briantoronto

I hear you, they have really been optimizing the OS for SSD. It was a company box and I wanted a notebook instead of a desktop and a notebook, so went for the MBP (got to love end-of-year surpluses) . Lucky for me I haven't had the issue with battery life. I wonder what I am doing right (wrong?)!

tmiw

Is it me or does the refurb site seem to be particularly lacking in 15" MBPs lately? I wonder if people are just opting for those instead of bothering with the new models.

Michael Ad

Just got my 13" a few days ago. My previous one seems clunky by comparison.

Love the weight and the screen; like the USB-C now that I'm organized on it. Will get a USB-C monitor in the near future.

And Touch ID with 1P is amazing - love it!

eeflyer

Not sure why my previous post didn't show up.. Maybe stuck in modqueue somewhere. EDIT: Never mind, found it thanks!

A new update for MacOS was released today. Among other fixes, it removed the "Time Remaining" indicator.

While I've always kept it enabled as a sanity check, it's never been very accurate anyway. Still feeling somewhat conflicted about its total removal though.

tmiw

It kinda reeks of the whole "you're holding it wrong" thing that happened with the iPhone a few years back. Apple will probably eventually be forced to admit that there's actually a problem with the MBP's battery if history's any indication.

eeflyer

That is a concern as well. But what could be the possible solution? It won't be as simple as issuing bumpers to MBP owners In addition reports have been somewhat spotty. It's going to vary widely based on usage patterns (dGPU active, compute-intensive tasks, etc). I should really get around to benchmarking my battery life to see if it personally affects me.

tmiw

In this case, it'd likely be a monetary settlement and a downward adjustment of advertised battery life. The upside is that Apple might actually have to add back a mm or two of thickness to be able to advertise 10 hour battery life again.

nmenaker

apple doesn't really want to offer the refurbs on the 15" (and certainly not the 2016 models yet). Most of the most recent 15" with the Radeon X370m dGPU would be directly competitive to the current new 2016 model (and an upgraded BTO at that).

There's a reason that apple kept the 2015 chassis in place, but depricated the GPU, they want ppl to move to the new 2016 model to get that. So, not available in the retail outlets, and most likely won't be available in the refurb store.

I recently bought a couple of the last model rMBP 15", with upgraded CPU and the dGPU and 1TB SSD for 2100$ (this was a 3100$ machine 2 months ago) brand new "apple refurbished" with the full apple warranty-on ebay. So, I think what apple has done has moved these units to a third market and not making them available through their primary refurb mkt on the apple store.

tmiw

Were you able to buy AppleCare for those? That'd be my concern when buying from a third party like that.

nmenaker

if a unit is currently under applecare warranty (which these are) adding the ac extension has never been a problem in my experience. We'll see, I only do it before the 1 yr deadline if I've had problems with the unit or if they have some inherent problem.

Analise

Will the "time remaining" feature be removed from MBAs too? I haven't received the update on my MBA.

DYKWIA

Yes - it's removed from the OS - so will affect all machines running the new MacOS version.

nmenaker

you can still find it in the energy section of the activity monitor, and I think there is a terminal hack that will bring it back if you like.

Analise

Does that also mean that the percentage of battery life info is also removed?

It sounds like they opt not to want to fix the MBP problem but instead prefer to hide it.

bocastephen

I wonder if there will be a class-action against Apple for the MacBook battery misrepresentation - I for one, am ready to join.