Apple ‘fixed’ the MacBook Pro’s battery life issue by removing the ‘time remaining’ clock

By Joel Hruska

• By Joel Hruska on December 14, 2016 at 7:30 am

It’s not unusual for new hardware to have a few bugs to work out, but Apple’s response to the battery life issues its users have been experiencing with the MacBook Pro seems to take the cake. The macOS 10.12.2. update dropped today, and it contains a bevy of bug fixes and improvements — along with one puzzling removal. According to Apple, it’s simply too difficult to calculate how much battery life a CPU has remaining, and the company has removed this feature from the latest edition of its operating system.

That’s right. If you have a Mac, Apple will no longer tell you how much longer the battery might last. You’ll still get a report on the percentage of battery life remaining, but nothing else. Apple does think it’s nailed down some graphical corruption issues that were plaguing users with AMD’s RX 460, and there are some improvements to palm rejection and a few Touch Bar changes.

The battery life issue remains puzzling, however, despite Apple’s apparent lack of interest in investigating the topic. Tech writers at The Verge report that their testbed Apple laptop could barely squeak through six hours of battery life, to the point that Apple agreed to send a replacement unit for testing. That unit failed to do any better, which puts these laptops well below the 10 hours of battery life that Apple is claiming — and while no claim about battery life can be accurate to every single use-case, Apple has a reputation for generally providing the battery life it promises.

What’s even more unusual about this is that other sites and forum users have reported that their own battery life is fine and hitting the 10 hour mark without incident. There are several possibilities here. First, there’s a chance that Apple chose to source certain components from different manufacturers, and that discrepancy is hitting battery life. While this isn’t impossible, it doesn’t seem very likely, either. Using a different screen or Wi-Fi solution might extend battery life by a small amount, but it wouldn’t create a four-hour difference.

Second, it’s possible that some systems aren’t dropping into lower power states the way they should be, possibly due to a software issue. We’ve seen issues like this before in mobile, where ad-supported games and apps drain battery life much more quickly than their paid equivalents because they don’t turn the Wi-Fi modem off properly when ads aren’t being displayed. Microsoft also made much of the fact that Chrome, even after the work Google has done to improve the situation, still draws more power than Microsoft Edge. It’s entirely possible that the reason some users are seeing 10 hours while others are seeing 5.5 or 6 is related to a subtle software configuration issue or improperly configured driver that’s knocking some systems out of power states more rapidly than it should.

In fact, this speaks to the fundamental issue with the power management techniques now advanced by Intel, AMD, and various ARM vendors. The promise of this technology is that it can cut power consumption dramatically by fine-tuning the SoC. When these systems work, all is well. When they don’t work properly, or don’t play nice with other system hardware, drivers, or web browsers, you end with a situation where some consumers clearly see a problem, others don’t, and the company doesn’t have a roadmap to resolve the issue.

I know there are some Mac faithful who will buy whatever Apple churns out, no matter what. But between the battery life, the dongles, and the decision to recycle Intel’s older Skylake chips instead of holding for Kaby Lake this is the most troubled MacBook Pro update in years. If you bought one of these systems, we’d be very interested to hear how your battery life has been, and whether you’ve found any tricks for improving it (before Apple took away the actual battery timer, natch).