on the GPU It will struggle to function at all seen as no Apple machine ships with a decent CUDA card.
frankomonster 10y ago
Love that Apple keeps adding "features" like this. Not even SlimBatteryMonitor still works thanks to this update. What a time to be alive, watching Apple choke on their own arrogance. Their one shot at a big comeback is the iPhone 10th anniversary edition. If it is as much of a smash hit as Robert Scoble keeps heralding then Apple will be golden for another decade.
- nkkollaw 10y ago
  I'm using Battery Monitor (http://www.rockysandstudio.com/index.html#freeapps http://www.rockysandstudio.com/index.html#freeapps) and it works great. Of course, it would've been better if I didn't have to install a third-party app and I had one less icon in my menu bar, but whatever.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  pmset -g batt Bonus points: easy to add in tmux-powerline running fullscreen in iTerm2
- johansch 10y ago
  This hilarious Scoble piece? https://virtualrealitypop.com/im-inside-tim-cook-s-head-but-i-really-wonder-what-s-going-on-inside-mark-zuckerberg-s-head-5babf01c5713 https://virtualrealitypop.com/im-inside-tim-cook-s-head-but-... I wonder what he has been smoking. I love this sentence: "You pop it into a headset which has eye sensors on it, which enables the next iPhone to have a higher apparent frame rate and polygon count than a PC with a Nvidia 1080 card in it."
  - matt4077 10y ago
    That's quite an insult to pot. Robert Scoble is just an idiot.
    - JshWright 10y ago
      You can smoke things other than pot...
    - Nekorosu 10y ago
      Definitely not pot. Probably bath salts.
  - kfinley 10y ago
    > "You pop it into a headset which has eye sensors on it, which enables the next iPhone to have a higher apparent frame rate and polygon count than a PC with a Nvidia 1080 card in it." Interesting. Ive said that the touch bar was the first step in a new paradigm. Maybe the next step is connect your iPhone as the display. That would explain why Apple stopped investing in displays.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  Maybe it'll be a special collector's piece, like the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh.
shabbyrobe 10y ago
Having used and trusted the "time remaining" calculation in Macs for years, it's very hard not to be suspicious of the timing here. A series of less-than-stellar reports of battery life in the new MacBook Pros, and then all of a sudden the indicator is inaccurate? Nope, not buying it.
jakobegger 10y ago
The time remaining indicator was really useful. It was more than accurate enough. It allowed me to see at a glance if I had enough charge to finish the movie, if it would last for the rest of the train ride, etc. If I saw that the battery wouldn't last as long as I had expected, closing Slack would fix it. The problem with the time remaining indicator was that people started reporting the displayed time as actual run time. I read a couple of blog posts where people claimed that the battery life time of the Macbooks was reduced, based on the estimates they saw in the battery menu. They didn't actually time the run time of their Macbooks, presumably because that would take 5-10 hours, or longer if you want to repeat the measurement. So Apple is claiming that these people are wrong, the indicator was inaccurate, and they removed it. Of course, the problem is that most likely battery life actually is lower. The battery of the new MacBook Pro is significantly smaller than the predecessor's, but the components don't use significantly less power. With the increasing popularity of Electron based apps, average power consumption is probably even increasing. For the user, this is a huge loss. We've learned to live with the battery time estimate, and we know that the time remaining isn't absolute; just like we know that the remaining range displayed on the dashboard of most recent cars depends heavily on the driving style. Fortunately, there are 3rd party tools that display the estimate Apple removed -- I downloaded Coconut Battery. But I wish we wouldn't have to rely on 3rd party tools for such basic functionality. Macs used to come with "batteries included".
- kalleboo 10y ago
  > Of course, the problem is that most likely battery life actually is lower. The battery of the new MacBook Pro is significantly smaller than the predecessor's, but the components don't use significantly less power Exactly. Apple has always designed their devices to a battery life target. But as "wireless web" and "movie playback" both depend on use cases that get more and more optimized as Apple improve their software, they get more and more disconnected from the reality of pro users. How about a "editing a Swift Playground" battery life estimation? Or Photoshop? What Pro user spends all their day browsing the web and watching movies? Those make sense for the regular MacBook, not the Pro.
  - tajen 10y ago
tekklloneer 10y ago
I know why apple hasn't, but I'd kill for a $1500 macbook stuffed into a macbook pro case, and all of that spare space taken up by battery. Give me a core-m, 8GB RAM, a high res display, and a massive battery.
- gambiting 10y ago
  I would also settle for a battery pack which charges the MacBook at full speed over USB. I know the latest one charges from battery packs, but they can usually provide 15-20W, so it's a bit from the charger's 65 or 85W.
- toyg 10y ago
  It would weight like a similarly-sized coffee-table book, you'd need a cart to drag it around. But yeah, overall Apple should give us more options. It was fine before with dedicated lineups - Air for battery-life and portability, Pro for ultimate power. The current lineup makes both segments pay more while giving them stuff they don't need.
