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MacBook Battery Time Remaining

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Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#51

Post by crisfine »

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…

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.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#52

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#53

Post by canuckintime »

crisfine wrote: post #51
riprowan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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)

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#54

Post by ebbv »

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.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#55

Post by jws »

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.

As I see it, as the difference between high power and low power states increases, the accuracy of a "time left" predictor decreases.

Back in the day, "active" was one power draw, with a somewhat lower one for idle. And people intuitively understood that idle was not part of a timed test.

Now idle is significantly less power. Discrete GPU is vastly more. Ill behaved app waking from idle only to sleep again is a huge hit. Most of these behaviors are invisible to the user.

You can't just say "at last minute's usage rate, each percent of battery is 6 minutes" and multiply it out. The wildly varying input gives a wildly varying output.

The old algorithm with the new inputs was confusing people.

It's not like they are stopping anyone from watching movies or surfing the web and timing how long a computer runs. The truth is still out there.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#56

Post by jws »

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…

What if Safari attracted a heavy WebGL ad in their web browsing test? What if Chrome had an ad blocker in place? What if they used an automation system to drive the test which wired on the discrete gpu?

I see a lot of questions an engineer could answer to help Consumer Reports better understand why their test showed such large variances and then they can decide if it is a testing artifact or indicative of a real variance.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#57

Post by jws »

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…

What if Safari attracted a heavy WebGL ad in their web browsing test? What if Chrome had an ad blocker in place? What if they used an automation system to drive the test which wired on the discrete gpu?

I see a lot of questions an engineer could answer to help Consumer Reports better understand why their test showed such large variances and then they can decide if it is a testing artifact or indicative of a real variance.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#58

Post by Nekorosu »

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.

Definitely not pot. Probably bath salts.

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#59

Post by mastax »

mynewtb wrote: post #46
tajen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For example: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Revie...

Re: MacBook Battery Time Remaining

#60

Post by j-pb »

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…

You are not getting OPs point I think. He's talking about efficiency not overall resource usage. When people code in electron and embed an entire friggin browser into their application just so that they don't have to port their webapp or so that they can apply their webdev skills, you the user gain nothing.

These apps don't do more, they do less but require more resources. They trade user convenience for developer convenience.

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