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.
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.