MacOS can optionally show seconds. Anyone know if it has similar benchmark impact?
Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
11–20 of 124 posts
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#12And on current systems, updating every second would decrease battery life by preventing your system from sleeping. Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating).
I also, personally, can't stand to have distractions like that on my screen away from where I want to focus.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#13On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? I find that most of the time I don't want to know the time to a precision of better than 5 minutes. That may just be me, but when someone asks the time and I read it off my phone as 3:56 it really bothers me and sometimes I convert that to 5-to-4 just to avoid what in most cases is arbitrary extra precision. Sure there are times when minutes c…
On macOS, it’s a useful indicator of when the system has frozen/kernel panic, which unfortunately happens far too often.
Cursor movement works for that. Or if the system freezes in a way that allows the hardware cursor to keep working, then move the cursor over something that would normally react to it.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#14And on current systems, updating every second would decrease battery life by preventing your system from sleeping. Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating). I also, personally, can't stand to have distractions like that on my screen away from where I want to focus.
That's why Apple got rid of the Time Machine icon animation, IIRC.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#15I have been using T-Clock for many years to get seconds in the taskbar clock. https://github.com/White-Tiger/T-Clock
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#16And on current systems, updating every second would decrease battery life by preventing your system from sleeping. Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating). I also, personally, can't stand to have distractions like that on my screen away from where I want to focus.
Displaying the clock in Mac OS doesn't prevent the machine from sleeping, whether seconds are shown or not.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#17On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? I find that most of the time I don't want to know the time to a precision of better than 5 minutes. That may just be me, but when someone asks the time and I read it off my phone as 3:56 it really bothers me and sometimes I convert that to 5-to-4 just to avoid what in most cases is arbitrary extra precision. Sure there are times when minutes c…
On macOS, it’s a useful indicator of when the system has frozen/kernel panic, which unfortunately happens far too often.
You must have really bad luck with Macs.
As a MacOS user for seven years I can't say I've ever had that issue. Certainly not enough to need the seconds to be an indicator. I've had my system completely lock up maybe four times and those times my mouse refusing to move was enough of an indicator.
Heck, right now it's been two and a half months since I've rebooted... and probably a year since I've rebooted because it froze.
I'm not an Apple fan boy either. In fact my next computer will probably be Linux. But I have to admin the last three Macs I have owned have been great computers.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#18I always have the seconds on (Ubuntu) and it's a good feature. I leave work every day at 17:28:15 sharp, otherwise I will miss my train (London DLR) and yes, seconds matter in this case.
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#19It might not be the memory concern it once was, but today it might very well be a power concern. Modern laptop display pipelines can save power if they don't have to redraw any of the screen: constantly updating status bar animations break that.[1]
1: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2013/712/ (I think the relatively short graphics section mentions this. Can't seem to find the talk that goes into it in more detail...)
Re: Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
#20And on current systems, updating every second would decrease battery life by preventing your system from sleeping. Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating). I also, personally, can't stand to have distractions like that on my screen away from where I want to focus.
Displaying the clock in Mac OS doesn't prevent the machine from sleeping, whether seconds are shown or not.
He is talking about a different form of sleeping.