The point is that those estimates aren't actually accurate. That they mislead the end user so they don't belong in primary UI.
This article is nice to show that you can get the data from the command line (you can still get it elsewhere in macOS too) but the snark at Apple for saying they can't do it when it's in fact a deliberate design choice just makes the author look uninformed & petty.
The fluctuation, if it exists at all, has real meaning in how people are managing their system.
It also gives an indication to the health of battery
They could have showed a range, or a smoother average, or a prediction based on previous use.
They could have a graphical interface illustrating what programs are causing the fluctuation.
Many ways to improve something that's already perfectly adequate.
A "people are stupid, let's tell them less" approach is one of the ones making software so profoundly terrible and increasingly less useful.
Being a protector of the hypothetically imbecile user is why some software has been rushing full speed to lowest common denominator design.
This toxic culture strives to corral users and remove features.
These are the same projects which seem to be getting slower and buggier with each release. It's making me absolutely abhor the industry I work in and I'm ashamed of such workmanship.
I don't know when it became so fashionable to try to excel at making terrible software.
I will actually take this. If you are talking about useless information for most users what about the battery percentage? What does that 45% gives a layman user? They basically will try to estimate in their head how long until they need to charge and you are saying its more user friendly for a user to guess what a percentage (or Wh) means than for the OS with the actual information of the current & historical powerdraw to estimate and help the user?
I thought computers were suppose to this sort silly computations for you.
Presumably this was their thinking: either the number is accurate, or it isn't. If it is accurate, then we can have a discussion about whether or not we should show it by default. In this case, you would probably decide to show it (or give the option to show or hide it), because it's a number that's highly valuable to the end user.
However, if the number IS NOT accurate, then don't even give the user the option to see it. It's just going to be misleading.
Are you implying that major companies can never do wrong? I don't care whether UI is designed by big or small company, usability is what matter and what we discuss here.
They were sufficiently accurate enough to be useful for a couple of decades. Are we supposed to believe that the release of 10.12.2 marks some watershed moment where they suddenly became useless?
No, it's just BS. Apple doesn't want people paying attention to it anymore, so they removed a useful feature just to avoid complaints.
The "Apple no longer knows how" bit is obviously a joke. I agree with petty, but it doesn't make them look misinformed.
Not at all. They assumed a consistent workload, but given that assumption, they were quite good. Programming in a coffee shop, if the estimate said three hours, I'd get about three hours. If I fired up a game and the estimate dropped to 40 minutes, I'd get about 40 minutes. It failed if I took the estimate for one and applied it to the other, but, well, don't do that.
I'm getting rather annoyed at people telling me the estimate was useless anyway. I used it!
> I'm getting rather annoyed at people telling me the estimate was useless anyway. I used it!
Indeed, but I think the argument is more: at best it was a current workload time indicator. I'm still on 10.11 but think I might just make a battery power indicator of my own. Been wanting a better one for a while anyway.
Agreed, just trying to apply the principle of kindness to their arguments.
What I want for a battery indicator is more a dual battery indicator/workload indicator. Aka, lets say some process goes nuts for 10 seconds, I'd want some sort of "hey this thing started up over here and is using energy like a fiend" alert. But if I were on power then I'd say only do that after 30 seconds or whatever. That and also keep historic power use and tie that into current use and times and it would seem like you could have some really stupid ML/linear regression to figure out: the user normally runs a compile every 4pm, and its 4pm and he's not on power so that means it'll likely use XMah which means based on the power available he's got about... N minutes of power remaining.
Still seems a stupidly annoying problem to solve with so many variables.
Citation: about two decades of personal experience using portable Macs on battery power.
The estimate is quite useful on my 2013 MacBook Pro, which I'm pretty sure uses a modern power-saving CPU. Correction: it was quite useful. Now it's gone.
Was it actually useful? I think I can manage the battery on my tablet and iPhone just as well as I can on my laptop. Neither the tablet or iPhone estimate how long the battery will last, and somehow I do just fine. That tells me that the time estimate is just noise that doesn't actually contribute to the utility of the machine.
I'm OK with removing it since it was never really accurate for me. The time estimates did give me anxiety from time to time. What's interesting is since removing the battery percentage label from my phone, I have less battery anxiety there and it "seems" to last longer since I'm less concerned about the actual percentage remaining.
Of course it was useful. Why would I be complaining about its removal if it wasn't useful to me?
I don't do just fine with my iPhone. I have no real idea how long it'll last. I know that if it's nearly full, it'll last "a while" but I can't judge with any accuracy when I'll need to charge it. My approach is to just plug it in at every reasonable opportunity, which ensures it doesn't quit before the end of the day.
I don't fault Apple for that. My iPhone rarely sees a consistent workload, so I don't see how any sort of useful battery estimate could be done there.
But my computer is a different story. I usually do the same thing with it for hours at a time. Under those conditions, the estimate was both accurate and useful.
This is just rude. Reading these threads a lot of people have made very specific, good arguments as to why this feature was useful to them _for years_. No matter what you think of that feature, you can't just condescend people because you are not accepting reasonable and logical arguments. I too found this feature useful for _years_. Please be respectful of other peoples' opinions. Surely you can tell a lot of people use this feature for _a_ reason.
"But my computer is a different story. I usually do the same thing with it for hours at a time. Under those conditions, the estimate was both accurate and useful."
