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0 pointsjosephg1y ago0 comments

You say that - and then I looked up and saw AMPDevicesAgent sitting at 95% CPU for the past - well, who knows how long. What even is that? Oh, some iphone sync thing. Why is it running while my laptop is on battery? I don't want my battery going flat in order to background sync my phone. In fact, I turned background phone sync off in finder a few days ago. Why is it even running?

Are these processes behaving properly or is it in some stupid infinite loop? I can't tell. Is it considered acceptable by apple for background processes to make my efficiency cores sit at 100% utilisation more or less all the time - even when I'm on battery power? How much will that reduce my laptop's battery life?

I can't tell. I have no way to tell. Its all an opaque jungle of processes running processes. Half of them are buggy half the time, and I don't know which half. It gets more complex and stupid every year.

I swear, macos seemed to run better 10 years ago when I had a computer that was many times slower. Strangely, at the time, there were no constant background processes chewing up CPU all the time like this. Tell me, how is any of this stuff making my computing experience better?

I think my preferred computer has a fast, modern CPU and software from a decade or two ago. Off the top of my head, I can't name a single feature added in macos in the last decade that I actually care about. (Excluding support for modern hardware.)

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astrange1y ago· 2 in thread

> I can't tell. I have no way to tell.

If the battery life is less than you expect then there's a problem. I think that's pretty easy to notice.

It sounds like that's a bug though, you should report it. Posting on random forums about it won't cause it to get fixed.

josephgOP1y ago

Huh? I don't find battery life to be that easy to notice. Most of the time I use my laptop, I'm at home - and I'm only on battery power because I sat on the couch and I'm too lazy to reach over and plug my laptop in. The battery goes flat sometimes on zoom calls, or when streaming. But I don't know how many hours I should expect the battery to last while on a zoom call.

The only way I could tell that my battery life has gone down would be by doing actual tests - but those are notoriously difficult - because I can't use my laptop at the same time. (Or, I guess I can - but I'd need to use it the same way across tests). It sounds like days of work to test my battery life with and without transient background tasks. I don't even know how I'd test that - because I don't know how to turn all that stuff off for the control.

I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.

I hear you that complaining online probably won't help. But can't see how complaining about battery life in feedback assistant would help either. The situation is crappy.

astrange1y ago

> I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.

Don't worry, I am literally telling you to do this. Apple is made entirely out of bug reports. It's their job to handle them.

I would say that you shouldn't put too much effort into it, simply because of burnout.

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