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MacBook Battery Time Remaining

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Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#41

Post by canuckintime »

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.

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

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#42

Post by eli »

riprowan wrote: post #35
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…

Don't know how much you know about Consumer Reports, but I don't think they can't be pressured.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#43

Post by whywhywhywhy »

kalleboo wrote: post #8
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…

> 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…

> Or Photoshop

Consistent 20-30% processor usage no matter what the processor when not in focus and no files open.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#44

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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.

Getting tired of people pointing out that "it was never accurate, it doesn't know if you're going to open a game in 20 minutes" as if it's some sort of massive revelation and justifies this move just to make up for their design problems with their latest laptop because the shaped battery didn't work out in time to ship.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#45

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Jack000 wrote: post #27
kalleboo wrote: post #2

Bring on the machine learning battery gauges?

if it runs on the GPU it will have to take its own power draw into account

> if it runs on the GPU

It will struggle to function at all seen as no Apple machine ships with a decent CUDA card.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#46

Post by mynewtb »

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…

> PC competitors never ever hit the target

Start looking at proper business models maybe.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#47

Post by mtw »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #39
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 marg…

This makes sense for iPad or the 12" MacBook but not for MacBook pros. I invest a lot of money in a MacBook Pro for work and it makes sense the apps I'm using needs more RAM, CPU and graphics card usage.

If the thinness of current MacBook pros prevent them on displaying remaining battery time, then making the MacBook pros thinner was not a good decision. You can make the regular MacBooks thinner but not the MacBook pros -- unless Apple finds another battery material that outputs significantly more power per cubic cm

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#48

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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 don't get what customers gain from .07 nineteenth of an inch less of thickness

It is difficult to make thin, light and functional laptops. This results in fewer doing it, with those that do being able to command a margin for it.

It also amortises your product R&D. Minitiarisation continues, delivering not only more computing power but more in smaller form factors.

By focussing on thin and light, they can keep tweaking with decisions they had to make when putting a computer in a phone and then a watch and will need to face putting it into a contact lens, et cetera.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#49

Post by rufius »

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…

The usage of Electron, while convenient, is continually irritating to me. Power consumption matters and "hur dur lets repurpose our web app for desktop" is annoyingly bad for power.

I get why companies do it, I just wish they wouldn't. Alternatively, perhaps an investment in electron as a platform in the power consumption space is what really needs to happen.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#50

Post by nothrabannosir »

mtw wrote: post #47
nothrabannosir wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 marg…

This makes sense for iPad or the 12" MacBook but not for MacBook pros. I invest a lot of money in a MacBook Pro for work and it makes sense the apps I'm using needs more RAM, CPU and graphics card usage. If the thinness of current MacBook pros prevent them on displaying remaining battery time, then making the MacBook pros thinner was not a good decision. You can make the regular MacBooks thinner but not the MacBook p…

> I invest a lot of money in a MacBook Pro for work and it makes sense the apps I'm using needs more RAM, CPU and graphics card usage.

100% agreed. The crucial word there is "I". You choose. You get to decide what to think of wasteful apps. Text editor in Electron? Well you're a programmer, so ok. No hard feelings. Image editor using up 50% of your cpu? I'll look for a different one. Might be just the other way around for a graphic designer.

The important part is: let the market figure out what is the balance of acceptable resource usage. Right now, there is no accountability. Spotify was trashing the disk for about a year and finally got off their asses to fix it when it became a serious pr issue. That is not a sustainable system.

Edit: to drive the point home about your mbp: I have one too, and I actually don't think it's acceptable for apps to use a lot of cpu / gpu. I'm on battery a lot and I constantly monitor the tasklist to shut apps that are using too much. Already in n=2, you and I have different preferences. And that's great! Let us collectively figure out a balance like a normal market does :).

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