5 ms·

My journey to drain the M2 MacBook Pro’s battery

17 points by carlycue 4y ago

GekkePrutser 4y ago
Apple does a lot of dirty tricks though that make it not really comparable to other OSes. On my M1 mini I don't want anything to ever go to sleep. It doesn't have a battery and I don't care about energy use, it's not that much anyway. So I switched it off (Apple only offers a slider for this).. Yet every morning when I go to use the machine every app is playing "catch up" and it's slow for the first few minutes. I hate this especially because I have to use MS Office and Teams for work which are extremely poorly optimized on Mac. Especially teams, a lot of people's statuses get stuck during the night and only when I click on them it updates to the real status. I just want every app to stay awake all the time. I'm sure they can advertise great battery life like this but it's not what I need. I understand they want to optimize but there must be an opt-out. PS maybe calling it a dirty trick is a bit harsh but it's so frustrating when I get at the computer and it still needs to 'wake up' even though it's not set to go to sleep.
- musicale 4y ago
  > Apple only offers a slider for this One way to get the display to turn off immediately is by setting a hot corner in Desktop & Screen Saver>Screen Saver>Hot Corners... to "Put Display to Sleep" and then dragging the pointer to the appropriate corner. Works like a charm. > there must be an opt-out There are at least two: 1. System Preferences>Battery [√] Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off 2. caffeinate(8) command $ man caffeinate Note it has some interesting options such as configuring display/system/disk sleep as well as preventing the system from sleeping while running a specified command (e.g. make).
- opan 4y ago
  >Especially teams, a lot of people's statuses get stuck during the night and only when I click on them it updates to the real status. This 100% happens on Windows, and not just from leaving it overnight, but using it actively for hours after powering on in the morning. Statuses getting stuck is just a bug, I think. I've even seen it with my own status, repeatedly trying to set myself Away for lunch but still being shown Available or Busy. After a few attempts I usually give up, and I come back later to usually see it changed eventually. I don't expect proprietary software to be high quality or especially usable, so it doesn't surprise me much.
  - musicale 4y ago
    This is a good point. I've found Teams to be rather buggy and unreliable, on both the client and server sides. The most annoying bit is Microsoft's monthly (or so) service outages when you can't log in. > I don't expect proprietary software to be high quality or especially usable, so it doesn't surprise me much. If I pay for a piece of software and it doesn't work as advertised, I ask for a refund. If I'm paying for a service like Teams or Office 365 that doesn't work as advertised, I stop paying for it. Unfortunately I'm not the one who is paying Microsoft for Teams, nor am I the person who selected it over various alternatives. That being said, what do you recommend as some higher quality free/open source alternative to Teams / Office 365 / Gsuite, etc.?
    - opan 4y ago
      >Teams IRC is my personal favorite, but I'd look at XMPP or Matrix if you need something a bit more fancy. I use all three a bit outside of work. >Office I don't use office software much. I prefer to deal with plaintext when possible and use vim or emacs. I usually have LibreOffice installed if I need to do something especially office-y, but I'm not sure I can properly defend/recommend it when I don't actually know it that well. I think IRC, email, and git all still work pretty well. I think NextCloud has some sort of office stuff that could be worth looking into as well. I will add that Teams and some of these other popular proprietary programs have a LOT of features, and you probably won't get full feature parity elsewhere, but I also believe a lot of these features just aren't really needed. I like to think of things in more general terms, like "chat program", not "Teams alternative" or "Teams clone". I don't expect all similar software to have the same featureset. At work I've had to use Webex, Zoom, and Teams depending on who I'm working with. Some places have bans on certain software of this type. On that note, I was initially thinking of text chats in Teams as that's 99% of what I do with it at work, but if you do need the voice/video aspects, then I'd probably recommend Jitsi or maybe Mumble.

17 points by carlycue 4y ago

Apple does a lot of dirty tricks though that make it not really comparable to other OSes. On my M1 mini I don't want anything to ever go to sleep. It doesn't have a battery and I don't care about energy use, it's not that much anyway. So I switched it off (Apple only offers a slider for this).. Yet every morning when I go to use the machine every app is playing "catch up" and it's slow for the first few minutes. I hate this especially because I have to use MS Office and Teams for work which are extremely poorly optimized on Mac. Especially teams, a lot of people's statuses get stuck during the night and only when I click on them it updates to the real status. I just want every app to stay awake all the time. I'm sure they can advertise great battery life like this but it's not what I need. I understand they want to optimize but there must be an opt-out. PS maybe calling it a dirty trick is a bit harsh but it's so frustrating when I get at the computer and it still needs to 'wake up' even though it's not set to go to sleep.

musicale 4y ago
> Apple only offers a slider for this One way to get the display to turn off immediately is by setting a hot corner in Desktop & Screen Saver>Screen Saver>Hot Corners... to "Put Display to Sleep" and then dragging the pointer to the appropriate corner. Works like a charm. > there must be an opt-out There are at least two: 1. System Preferences>Battery [√] Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off 2. caffeinate(8) command $ man caffeinate Note it has some interesting options such as configuring display/system/disk sleep as well as preventing the system from sleeping while running a specified command (e.g. make).
opan 4y ago
>Especially teams, a lot of people's statuses get stuck during the night and only when I click on them it updates to the real status. This 100% happens on Windows, and not just from leaving it overnight, but using it actively for hours after powering on in the morning. Statuses getting stuck is just a bug, I think. I've even seen it with my own status, repeatedly trying to set myself Away for lunch but still being shown Available or Busy. After a few attempts I usually give up, and I come back later to usually see it changed eventually. I don't expect proprietary software to be high quality or especially usable, so it doesn't surprise me much.
- musicale 4y ago
  This is a good point. I've found Teams to be rather buggy and unreliable, on both the client and server sides. The most annoying bit is Microsoft's monthly (or so) service outages when you can't log in. > I don't expect proprietary software to be high quality or especially usable, so it doesn't surprise me much. If I pay for a piece of software and it doesn't work as advertised, I ask for a refund. If I'm paying for a service like Teams or Office 365 that doesn't work as advertised, I stop paying for it. Unfortunately I'm not the one who is paying Microsoft for Teams, nor am I the person who selected it over various alternatives. That being said, what do you recommend as some higher quality free/open source alternative to Teams / Office 365 / Gsuite, etc.?
  - opan 4y ago
    >Teams IRC is my personal favorite, but I'd look at XMPP or Matrix if you need something a bit more fancy. I use all three a bit outside of work. >Office I don't use office software much. I prefer to deal with plaintext when possible and use vim or emacs. I usually have LibreOffice installed if I need to do something especially office-y, but I'm not sure I can properly defend/recommend it when I don't actually know it that well. I think IRC, email, and git all still work pretty well. I think NextCloud has some sort of office stuff that could be worth looking into as well. I will add that Teams and some of these other popular proprietary programs have a LOT of features, and you probably won't get full feature parity elsewhere, but I also believe a lot of these features just aren't really needed. I like to think of things in more general terms, like "chat program", not "Teams alternative" or "Teams clone". I don't expect all similar software to have the same featureset. At work I've had to use Webex, Zoom, and Teams depending on who I'm working with. Some places have bans on certain software of this type. On that note, I was initially thinking of text chats in Teams as that's 99% of what I do with it at work, but if you do need the voice/video aspects, then I'd probably recommend Jitsi or maybe Mumble.