A few days ago macOS Sierra 10.12.2 was released, featuring several key bug fixes and addressing an issue that has plagued some customers who purchased a new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar – battery life. Apple believes the battery life indicator in macOS Sierra is inaccurate, and has led to some confusion about battery performance. That’s exactly why it has been removed.
Apple’s words:
“The percentage is accurate, but because of the dynamic ways we use the computer, the time remaining indicator couldn’t accurately keep up with what users were doing. Everything we do on the MacBook affects battery life in different ways and not having an accurate indicator is confusing. Besides the apps we are working on all the time, there are a lot of things that are happening in the background that users may not be aware of that affects battery life.”
Some MacBook Pro (October 2016) have been complaining about getting less than 10 hours of battery life, reporting little as three hours of it in some cases, however, battery performance can vary significantly based on the apps and processes (such as Spotlight indexing and iCloud photo syncing) that are running, especially for the new devices.
According to the Loop (website), Apple has done extensively battery life testing on the BackBook Pro with Touch Bar, and continues to standy by its battery life estimates of up to 10 hours, but there have been some real word tests that don’t rely on the estimate and still show poor performance.