Low Power Mode for Mac Laptops: Making the Case Again (marco.org) 58
In light of this week's rumor that a Pro Mode -- which will supposedly boost performance on Macs with Catalina operating system -- may be coming, long time developer and Apple commentator Marco Arment makes the case for a Low Power Mode on macOS. He writes: Modern hardware constantly pushes thermal and power limits, trying to strike a balance that minimizes noise and heat while maximizing performance and battery life. Software also plays a role, trying to keep everything background-updated, content-indexed, and photo-analyzed so it's ready for us when we want it, but not so aggressively that we notice any cost to performance or battery life. Apple's customers don't usually have control over these balances, and they're usually fixed at design time with little opportunity to adapt to changing circumstances or customer priorities.
The sole exception, Low Power Mode on iOS, seems to be a huge hit: by offering a single toggle that chooses a different balance, people are able to greatly extend their battery life when they know they'll need it. Mac laptops need Low Power Mode, too. I believe so strongly in its potential because I've been using it on my laptops (in a way) for years, and it's fantastic. I've been disabling Intel Turbo Boost on my laptops with Turbo Boost Switcher Pro most of the time since 2015. In 2018, I first argued for Low Power Mode on macOS with a list of possible tweaks, concluding that disabling Turbo Boost was still the best bang-for-the-buck tweak to improve battery life without a noticeable performance cost in most tasks.
Recently, as Intel has crammed more cores and higher clocks into smaller form factors and pushed thermal limits to new extremes, the gains have become even more significant. [...] With Turbo Boost disabled, peak CPU power consumption drops by 62%, with a correspondingly huge reduction in temperature. This has two massive benefits: The fans never audibly spin up. [...] It runs significantly cooler. Turbo Boost lets laptops get too hot to comfortably hold in your lap, and so much heat radiates out that it can make hands sweaty. Disable it, and the laptop only gets moderately warm, not hot, and hands stay comfortably dry. I haven't done formal battery testing on the 16-inch, since it's so difficult and time-consuming to do in a controlled way that's actually useful to people, but anecdotally, I'm seeing similar battery gains by disabling Turbo Boost that I've seen with previous laptops: significantly longer battery life that I'd estimate to be between 30-50%.
The sole exception, Low Power Mode on iOS, seems to be a huge hit: by offering a single toggle that chooses a different balance, people are able to greatly extend their battery life when they know they'll need it. Mac laptops need Low Power Mode, too. I believe so strongly in its potential because I've been using it on my laptops (in a way) for years, and it's fantastic. I've been disabling Intel Turbo Boost on my laptops with Turbo Boost Switcher Pro most of the time since 2015. In 2018, I first argued for Low Power Mode on macOS with a list of possible tweaks, concluding that disabling Turbo Boost was still the best bang-for-the-buck tweak to improve battery life without a noticeable performance cost in most tasks.
Recently, as Intel has crammed more cores and higher clocks into smaller form factors and pushed thermal limits to new extremes, the gains have become even more significant. [...] With Turbo Boost disabled, peak CPU power consumption drops by 62%, with a correspondingly huge reduction in temperature. This has two massive benefits: The fans never audibly spin up. [...] It runs significantly cooler. Turbo Boost lets laptops get too hot to comfortably hold in your lap, and so much heat radiates out that it can make hands sweaty. Disable it, and the laptop only gets moderately warm, not hot, and hands stay comfortably dry. I haven't done formal battery testing on the 16-inch, since it's so difficult and time-consuming to do in a controlled way that's actually useful to people, but anecdotally, I'm seeing similar battery gains by disabling Turbo Boost that I've seen with previous laptops: significantly longer battery life that I'd estimate to be between 30-50%.
So do it (Score:1, Troll)
So write the code that does it. Oh wait, it is a closed source OS? I guess you are SOL unless Apple wants it. Until then, keep forking over the money.
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It sounds like he's arguing that Apple should build this functionality into the OS, just like they do with iOS. I'm sure there are some other things that they could do behind the scenes beyond just limiting the CPU's turbo boost.
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There is more to what he is arguing than just disabling TurboBoost. He has a whole list of things, like suspending indexing, etc. He can't do any of those things because he has no control over what his system does. Never mind, you don't understand what I am talking about. You are just another consumer. Be happy.
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There is more to what he is arguing than just disabling TurboBoost. He has a whole list of things, like suspending indexing, etc. He can't do any of those things because he has no control over what his system does. Never mind, you don't understand what I am talking about. You are just another consumer. Be happy.
Even if there isn't a convenient GUI checkbox/slider, etc, most, if not all, of those things, like Indexing, can be controlled from the Command Line.
And if it is controllable from the CLI (shell), it is controllable from an Application.
