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MacBook Battery Time Remaining

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Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#31

Post by hellofunk »

herbst wrote: post #29
logicallee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you would get 9 hours on this year's model (likely enough for you.) This year's has give or take a 75 watt hour battery while last year's has give or take 100 watt hours, so to arrive at the above figure I quoted three quarters of what you reported.

Have they fixed the issue that batteries dont stop charging once they are full? Otherwise those 9 hours wont be 9 houra for long ether.

Was this an issue in the recent 2016 model? All major laptops by all manufacturers have prevented overcharging in batteries for years. It has always been safe to leave a Macbook plugged in long after the battery was full.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#32

Post by kalleboo »

tajen wrote: post #25
kalleboo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 softwa…

It's natural that Apple designs a battery target for one usage. It's totally ok to tell '10hrs watching a movie', with actual figures being lower when doing other activities. PC competitors never ever hit the target, even for movie-watching, so we were perfectly happy to have 10 actual hours for one usecase. Of course I don't get what customers gain from .07 nineteenth of an inch less of thickness. Next version Apple…

I just wish they'd show figures for a use case that matters to me. If you keep 10 hours of "wireless web" mostly by optimizing your web browser, that's great for people who spend their time browsing Facebook, but if that means I lose 2 hours of my usage, I wish they had some number that showed that as well. Of course, I get that if they show a "heavy productivity - 3 hours" then pundits will latch onto that and compare it to other makers' web browsing numbers... It's a crap situation.

You have a point that many PC manufacturers have fantasy numbers - I don't want Apple to venture into that realm. ("10 hours... as long as literally the only process you have open is Safari")

Phrasing it another way... I hope Apple doesn't optimize their batteries for their own benchmark, to the detriment of real-world use cases.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#34

Post by herbst »

hellofunk wrote: post #31
herbst wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they fixed the issue that batteries dont stop charging once they are full? Otherwise those 9 hours wont be 9 houra for long ether.

Was this an issue in the recent 2016 model? All major laptops by all manufacturers have prevented overcharging in batteries for years. It has always been safe to leave a Macbook plugged in long after the battery was full.

This was ether introduced in 2014 or 2015 models. My 2015 MBP did suffer from it. Mostly used in a office environment it lost at least 10-20% of battery volume within a year.

Yes i also never heard of any other brand still having that issue.

On my phone on a bus right now. But there is a thread somewhere in a mac support forum that suggests to put tape over (i think) the 2 middle connectors on the charger which somehow fixes the issue.

Edit:// i dont use apple anymore so take that with a grain of salt. I mostly remember because the all mac company i worked for then was in rage. Thought about switching to thinkpads. And already replaced a few of those faulty things in mid 2016. I did not really care because it knew i just get a new one. I did however confirm it myself, it did not wait even 1% to charge again. Next to my battery dying faster than anything i've seen before.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#35

Post by riprowan »

azr79 wrote: post #20

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.

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-report...

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#36

Post by bluedino »

SFJulie wrote: post #21
ars wrote: post #10

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?

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... Ev…

>> 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

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#37

Post by toyg »

tekklloneer wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#38

Post by JshWright »

matt4077 wrote: post #18
johansch wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hilarious Scoble piece? 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."

That's quite an insult to pot. Robert Scoble is just an idiot.

You can smoke things other than pot...

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#39

Post by nothrabannosir »

jakobegger wrote: post #5

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…

> With the increasing popularity of Electron based apps, average power consumption is probably even increasing.

I can only hope OS vendors (both mobile and desktop) will one day be driven to actually incentivise frugal use of resources. We are currently suffering a massive tragedy of the commons for RAM, cpu and even disk I/O (see Spotify, recently).

I would be absolutely thrilled if, just for example, App Store margins were calculated based on median resource usage. Or if apps got a clear UI annotation indicating resource use. Or something... anything. Like a carbon tax, but for software :)

Currently it's the Wild West out there, the cpu tuna is being massively overfished and we don't put the blame with the right parties so why would anyone stop. We the consumers end up paying for all this.

Edit: and if google could do the same with search ranking I would convert to any religion you asked me to.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#40

Post by kfinley »

johansch wrote: post #14
frankomonster wrote: post #3

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.

This hilarious Scoble piece? 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."

> "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.

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