Quite an amazing coincidence that they recognized this right after they released a new line of computers whose battery life failed to live up to expectations.
And quite annoying that they're "recognizing" this, when it's often quite useful and not at all misleading. I made good use of that display before, and now they've taken it away.
I also use this estimate even if it's not always right. FWIW it's still accessible in the Activity Monitor energy page.
Personally I've now disabled Apple's battery menu extra and replaced it with the one from iStat Menus because that still has a time estimate.
It's an $18 utility, but it's very well designed and has a clock menu extra that's similarly more useful than the one Apple gives you (calendar and multiple time zones in the dropdown).
>Quite an amazing coincidence that they recognized this right after they released a new line of computers whose battery life failed to live up to expectations.
Or was reported to have "failed to live up to expectations", by idiots who merely assumed the estimate and didn't bother to do an actual clock wall check.
No, I doubt they changed it to punish Mike Ash specifically.
Rather they decided to cut the fake precision (X hours YY minutes) and stick to the segmented-battery icon display.
It's like some statistics were saying there's a 45.32% chance of something, just because that's what their simplistic division of the samples gives them, despite the confidence margin being plus/minus 5 percentage points.
Instead, they now tell you it's "between 40% and 50%".
The target audience of the statistics is not "punished because some idiots took 45.32% literally". They are just shown a better value.
More correct but less useful isn't actually better. An estimate of time remaining is more meaningful than a percentage of battery capacity remaining, even if the latter can be provided with more accuracy.
Correct but inactionable is useless. It's basically undeniably correct that our universe will eventually die of entropic heat death. This isn't useful, though.
Projections about Earth's global warming are undoubtedly less correct but far more useful because they are actionable.
And quite annoying that they're "recognizing" this, when it's often quite useful and not at all misleading. I made good use of that display before, and now they've taken it away.