- canuckintime 10y ago
  All these years I've wanted a lightweight 15" (or 17") MacBook/Air but Apple insists on segmenting the larger laptops at more expensive prices. Apple won't even offer a 15" MBP without the dGPUs now. Apple should simply offer two lines of laptop: 11"/13"/15" MacBooks optimized for thinness 13"/15"/17" MacBook Pros optimized for power
ars 10y ago
Have they never heard of averages? Just show time remaining based on last 5 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, and all data. Or does apple not like that kind of "complexity" and wants just a single number?
- SFJulie 10y ago
  Average makes bad estimations for non linear phenomenon. And nothing can be done about it. Math 101. And what could be better? Well, nothing we don't have the math for that problem in the first place. If we had, we could predict weather accurately with a time window bigger than 24hours... 24 hours is the accuracy weather forecasts are having since decades even with Moore laws multiplying the power of processors... Even by throwing more money and engineers at them some problems cannot be solved. The only way to average non linear phenomenon is to scale the problem to an extra large population or make prediction on ultra short time. Actually I guess that if users were seeing there battery lifetime sucked dramatically every time they use WiFi, or GPU it would create an adverse effect on computer users of making them anxious (human beings are weird animals) and some of them would use less their computers. Imagine if SUV were showing an estimation of mileage dropping sharply when you make a big acceleration? People would stop accelerating like mad men, hence it would kill the SUV/sport car market. You don't want to kill a really good and rational economy, do you? Sellers don't want you to be economical in your use of anything, else it kills the market as sure as a pair of crocs lasts for years. We live in an era where consumers and producers want to use moar resources, moar energy and feel good about it, not anxious. Does the planet have limited resources, is it irresponsible? No! Let's throw more money and engineers at a problem and we surely can solve it. I guess immortality and super powers are just around the corner. lol.
  - bluedino 10y ago
    >> Imagine if SUV were showing an estimation of mileage dropping sharply when you make a big acceleration? That's how it works with any vehicle that has a real-time MPG readout
azr79 10y ago
Excuse me?! That's how it worked for years and everyone knew that, and still it was useful to estimate the current workload of your machine. Why all of the sudden something that worked for years isn't viable anymore coincidentally when people started complaining about new MBP's shitty battery life? Nobody's buying it.
- riprowan 10y ago
  Also the news today reports "Apple Working with Consumer Reports on Macbook Pro Battery Issue" [1] Reading between the lines: "Apple Pressures Consumer Reports to Change its Story" You don't need to "work with" Consumer Reports to fix the issue. Just fix it. Why "work with"? Does Consumer Reports have engineers that will help Apple understand the problem? Is Consumer Reports an isolated incident that just needs some tech support to help them understand the computer? Smacks of whitewashing to me. [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer-reports-on-macbook-pro-battery-issue/ https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer-report...
  - eli 10y ago
    Don't know how much you know about Consumer Reports, but I don't think they can't be pressured.
  - crisfine 10y ago
    Imagine for a moment that you thought you'd made a good device. Now imagine that a respected organization did their own testing and said they couldn't recommend it. Would you want to work with them to understand why you came to opposing conclusions? There's no real chance of bullying, as CR buys the products they test, and has decades of experience with huge companies not loving their reviews.
    - canuckintime 10y ago
      Consumer Reports already sent Apple their logs on the test machines before the review. CR had already made a good faith effort to find the source of the opposing conclusions. However: > In his tweet, Schiller linked to a story from iMore that says Consumer Reports was just going for a pre-Christmas headline and should have done more testing. Apple is trying to bully/influence the public reception to CR's review. Gruber has spent more time dissing the CR review (and distracting from Gurman's expose on the Mac troubles which he hasn't linked to on DF)
ourcat 10y ago
Exactly. It's like a car manufacturer saying how many miles to the gallon you're going to get, without knowing that you're a terrible driver who never gets out of 2nd gear ;)
ebbv 10y ago
Is this really news to anyone? Of course it's hard to estimate, the same goes for MPG/miles until empty in a petrol or diesel car. That doesn't make the measurement of current estimate useless. It's still a useful tool. Users understand if they close windows in their browsers, or shut down Battlefield 958 that will prolong their battery life and that if they turn up screen brightness that will cost them battery life. Apple chose the lazy way out of this problem. The estimate was not any more inaccurate than it ever was in the past (at least I haven't seen any evidence that it was), and user's aren't any dumber. Apple just didn't like the press and made a stupid change to try to correct that issue. Lame.
justapassenger 10y ago
Oh, easy - we're just holding our macboocks wrong, that's messing with battery estimates.