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True but even if it didn't exist I think well within the Apple philosophy. Apple tends to dictate the right way of doing things and minimize the endless knobs to tweak. That's a matter of user preference market segmentation kind of things. People that really like to tweak go linux, fair amount of tweaking windows, "do it for me/just work" == Apple.
As much as I like to tweak my gadgets some don't and that's ok. If Apple's system doesn't give you enough knobs to play with buy something else. An over statement
Knobs with Mac-only apps (Score:2)
If Apple's system doesn't give you enough knobs to play with buy something else.
Except it appears you can't have both the iOS SDK and knobs without carrying two laptops. This is a problem for developers who like knobs but have customers who don't.
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For this particular change under Windows it's not a fair amount of tweaking, it's an insane amount of tweaking of barely-documented parameters. First, you need to fire up RegEdit and go to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\be337238-0d82-4146-a960-4f3749d470c7\Attributes and change its value from 1 to 2. Then go to Power Options in the control panel, Change Advanced, Processor Power Management (which isn't visible without the registry hack from ab
An Apple device (Score:1)
Judging by all the "itâ(TM)s" in the summary it was written on an Apple device. Wow, those quotes sure are "smart"!
Re:An Apple device (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot is the problem here. It's probably the last website on the planet that still can't cope with unicode.
Re:An Apple device (Score:4, Interesting)
The Slashdot administrators made a business decision not to cope with Unicode because Unicode has been used for layout-breaking directionality overrides (the "erocS" problem) and for indecent or hateful glyph art (think ASCII Goatse but worse). You could instead try Rehash, the comment software that powers SoylentNews and was forked from the last public release of Slash.
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The Slashdot administrators made a business decision not to cope with Unicode because Unicode has been used for layout-breaking directionality overrides (the "erocS" problem) and for indecent or hateful glyph art (think ASCII Goatse but worse). You could instead try Rehash, the comment software that powers SoylentNews and was forked from the last public release of Slash.
Oh, so the lack of Unicode support is saving us from all those 20 foot tall Swastikas that pepper too many Slashdot threads, right?
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Slashdot is the problem here. It's probably the last website on the planet that still can't cope with unicode.
They obviously take it as some sort of twisted Badge of Honor. [rollseyes]
Re:An Apple device (Score:4)
I never saw the point to using those to begin with, I always felt regular quotes were sufficient, but it's 2020, there's no real excuse for not having proper Unicode support by now. I'd say the ultimate blame in this case lies with Slashdot for not supporting something that should be standard at this point.
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As far as I know, MS Office was the first program to automatically convert regular quotes into "smart quotes." I might be wrong on that, though.
I believe TeX mode in Emacs was doing it a long time beforehand.
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"Smart" quotes speed up reading the same way paired brackets do: you can tell by looking at one whether you're starting or finishing a quoted passage.
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Judging by all the "itâ(TM)s" in the summary it was written on an Apple device. Wow, those quotes sure are "smart"!
No, you really mean "Wow, those Slashdot coders sure are dumb!"
LOL (Score:4, Interesting)
If I wanted to dick around with settings I would install Linux. MacOS should be smart enough to dim the screen and lower CPU use when it's running off battery.
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If I wanted to dick around with settings I would install Linux. MacOS should be smart enough to dim the screen and lower CPU use when it's running off battery.
Like Windows has since at least version 7?
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Like Windows has since at least version 7?
And like Macs have since at least OS 9, back in the late '90s, since they've had an Energy Saver preference pane or similar for at least that long (and likely earlier, but I don't recall the specifics of 8 and earlier well enough to make any claims about them). Macs have for decades had options to do things like dim the screen, disable discrete GPUs, disable background tasks, put disks to sleep, and engage in other battery saving techniques when on battery power.
What's being asked for here by this blogger i
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He's also advocating for Turbo Boost to be disabled when in Low Power mode, since it's conspicuously absent from the list of things that can be configured to be disabled when on battery power.
Which is one of those not-obvious optimizations, despite what's being discussed here. It's often cheaper in terms of power to run hard for a brief amount of time than to accomplish the same total computation load over a longer period of time. If it was as slam-dunk a win as its being portrayed to be, it might well already be in place. Haters gonna hate, but the people who work on the MacOS battery life problem aren't stupid.
Screen backlight power use while waiting (Score:2)
It's often cheaper in terms of power to run hard for a brief amount of time than to accomplish the same total computation load over a longer period of time.
In particular, if a task completes sooner, the user will spend less time with the screen backlight turned on waiting for the task to finish.
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How many people do you know that spend a significant amount of their total computer-using time waiting for things to finish? For most use cases the slowest part of the computer, by many orders of magnitude, is the user.
For example - it took your computer milliseconds to render this comment, which you've now spent several seconds reading.
