“The macOS 10.12.2. update dropped today, and it contains a bevy of bug fixes and improvements — along with one puzzling removal,” Joel Hruska reports for ExtremeTech. “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.”
“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,” Hruska reports. “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,” Hruska reports. “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.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: When CPU power management techniques are thwarted by some software, that’s usually when you see these significant battery issues in otherwise identical systems.