65 points by konstruktors 10y ago

kalleboo 10y ago

Bring on the machine learning battery gauges?

Jack000 10y ago
if it runs on the GPU it will have to take its own power draw into account
- whywhywhywhy 10y ago
  > if it runs on the GPU It will struggle to function at all seen as no Apple machine ships with a decent CUDA card.

frankomonster 10y ago

Love that Apple keeps adding "features" like this. Not even SlimBatteryMonitor still works thanks to this update. What a time to be alive, watching Apple choke on their own arrogance. Their one shot at a big comeback is the iPhone 10th anniversary edition. If it is as much of a smash hit as Robert Scoble keeps heralding then Apple will be golden for another decade.

nkkollaw 10y ago
I'm using Battery Monitor (http://www.rockysandstudio.com/index.html#freeapps http://www.rockysandstudio.com/index.html#freeapps) and it works great. Of course, it would've been better if I didn't have to install a third-party app and I had one less icon in my menu bar, but whatever.
Fnoord 10y ago
pmset -g batt Bonus points: easy to add in tmux-powerline running fullscreen in iTerm2
johansch 10y ago
This hilarious Scoble piece? https://virtualrealitypop.com/im-inside-tim-cook-s-head-but-i-really-wonder-what-s-going-on-inside-mark-zuckerberg-s-head-5babf01c5713 https://virtualrealitypop.com/im-inside-tim-cook-s-head-but-... I wonder what he has been smoking. I love this sentence: "You pop it into a headset which has eye sensors on it, which enables the next iPhone to have a higher apparent frame rate and polygon count than a PC with a Nvidia 1080 card in it."
- matt4077 10y ago
  That's quite an insult to pot. Robert Scoble is just an idiot.
  - JshWright 10y ago
    You can smoke things other than pot...
  - Nekorosu 10y ago
    Definitely not pot. Probably bath salts.
- kfinley 10y ago
  > "You pop it into a headset which has eye sensors on it, which enables the next iPhone to have a higher apparent frame rate and polygon count than a PC with a Nvidia 1080 card in it." Interesting. Ive said that the touch bar was the first step in a new paradigm. Maybe the next step is connect your iPhone as the display. That would explain why Apple stopped investing in displays.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Maybe it'll be a special collector's piece, like the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh.

shabbyrobe 10y ago

Having used and trusted the "time remaining" calculation in Macs for years, it's very hard not to be suspicious of the timing here. A series of less-than-stellar reports of battery life in the new MacBook Pros, and then all of a sudden the indicator is inaccurate? Nope, not buying it.

jakobegger 10y ago

The time remaining indicator was really useful. It was more than accurate enough. It allowed me to see at a glance if I had enough charge to finish the movie, if it would last for the rest of the train ride, etc. If I saw that the battery wouldn't last as long as I had expected, closing Slack would fix it. The problem with the time remaining indicator was that people started reporting the displayed time as actual run time. I read a couple of blog posts where people claimed that the battery life time of the Macbooks was reduced, based on the estimates they saw in the battery menu. They didn't actually time the run time of their Macbooks, presumably because that would take 5-10 hours, or longer if you want to repeat the measurement. So Apple is claiming that these people are wrong, the indicator was inaccurate, and they removed it. Of course, the problem is that most likely battery life actually is lower. The battery of the new MacBook Pro is significantly smaller than the predecessor's, but the components don't use significantly less power. With the increasing popularity of Electron based apps, average power consumption is probably even increasing. For the user, this is a huge loss. We've learned to live with the battery time estimate, and we know that the time remaining isn't absolute; just like we know that the remaining range displayed on the dashboard of most recent cars depends heavily on the driving style. Fortunately, there are 3rd party tools that display the estimate Apple removed -- I downloaded Coconut Battery. But I wish we wouldn't have to rely on 3rd party tools for such basic functionality. Macs used to come with "batteries included".

kalleboo 10y ago
> Of course, the problem is that most likely battery life actually is lower. The battery of the new MacBook Pro is significantly smaller than the predecessor's, but the components don't use significantly less power Exactly. Apple has always designed their devices to a battery life target. But as "wireless web" and "movie playback" both depend on use cases that get more and more optimized as Apple improve their software, they get more and more disconnected from the reality of pro users. How about a "editing a Swift Playground" battery life estimation? Or Photoshop? What Pro user spends all their day browsing the web and watching movies? Those make sense for the regular MacBook, not the Pro.
- tajen 10y ago

tekklloneer 10y ago

I know why apple hasn't, but I'd kill for a $1500 macbook stuffed into a macbook pro case, and all of that spare space taken up by battery. Give me a core-m, 8GB RAM, a high res display, and a massive battery.