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Booting from an SSD, installing updates to an operating system on an SSD, rendering a 3D scene, encoding video, and compiling code are examples of reasonably common tasks that can take seconds to minutes but run faster with a faster CPU.
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Maybe it's just me, but booting a laptop is a once-every-few-months thing - usually it hibernates instead of being shut off, and takes seconds to resume. Updates can take a while, but *maybe* half an hour once a month - not a significant percentage of total computing time.
Rendering, encoding, and compiling? You seriously want to claim those are things that consume a large percentage of total personal computing time? Heck, most people barely know what the terms mean, and even for those of us who do one or
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booting a laptop is a once-every-few-months thing
That depends on whether you need to use multiple operating systems, one for some applications exclusive to one operating system and the other for other applications exclusive to the other. For example, a MacBook power user might dual-boot macOS and Windows, or a power user of a laptop other than a MacBook might dual-boot Windows and some Linux distribution.
Rendering, encoding, and compiling? [...] we'll quite likely be doing something else while particularly long-winded processes run in the background. [...] The outliers are [...] legitimately massive tasks that probably won't be running on a laptop.
Even while offline? Some power users (such as myself) have done fairly substantial tasks while commuting or traveling as a passenger in a bus, train, air
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Unfortunately that breaks down in the face of performance-adaptive software. Movie playback, UI animation quality, website scripting, games, etc.quite often auto-throttle their computational demands to keep things responsive on low-end or overloaded hardware, while still delivering the best possible quality on high end systems.
The positive feedback between the two auto-throttling systems tends to keep things pegged at maximum quality and CPU usage - which is nice most the time, you're getting your money's
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He's also advocating for Turbo Boost to be disabled when in Low Power mode, since it's conspicuously absent from the list of things that can be configured to be disabled when on battery power.
Which is one of those not-obvious optimizations, despite what's being discussed here. It's often cheaper in terms of power to run hard for a brief amount of time than to accomplish the same total computation load over a longer period of time. If it was as slam-dunk a win as its being portrayed to be, it might well already be in place. Haters gonna hate, but the people who work on the MacOS battery life problem aren't stupid.
It already exists, Even has a nice "Auto" mode.
If you trust the sketchy-looking website:
https://www.rugarciap.com/turb... [rugarciap.com]
But you can build it from source, too:
https://github.com/rugarciap/T... [github.com]
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One handy feature of Windows power management is that you can set the cooling mode to passive instead of active, i.e. try not to run the fans at all. Handy when you need to sleep near the machine and also very good for keeping the CPU in low power states even under load, which is what this person wants.
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The argument isn't that Macs don't conserve power when the battery low.
The argument is that the user should be able to easily select between a preference for quick performance or long battery life rather than let the OS decide for them.
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I'm pretty sure there were exactly those options in past versions of OS X, and the ability to customize what exactly each one did.
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The problem with high performance notebooks, they cook themselves to death, simply incapable of getting enough of the heat out. Sure they will last warranty with continuous use at high load but their life there in after will be quite short.
Being able to run notebook in lower power mode, lower clock cycles will hugely extend the life of the computer. Better to improve performance with more ram, more cores, more cache, and better data storage and keep those clock cycles down.
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It does, it's got a reasonable low power mode. But being a laptop, the lower power mode should be considered a high value use-case. Ie, I've been in several all-day meetings in the past where everyone is plugging in power and looking for an outlet in the conference room; so having a laptop that goes 8 hours while still allowing you to watch the skype meeting and do some browsing on the side would be at least as useful as a high performance setting.
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Another solution would be to spend $5 on a power strip with enough outlets for everyone in the meeting.
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It is. This guy basically wants to be able to run his processor flat out, but have it run flat out *slower* than it otherwise would.
He could just buy a slower CPU version and stop whining.
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>He could just buy a slower CPU version and stop whining.
That would rather defeat the point of having a toggle, wouldn't it?
There's times you want a high-performance computer - probably most of the time for most people. But there's also occasionally times when almost everyone wishes they had much more battery life or less heat and noise, even if it meant their computer was slower. And since it's actually pretty straightforward (technically) to allow a single computer to transform between the two states
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If I wanted to dick around with settings I would install Linux. MacOS should be smart enough to dim the screen and lower CPU use when it's running off battery.
There is a set of GUI settings for exactly that. Been there for, like, ever...
https://support.apple.com/en-u... [apple.com]
The one thing it doesn't support is disabling Turbo Boost; but the rest is pretty flexible.
Control freaks (Score:1)
Or you could do something like buy a laptop that supports this natively. PC users have had this functionality forever.
Has no one gotten tired of the incessant narrow-minded dictatorial control Apple extends over its products? This is one reason why I refuse to own one. Apple's mantra seems to be "if we don't think you need it, you can't have it."
