MacBook Pro owners complain of short batt life – so Apple kills batt life clock in macOS Apple once again finds itself drawing the ire of customers after its decision to remove part of the battery-monitoring tools on macOS. The latest version of the Macintosh operating system, macOS Sierra 10.12.2, no longer displays the estimated amount of time left, instead showing only the percentage of battery charge remaining …
If it's like Sierra on my 2012 MacBook Pro, it uses it up displaying the spinning wheel. It's like Windows 3.1 all over a-fucking-gain.
Ye gods, why did I upgrade? You can tell they don't know how to do OSes any more, just make a new kext with the latest nVidia/AMD/Intel reference drivers and layer more and more iOS-style graphic effects on top.
This. It depends *entirely* on what you are doing with the machine. 10 hours for "normal" usage (emailing, web browsing, video playing, etc.), much less for playing games or editing video and such.
That being said, there were legit battery life problems with MacOS on the new MacBook Pros and people have every right to be upset about that.
I do have wider concerns over the direction that Apple's taking. For example, the new 2016 Macbook Pro is thinner and more elegant than the 2015 model but it comes with the cost of being noticeably less practical because of the way that the variety of connection ports has been significantly reduced and the complete loss of function keys.
Macbook Pros ought to be for doing serious work on and they shouldn't be made to be exhibits in a design museum. I think that Apple management is seriously veering off the path now and they are squandering the legacy bequeathed to them by Steve Jobs.
"Macbook Pros ought to be for doing serious work on and they shouldn't be made to be exhibits in a design museum."
Nitpick: do we really know what kind of professionals are the target market? Maybe serious, boring, unimaginative workaholics like us do not count as professionals in the new Digitally Nextified HyperPROVirtualAIReality?
I'm assuming that resetting the NVRAM is the only way to get the damn thing to actually fully restart. Apple loves to cram random microcontrollers into their devices that are constantly running, like the fan controller that is built into their hard drives so that you require an official Apple disk drive to keep your system from freaking out and running the fan at 100% because its not getting data from a sensor that has no right to be on a user-replaceable part.
none of the MacBook's I've opened up and replaced the HDD's since 2008 have this 'feature'
I've been able to replace the standard HDD with either a larger HDD or an SSD without a problem.
These include
2008 Mac Mini
2010 Mac Mini
2008 17in MBP
2009 13in MB
2012 15in MBP
2012 Mac Mini
2015 15in MBP
Was what you were seeing on a particular model/device? Please tell us.
sure, Apple have lots to answer for but in recent years your point is not one that I've come upon.
If you buy a hard disk from Apple then part of the price premium is for their guarantee that it will install okay and continue to work.
I did my own upgrade to a non-Apple SSD and turned on TRIM. Both those actions are unsupported by Apple and if things had gone wrong it would have been my fault. But all is well and my old MacBook Pro is usable again at a fraction of the cost of a new laptop or parts blessed by Apple.
Crazy Operations Guy is correct, for five or six-year-old iMacs at least. On replacing the HDD we had all the fans going to full-speed when they didn't find the sensor in the disk. That said google quickly found a free utility to restore fan operation so hardly a show-stopper
... and if an NVRAM reset doesn't fix it, the comments will say you need to take it to Apple for a logic board (not mother-board! nope, logic board) replacement, but that's okay provided you have Apple care? Oh you don't? Well, that'll cost you more than a non-Apple branded laptop.
"and is leading some customers and pundits to wonder if the new policy in Cupertino is to sweep complaints under the rug rather than address them head-on."
Hardly a new policy, this is the same company the told iphone4 users they were holding their phones incorrectly.
It's possible that Apple have done the math and come to the conclusion that more than 16GB wouldn't make much of a difference to system speed anyway.
As SSDs get faster and cheaper, the need for oodles of RAM is becoming less and less. I fully expect there will come a time where computers don't actually need RAM; they'll just join the CPU to the SSD with maybe a little bit of L2 inbetween.
"As SSDs get faster and cheaper, the need for oodles of RAM is becoming less and less. I fully expect there will come a time where computers don't actually need RAM; they'll just join the CPU to the SSD with maybe a little bit of L2 inbetween."
Tell that to someone using Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. I heard one reviewer on about it and he said that Final Cut on it's own takes up such a stupid amount of RAM that he can't buy the new MacBook because it will hinder his work.
You're missing my point. I'm not saying that 16GB is enough, just that maybe Apple concluded that more RAM wouldn't necessarily make any difference to the speed, whilst hammering battery life. For example; the prefetch code hits a bottleneck when shoving more than 16GB around the bus, which could mean that they could put 32GB in it, but it would actually end up slower.
My other point was that if a (theoretical, future) SSD is the same speed as the RAM, there would be no point in having RAM. You might as well link the CPU to the SSD directly.
16GB is the max as the Intel chipset limits LPDDR3E memory to 16GB. If they were to go with 32GB then it would have to be DDR4 memory which uses more power. They want longer battery life so their OS can hog it.
Second point - how would the CPU address e.g. 512GB/1TB of SSD?
It seems like everyone worships Apple these days, forgetting the 20 years of 5% market share, failed product lines, and annual predictions of impending doom. Sell a few iphones and now they're so innovative and brilliant! No, they're not.
But at least back then Apple was experimenting and trying new things. Trying desperately to break out of the "schools and graphics pros" niche and into the mainstream. Now they're rolling in Iphone cash and believe their own hype about how awesome they are. And since Apple Knows Best they're making horrible design choices. They're throwing out years of user-oriented design experience. Apple widgets are not easy to use anymore, cost more than they're worth, and ignore what the users actually want. They don't bother with user testing, and usability is not even a design goal anymore.
As long as they can coast along on Iphone sales and their cash stash, expect Apple to go further down this path. Maybe when they're broke again will we see functional design from Apple.
> forgetting the 20 years of 5% market share
That is very generous. Apple market share was much closer to 2%. Still around there for Desktops/Laptops. Their market share is down below 20% in phones now and continuing to fall.
They have enough cash to coast for 100 more years though.
Try as I might, I can't see Apple's point in removing a battery time counter and bringing all this bad publicity onto itself.
*Of course* a computer's remaining batery operation time varies with its user's screen brightness setting or the app(s) in use. Of course it'd change if you close a resource-hungry app. I mean, isn't this obvious? Isn't this useful to know? ("uh, maybe I shouldn't use this app during my flight")
Finally, we all understand those counters are based on estimates!
I use a mac and a ubuntu laptop; both are kind of inaccurate when it comes to battery charge estimations, whether it's displayed as a wildly varying time remaining estimate or a charge percentage that has precipitous drops from time to time (or when near exhaustion).
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