Latest macOS Sierra beta informs you when your Mac’s display is using significant energy

The latest beta of macOS Sierra 10.12.3 provides a brand new display brightness energy saving recommendation for extending battery life under the Battery menu bar item, MacRumors has discovered. It appears in macOS Sierra 10.12.3 beta 4 when display brightness is set above the 75 percent mark.

Clicking it lowers your Mac’s display brightness to 75 percent, helping reduce energy consumption and extend your computer’s battery life. This new feature also works when the option to automatically adjust display brightness is enabled in System Preferences.

The item appears in the same area where the Time Remaining indicator used to be.

Apple has recently removed the Time Remaining indicator from the Battery menu because it wasn’t very accurate to begin with. The Cupertino firm has explained that the Time Remaining indicator was unable to “accurately keep up with what users were doing because of the dynamic ways” people use their Macs nowadays.

macOS has listed apps using a significant amount of energy under the Battery menu for some time now. On mobile devices and notebooks, the display is typically the #1 power hog. That’s especially true for LCD screens that require a backlighting module that requires a significant amount of energy to illuminate the pixels.

This new Display Brightness item in macOS Sierra 10.12.3 beta 4 is especially relevant in light of the recent controversy over the new MacBook Pro’s battery life issues.

As you know, the Consumer Reports organization has re-run their barrage of battery tests and now recommends Apple’s machine after the company fixed a Safari bug in Sierra which apparently resulted in flawed results in Consumer Reports’ tests.

Apple’s official stats for the new MacBook Pro advertise up to ten hours of battery life on a single charge when browsing the web or watching iTunes movies. The new Display Brightness feature will be available to all users when macOS 10.12.3 is released for public consumption in the coming days.

Source: MacRumors