Apple is ditching the useful MacBook battery 'time remaining' feature

By their very definition, estimates aren’t supposed to be exact. But when they’re as inexact as the battery life estimates on the latest line of Macbook Pros, there probably isn’t much point in them.

Though the 2016 Macbook Pro is supposed to have a battery life of up to 10 hours, many consumers were taking to the internet to complain that wasn’t what their laptop was telling them they were getting when they looked at its estimated time remaining feature. For some, even at 100% charge, the feature was suggesting them they could only expect another three hours out of their new laptop. 

After reporting that it’s tested the performance of the batteries in its Macbooks and found no hardware problems to be fixed, Apple has come up with a different solution: remove the time remaining feature entirely in the macOS Sierra 10.12.2, update. Out of sight, out of mind.

It's not a problem if you can't see it

It’s not an ideal fix in the sense that having a battery life estimate is a useful way of knowing just how long you have before your laptop dies, but it might have been the only move Apple could make thanks to changing technology. 

Obviously a laptop can only tell you how much life it has left in it based on the power requirements of the programs it’s running in the foreground and background at the very moment you ask it. 

As the newest Macbooks use Skylake-based chipsets which are able to move very quickly between low and high performance modes, it’s hard for the operating system to keep up and provide accurate battery life estimates. 

This means that even if the battery is performing perfectly fine, it won’t be reflected in the estimate making it a redundant feature anyway. 

This isn’t the only change that comes with the new update: owners of newer Macbook Pros will see a serious graphics bug receive a fix and improvements have also been made to the quality of Bluetooth audio when using FaceTime or Siri and the Auto Unlock with Apple Watch function. There are also new wallpapers and emoji to enjoy, and much more besides. 

• Now that you know the battery is just fine, why not check out the best deals on Macbooks?

December 14, 2016 at 07:01PM
Emma Boyle