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Um, what laptop supports this "natively"? What is the difference between Windows laptops and Apples? You have the same issue: YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER YOUR LAPTOP. The is closed source. Proof: I didn't' really type that in caps. My laptop did it.
Re: Control freaks (Score:2)
*sigh*
This isnâ(TM)t about source code and RMS levels of freedom.
Windows-centric OEMs, from Dell and Lenovo to Alienware and Fujitsu have had applications that ship with their laptops which handle hardware things like screen brightness, performance throttling, and machine specific hardware options (e.g. colored LED backlit keyboards). Windows 10 has taken a lot of those things and given them standardized controls, for good or for ill, but theyâ(TM)ve been there, courtesy of OEMs, for decades.
Appar
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No, it's not. Much of that is built into the OS, just like it is in Windows. If that's not enough control for you, you can download apps that do more. Lots of Mac users use some kind of fan control app, for example, to adjust the temperature the fans try to maintain.
Maybe Marco can write his own app to do it (Score:2)
How about one step further? (Score:4)
Having a quick and visible way to rearrange this balance would be useful to me and I imagine other people, even if it's something as simple as a list where you drag and drop the order. I feel like implementing this kind of quality of life feature in a way that's meaningful and visible to users is the kind of thing Apple would have done well ten years ago.
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What you are asking is quite basic and the OS should do it by itself.
When gaming, the CPU/GPU usage will jump to the roof and the fan speed will therefore raise. But when idle or doing basic stuff (web browsing, document editing, etc.) the CPU usage should be close to 0% and the OS will reduce the CPU clock. The fan speed should be minimal, and perhaps even off on some laptops.
When running on battery, the CPU governor will also be more aggressive in reducing the clock speed, so your gaming performance can b
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(power plan) => change plan settings => advanced => processor power management => maximum processor state
Setting that to 100% enables everything. Setting it to 99% disables turbo boost (or at least used to - I'm still on Haswell). Setting it lower limits the m
Damn commies! (Score:1)
Hurry Up and Wait (Score:4, Insightful)
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I suspect the author is either making shit up, or doing something very odd with his notebook on battery power. If he's actually seeing 50% longer battery life just from disabling turbo boost he must be running the thing flat out all the time.
Why not just get an Atom laptop then? (Score:2)
If you don't care about processing speed and just want maximal battery life, why not go even lower power to something like a dual-core Atom (Celeron)? I had such a machine and it didn't even have fans. Or vents, for that matter. But it was painful to work with the moment its limits were reached.
Because there's no Atom MacBook (Score:2)
why not go even lower power to something like a dual-core Atom (Celeron)?
My laptop has a quad-core Atom (Pentium N3710, part of the Pentium Silver line). I bought it because I don't currently depend on any macOS-exclusive applications. But because Apple doesn't make any Atom-based MacBook computers, people who use Xcode or other macOS-exclusive applications must use a CPU that draws more power than an Atom.
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Because having one laptop that does it all would be really nice? Sometimes I want a powerful workhorse. Sometimes I just want to browse the web, listen to music, or watch a movie with as little heat, noise, and battery-drain as possible. Being able to transform between the right computer for two very different jobs with the touch of a button would be a wonderful thing,
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Sometimes thermodynamics doesn't want to cooperate with your notion of nice. You can design your heat dissipation to be two of [small, cool, quiet] but not all three, and right now the high end chips are still hot when boosting, so if you don't design for the boost cooling, you won't be boosting for very long.
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You're thinking of the system backwards - we're not talking about boosting a low-performance computer, but occasionally hobbling a high performance one. Obviously the size can't change, but cool, quiet, and long-running generally come automatically when you hobble the CPU.
Obviously you don't want to do that when you're doing something demanding that would painfully hit the artificial limits, but the option would be quite nice if you're just browsing the web, listening to music, watching a movie, downloadin
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I would never run my DAW in a performance-limited mode. I have a 6-core 3.6 GHz CPU in my desktop machine and still can exceed 75% CPU utilization from all the tracks and effects. (Some of the more recent hybrid modeling/sample instruments are HUGE CPU hogs, but damn do they sound good.) Downloading overnight is something to consign to a box you can remote into. If I'm carrying around the weight and complexity of a cooling system that can handle fast chips, it's because I wan them to do exactly that when th
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And before you ask about the noise problem, I meant to address that. I have a wall between me and the computer. It's in another room entirely. It's not as elegant as Linus Sebastian's server closet solution, but it's decent.
The Macbook Pro Really Isn't (Score:2)
USB-C batteries (Score:2)
Nowadays, USB-C batteries are cheap and powerful. Whenever I work out and about, I take one with me, just in case it's a hassle to find a power outlet. It would be convenient if macOS would provide this low power feature, but realistically, it's very much solved with hardware.