Can we now move past the part where we assume I'm an idiot, and get on with the conversation?
I never had that happen unless there was some major change in the work my computer was doing, in which case I'm grateful to know about the change.
That's probably what I dislike most about losing this UI tidbit, actually. Number of hours to empty is good, but knowing that my energy usage has silently gone through the roof is really handy.
We're both just talking about our personal experiences, of course. But your position requires nobody to have had my experience, whereas my position is compatible with people having had your experience. I fully acknowledge that the estimate was not perfect and wasn't useful for everybody. But it was for me.
>That's probably what I dislike most about losing this UI tidbit, actually. Number of hours to empty is good, but knowing that my energy usage has silently gone through the roof is really handy.
There's a really handy Activity Monitor window then, with energy usage details over time.
How are they not accurate? I'm watching a movie (a fairly common thing to do, I'd say) - the movie has 45 minutes left. I check the battery indicator if I can finish it or do I need to go get the charger. If it's telling me I have more than 50 minutes left I don't get the charger.
So far for me, it has worked every single time that I can remember.
It doesn't matter if they aren't perfectly accurate. Neither is the battery "percentage"; it's a constructed number that usually has an unintuitive relationship with the actual physical state of the battery. The point is that it's a useful number, as it answers the question "approximately how much longer can I keep doing what I'm doing right now?".
This. I never expected the battery meter to be perfectly accurate, just to give me a rough idea of how much time I have left before I need to start worrying about looking for a power outlet. I find this more useful than a percentage.
>The point is that it's a useful number, as it answers the question "approximately how much longer can I keep doing what I'm doing right now?".
If it's not accurate, as you admit, then it doesn't need to be shown with precision it doesn't actually have (X hours YY minutes). The segmented battery icon still shows the same information in a more fuzzy way that fits the accuracy (or lack thereof) better.
No, the percentage tells me nothing about how long I can expect to keep doing what I'm doing. I haven't memorized the power consumption profiles of every task I use my laptop for.
Go ahead and round it to nearest 15 or 30 minutes. But showing raw battery charge doesn't have the same info about whether my workload is going to drain that in 2 hours or 5 hours unless I pull out a stopwatch to help teach my computer to count.
> Percentage is pretty darn accurate actually. Mostly because it's based on remaining charge
This is incorrect on both counts. It's based on remaining available energy, which is actually quite hard to calculate.
There are two ways you can estimate the remaining energy in a battery under load, and neither of them are very accurate. You can measure the voltage, the relationship between which and remaining energy depends on a huge number of factors including effective internal resistance (which changes with battery age, temperature, and across batches), particulars of the chosen chemistry, physical profile of the cells, current draw, etc. This is probably what you're talking about when you suggest measuring this "at home". It's not what any decent quality laptops use. It works OK at equilibrium though.
The other approach is dead reckoning. This involves estimating the discharge profile of the battery (which isn't as simple as "how much charge" the battery holds) and then integrating a non-linear function of the measured current draw based on the discharge profile. This works OK, but you need to combine it with occasional voltage-based recalibration to avoid integration error drift. That usually happens during charging.
Either way, not as accurate as you think, and you have to make assumptions about future current draw. If you give me a AA battery, it's literally impossible for me to tell you how much energy you're going to get out of it. It can easily vary by a factor of 20 depending on how you're going to use it.
Once you have a rough estimate of the remaining energy (which, again, is different from remaining charge), you can use that to formulate a percentage. But for human factors reasons, the displayed percentage almost never correspond to the actual remaining safe power. Most products stretch out percentages near 100% and 0% to give an impression of longer battery life and to give the user plenty of warning to find a charger.
Percentage is a dynamically constructed estimate too. It's more accurate because the underlying variables tend to change more slowly and predictably, but the actual charge levels corresponding to "0%" and "100%" aren't fixed, and the calculations do sometimes drift noticeably from reality.
Incidentally, this is why you'll sometimes see an improvement in battery life if you do a full discharge. It's not that it's good for the battery itself (quite the opposite, in fact), but it gives the estimator a better view of how the battery is behaving, so it can better estimate the charge level at any given point.
I find the time estimates quite useful. They're not 100% accurate, but they give a good idea of "If I keep doing whatever task I'm doing right now, I have X hours left".
I think the apple bashing was sarcasm and your comment is sillier than the article. It wasn't the primary UI, the primary UI just shows the percentage. Its useful for a lot of user to know some expected runtime given their current usage and now that is inaccessible for a whole lot of regular user. The only thing they needed to make it not confusing to the user was to change 'Time remaining' word to 'Estimated time remaining'.
The only thing apple's change did was remove a useful feature from users and maybe make it harder to notice battery performance regression (not that I'm sure if there was any with the latest macbook).
Its not what people look at first glance. You get the battery percentage as default. You get this when you actually want an estimate. The wrong thing apple did was calling it 'Time remaining' and not calling it in an estimate.
If Microsoft or some Linux distro did this for user complaint I believe you would have been hard pressed to find anyone defending it. I'm typing this on a Macbook pro and while I think this is the best device for me for a lot of reason there so many idiotic Apple decisions out there that I have seen excused away that I'm frankly tired of it.
This article is nice to show that you can get the data from the command line (you can still get it elsewhere in macOS too) but the snark at Apple for saying they can't do it when it's in fact a deliberate design choice just makes the author look uninformed & petty.