gambiting 10y ago
I would also settle for a battery pack which charges the MacBook at full speed over USB. I know the latest one charges from battery packs, but they can usually provide 15-20W, so it's a bit from the charger's 65 or 85W.
toyg 10y ago
It would weight like a similarly-sized coffee-table book, you'd need a cart to drag it around. But yeah, overall Apple should give us more options. It was fine before with dedicated lineups - Air for battery-life and portability, Pro for ultimate power. The current lineup makes both segments pay more while giving them stuff they don't need.
canuckintime 10y ago
All these years I've wanted a lightweight 15" (or 17") MacBook/Air but Apple insists on segmenting the larger laptops at more expensive prices. Apple won't even offer a 15" MBP without the dGPUs now. Apple should simply offer two lines of laptop: 11"/13"/15" MacBooks optimized for thinness 13"/15"/17" MacBook Pros optimized for power

ars 10y ago

Have they never heard of averages? Just show time remaining based on last 5 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, and all data. Or does apple not like that kind of "complexity" and wants just a single number?

SFJulie 10y ago
Average makes bad estimations for non linear phenomenon. And nothing can be done about it. Math 101. And what could be better? Well, nothing we don't have the math for that problem in the first place. If we had, we could predict weather accurately with a time window bigger than 24hours... 24 hours is the accuracy weather forecasts are having since decades even with Moore laws multiplying the power of processors... Even by throwing more money and engineers at them some problems cannot be solved. The only way to average non linear phenomenon is to scale the problem to an extra large population or make prediction on ultra short time. Actually I guess that if users were seeing there battery lifetime sucked dramatically every time they use WiFi, or GPU it would create an adverse effect on computer users of making them anxious (human beings are weird animals) and some of them would use less their computers. Imagine if SUV were showing an estimation of mileage dropping sharply when you make a big acceleration? People would stop accelerating like mad men, hence it would kill the SUV/sport car market. You don't want to kill a really good and rational economy, do you? Sellers don't want you to be economical in your use of anything, else it kills the market as sure as a pair of crocs lasts for years. We live in an era where consumers and producers want to use moar resources, moar energy and feel good about it, not anxious. Does the planet have limited resources, is it irresponsible? No! Let's throw more money and engineers at a problem and we surely can solve it. I guess immortality and super powers are just around the corner. lol.
- bluedino 10y ago
  >> Imagine if SUV were showing an estimation of mileage dropping sharply when you make a big acceleration? That's how it works with any vehicle that has a real-time MPG readout

azr79 10y ago

Excuse me?! That's how it worked for years and everyone knew that, and still it was useful to estimate the current workload of your machine. Why all of the sudden something that worked for years isn't viable anymore coincidentally when people started complaining about new MBP's shitty battery life? Nobody's buying it.

riprowan 10y ago
Also the news today reports "Apple Working with Consumer Reports on Macbook Pro Battery Issue" [1] Reading between the lines: "Apple Pressures Consumer Reports to Change its Story" You don't need to "work with" Consumer Reports to fix the issue. Just fix it. Why "work with"? Does Consumer Reports have engineers that will help Apple understand the problem? Is Consumer Reports an isolated incident that just needs some tech support to help them understand the computer? Smacks of whitewashing to me. [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer-reports-on-macbook-pro-battery-issue/ https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer-report...
- eli 10y ago
  Don't know how much you know about Consumer Reports, but I don't think they can't be pressured.
- crisfine 10y ago
  Imagine for a moment that you thought you'd made a good device. Now imagine that a respected organization did their own testing and said they couldn't recommend it. Would you want to work with them to understand why you came to opposing conclusions? There's no real chance of bullying, as CR buys the products they test, and has decades of experience with huge companies not loving their reviews.
  - canuckintime 10y ago
    Consumer Reports already sent Apple their logs on the test machines before the review. CR had already made a good faith effort to find the source of the opposing conclusions. However: > In his tweet, Schiller linked to a story from iMore that says Consumer Reports was just going for a pre-Christmas headline and should have done more testing. Apple is trying to bully/influence the public reception to CR's review. Gruber has spent more time dissing the CR review (and distracting from Gurman's expose on the Mac troubles which he hasn't linked to on DF)

ourcat 10y ago

Exactly. It's like a car manufacturer saying how many miles to the gallon you're going to get, without knowing that you're a terrible driver who never gets out of 2nd gear ;)

ebbv 10y ago

Is this really news to anyone? Of course it's hard to estimate, the same goes for MPG/miles until empty in a petrol or diesel car. That doesn't make the measurement of current estimate useless. It's still a useful tool. Users understand if they close windows in their browsers, or shut down Battlefield 958 that will prolong their battery life and that if they turn up screen brightness that will cost them battery life. Apple chose the lazy way out of this problem. The estimate was not any more inaccurate than it ever was in the past (at least I haven't seen any evidence that it was), and user's aren't any dumber. Apple just didn't like the press and made a stupid change to try to correct that issue. Lame.

justapassenger 10y ago

Oh, easy - we're just holding our macboocks wrong, that's messing with battery estimates.