Yeah, having both a new gen Surface book and a new MBP, the difference is stark for CPU and I/O intensive tasks. With battery saver on, the Surface Book can easily last 6-8 hours of use.<p>To get that far with my MBP I'd need to essentially disable the screen, disable all backgrounding, turn off incremental compiles, and try to be careful about using my clojure repl. You immediately stop using Chrome (despite being a better overall browser) and go to the inferior Safari for battery life, etc.<p>The tradeoff is that the MBP compiles about 10-15% faster, but as it only lives about 1/2-2/3 as long on a single charge it is not worth it to me.
They keep shrinking the battery to make the machine thinner. Nobody but their internal design team appears to care that the box is getting any thinner than it is already.<p>But the days of 10 hour batter time are over. Regular use on Macbooks is now around five hours and will continue to fall in future versions.
I honestly wish they'd focus on battery tech instead of whiz-bang features like the touchbar.<p>Just accept that you're not going to make a touchscreen Mac. Accept it. That's fine. I don't want one anyway.<p>Give me a quad-core newish processor with 32GB of RAM, the fastest SSD that I can imagine, and ten hours of battery life.<p>If a 15" laptop weights between 2 and 3.5 lbs I don't care. I'm carrying it in a backpack 99% of the time. I'm not going to notice the difference. I will notice the difference when it stops working because my 2.257lb laptop stopped working after 2hrs because it's thin and light.
So basically in response to reports of lackluster battery life on the smaller battery equipped 2016 MacBook Pro, they remove the time remaining indicator? LOL!<p>It wasn't an issue for 16 years, but now it's a problem? Does anyone buy that?
I don't have one of the new ones (yet), and maybe it's just me, but I find the battery life to be completely bananas for the few week or so after a reinstall. Even more so today with iCloud. The amount of background downloading and indexing for iDrive, iCloud, Photos, etc. is bananas for the first week. I recently re-installed on my older MacBook Air and the battery life was like 1.5-4 hours for the first week or so. Now it seems back to the normal range.<p>I wonder how people are really testing the battery life on these? It seems the only fair way to do it is not log into anything.<p>Maybe what macOS really needs is a system preference like, "Disable background tasks when running on battery."
I thought having some way of knowing "how long can I keep doing the thing I'm currently doing" is basic functionality you'd expect in a laptop (or any powered device, phone, camera, gps/navigation, etc.)
I almost feel sorry for Apple. Almost.<p>I think the MacBook Pro actually looks like a better than average machine despite some of the issues.<p>But they squandered all of their goodwill through years of neglect. If they had a normal release schedule, many more people would be willing to give them a pass about the dongles and the battery or touchbar issues or low Max RAM or anything else that's been annoying people.
It's easy to scoff at the timing, but as someone who's had laptops with Nvidia's optimus tech for the past 5-6 years, I can understand why. When you spin up the discrete GPU, even a weak mobile chipset, you can easily halve your battery life. If Apple hasn't quite perfected the decision around when to switch between the integrated and discrete GPUs, then that estimate won't seem very accurate to the average user. Watching youtube/netflix may or may not wake up the beefier GPU depending on how busy the machine is at the time, that sort of thing.<p>Personally, I'm starting to think that discrete GPUs are a bit overkill in laptops these days. More and more, I'm finding that modern integrated chipsets are up to the task of basic 3D modeling and graphical programming; the Linux Mesa drivers are even starting to support OpenGL 4.x and Vulkan.
Does anyone make a USB-C battery pack that can put out enough power to sustain the new MBPs during use? IMO that's going to be the fix for Apple's thinness fetish, a return to the days of replaceable batteries except now they're external.<p>Carry as large / as many batteries as you need, and if you're going somewhere with an outlet you get the benefits of thin/light.
Reminds me of when they stopped calling the powerpc Macbooks 'Laptops' and started calling them 'portables' everywhere. To avoid customers placing the hot griddles into their laps.
I was waiting for an Anandtech review to get definite answers to questions about the new MBP.<p>Isn't it strange Anandtech hasn't reviewed the new MBP yet?
Jeez, come on. I mean, maybe I think a lot of the griping about new MacBooks is a bit much, but this is just embarrassing. They really do need to figure out what the hell they're doing with Macs.
I can't help but feel amused that a company that bashes others for battery life stamina has now built a computer with battery life that is so bad that it's removing their claims. This is false advertising at its finest and I expect class action lawsuits to follow.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164534</a> is a related recent thread.
I got the new macbook pro 15' first two days batter life was really bad, 2 hours most. but on the 3rd day it went back to normal. now I get around 10 hours. I think it had something to do with Firevault. Encryption was running in the background and draining the battery now that it's done it's back to normal.<p>I think there is no need to freak out over this
Customer: My keyboard isn't working right
Apple: Give it here
(takes it and doesn't give it back)
Customer: My Mouse isn't working right
Apple: Give it here
(takes it and doesn't give it back)
Customer: My laptop isn't working right
Apple: Give it here
(takes it and doesn't give it back)<p>End
Even on the older rMBP (mine is 2012) my system just goes on suspend mode at 15-20% battery, even when I'm not doing much so the estimates shouldnt have been that far off. Did all the SMC reset steps and same issue.
I do dev work. I easily get all day battery life. People complain, people take those complaints as truth for all the MBP 15". None of those complaints about battery life have proven true for mine.
Would it have killed the author to clarify whether they were over or under estimates?<p>I can maybe guess under estimates, but people also get really angry when an over estimate suddenly drops to zero.