Well that's simply the silliest way to try and solve the battery-life issues of the new laptops.

According to Apple, the new laptops don't have a battery issue, but that the battery estimate is misleading. For example, people were reporting that macOS would show 3 hours remaining, but then the laptop would actually last 6 hours.

No idea why this came up at the same time as the hardware launch. macOS has had various background sync tasks for a while — iCloud sync, Photos, Time Machine, etc. Sierra adds some background services (specifically, "Optimized Storage") that might have a bigger effect.

That's not what they're doing. They're recognizing that the estimate has always been misleading.

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).

iStat battery screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/bi95Fs9.jpg

And so Apple managed to make $6 off of you by removing a feature. Great.

a) I already owned it

b) It's not sold through the App Store anyway

Take your pick.

I agree; on my 2015 MBP the time remaining is extremely accurate. Probably because my behavior on the machine is very consistent.

So I'm being punished for the actions of some idiots I never met? That's not better.

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.

They could have changed it to "about X hours" if precision was the problem.

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.

Correctness is not synonymous with usefulness.

And in pretty much every consumer product that you use. Ethnography is a thing.

I've quite often used it to check if I can finish the movie I'm watching for example or if I have enough battery to finish writing something during the flight and so on. I'd say especially for the movie case, it's surprisingly accurate.

Didn't they have a similar reaction to the antenna issues on iPhone 4 (5?) back in the dizzy? They'd show five bars when truly, it was more like one or two? I forget the details, but this seems similar to me.

Yeah, it was the iPhone 4. Previously on their software the signal meter was tied to some specific RSSI dBm, but that phone had a poor antenna design and dropped calls at higher perceived signal. So they responded by adjusting the meter to better reflect call quality instead. You can enable raw RSSI numbers in the field test menu still.

Also related around that time: Apple pushed an update for AT&T that changed their HSPA indicator from 3G to 4G without any upgrade haven taken place.

Just trying to think back that far makes me dizzy.

The estimate has always (at least, based on my 2010 Snow Leopard MBP) been pretty good at telling you how long your laptop will last if you keep doing exactly what you're doing now.

Same as any other kind of estimate (yes, even the legendarily-terrible Windows file copy dialog). It's not misleading, you just have to understand what the numbers mean.