141–150 of 246 posts
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Exactly this. Open up your battery menu, it will say Chrome is using significant energy. I've never not seen it there
Chrome also turns on the discrete GPU for seemingly no reason.
Out of curiosity, am I alone in not wanting to use apple products because I find such practices as this to be unethical engineered extortion to extract more money from the consumer? I find such things exploitive and the product's success giving a green light for other manufacturers to re-engineer their products based on less honorable principles. For instance, on flip phones, batteries would eject if you dropped it i…
At the moment I don't know what to do. I can't buy a new MacBook Pro because they are all broken in my mind, so am looking to see what Lenovo do with their 'retro' ThinkPad.
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Is this a trade-off that most buyers are aware of? I'm not sure it's as simple as "shaving off a couple of millimeters", but if that's the case I know I would personally trade those millimeters for better serviceability, especially the day I realize I need a new battery. I was thinking about switching to a Macbook Pro, but for me this is just another argument to go with something else. Can't deny that the hardware is…
Apple tends to use the space savings to stuff in class-leading batteries. I have a T450s at work. The stock battery is only 46 watt-hours, versus 75 on the similarly-sized 13" rMBP. The 15" rMBP has a 100 watt-hour battery, which you can get on a T550s only if you buy the extended battery that sticks out half an inch from the bottom.
But can you imagine how big the batteries could be in a 15" MBP that was roughly the same size as those from 2012 and earlier? Those things would last even longer than a current 15" rMBP would, especially under load.
Over the course of my professional life with laptops, I've used Apple, Alienware, Dell and Lenovo machines. I can safely say that the three-day turnaround in an actual bricks & mortar store offered by Apple is far and away the best service I've ever received (the worst being a two-week wait that didn't resolve the issue!). Regarding the business-level support, I think it's fair enough for the store to deliver a basel…
Well AppleCare is terrible IMHO. On the phone most of them have no clue. If the issue gets escalated you have someone who understands the issue but cannot do a thing. Then you always end up in the Apple store and they will only become active if the issue is acknowledged by Apple and their hardware tests find something. All other issues are basically ignored. I am having kernel panics since 10.10.3 [1] and there is no…
Anyway I gave AppleCare a call. Told them that bootcamp version XYZ was messing up Windows 8.1's installer and that the older version worked fine, and asked if I could downgrade. Essentially they told me to "call Microsoft for support with Windows." And that's all I could get out of them. Zero bootcamp supported offered, even if it is Apple's own software.
The answer in an Apple store was (paraphrasing) "we don't recommend Bootcamp, if you want to run Windows then buy Parallels Desktop."
PS - Took them over seven months to fix Bootcamp.
I'm curious what other people's perspectives are on the (what appears to me anyway) dominance of Macbooks among developers these days. Is it the convenience of a Unix-y machine with decent drivers, or something else?
As EC1 said they're reliable. Once you setup a Mac it tends to run and run and run. I feel like I used to have to do a fair bit of fiddling with my Windows machines, but that was over a decade ago so it may no longer be the case. Linux was definitely fiddly. The hardware is very well designed, well put together, feels like a premium piece of equipment. PC laptops used to (and cheap ones still do) feel like junk. Appl…
That's a consumer-oriented view. Dell, HP and Lenovo continued to supply solid business laptops and portable workstations. Some were even ultraportable, including the ThinkPad X series and Toshiba Porteges.
Not sure why you think "the PC guys didn't target that market very hard" since they had more than 90% of the market. But if you were just watching the consumer market, perhaps you didn't notice?
> Next toss in the problem that Apple thought I didn’t have AppleCare on the machine. This is Apple’s extended warranty. This was despite me showing a receipt that showed that I bought both at the same time. Turns out that if you don’t by the machine from an Apple Store, you have to actually fill out some online form to register your warranty. If you buy at an Apple store, they automatically attach it. Anywhere else,…
This is laziness on the Apple Store employee's fault. There's an "agreement administrator" they can reach at Apple Care to get this fixed.
I now adopt an adversarial mindset when dealing with Apple. :-)
AppleCare not being automatically associated with a device when it isn't purchased from an Apple store is pretty clearly marked on both the AppleCare box, and every third party dealer I've bought from has either pointed this out or offered to register it for me on the spot. Later in the article he mentions that the Apple tech said they could resolve this issue, so it was really not a problem and just looking for more things to rant about.
As others have pointed out, the Macbook batteries are rated for 1000 cycles, and as this was only at 652 it should have been covered by the AppleCare warranty for free repair. Reading between the lines of this article, it sounds like Apple did offer to replace the battery for free in the end here, which negates the whole rant about $400 being too expensive since the repair would have been free.
This only leaves the fact that it takes 3 days, which in the scheme of things doesn't seem too unreasonable. In a perfect world, yes, they could service it while you wait. However, I once had to get an Acer laptop repaired, and it took at least 3 weeks.
Also, 652 cycles in just 1.5 years of use is insane. That's more than a full charge and discharge cycle every single day. I've had my Macbook for nearly 3 years and it's only at around 500 cycles.
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Have you tried another browser? Chrome has notoriously TERRIBLE effects on battery life on Macs. I'm not kidding. Try Safari for two days and be amazed. There are probably things you can do to make it better, but for whatever reason Google doesn't seem to care and ships (what I would say is effectively) broken software.
Exactly this. Open up your battery menu, it will say Chrome is using significant energy. I've never not seen it there
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I'd rather see a hard crash and know for sure that the battery is too empty to perform work. Stupid battery warning meters are a lie, and a waste of valuable power. If you have enough power to show me that you don't have power, I know your battery meter is full of shit. It means the board can still operate, and is probably performing a small subset of tasks without my awareness, in a low power mode. Maybe the acceler…
> The greatest sin of all, though. The hands-down WORST crime committed, is when the hardware IS PLUGGED INTO A POWER SOURCE, BUT REFUSES TO POWER ON BECAUSE "THE BATTERY NEEDS TO CHARGE FIRST." I don't know this for sure, but I'm guessing that the device waits until it has enough charge to boot properly. Otherwise, if you disconnect the power source the computer does not have enough power to finish booting and will…
No exceptions.