Jeff Carlson wrote a post about the battery gauge of his spiffy new MacBook Air.  The newest generation of MacBooks have amazing battery life.  There’s a strange downside to this battery life, though.  Here’s a quote from Jeff:

Working on the new 2013 MacBook Air, I noticed that the battery gauge in the menu bar had slid into red. Typically that means a scramble to find the power adapter, but then I clicked the button […]  17% battery still left—with an estimated 3 hours 23 minutes of battery charge.

A red battery indicator on my Mac used to mean that I needed to get plugged in quickly.  Not drop-everything quickly, but sometime in the next half-hour or so.  The red battery indicator usually meant that I could finish out a meeting if I was careful, but that was about it.  Now, though, I’ve got a retina MacBook Pro.  A red battery indicator usually means that I still have three hours of battery life yet.

Users are trained that a red icon indicates that there is a problem that needs to be addressed soon, and that not addressing it soon means that there will be consequences.  Apple hasn’t considered this in expectation in the current battery indicator.  Red no longer means that I need to fix this soon.  Now that my expectation for what red means is broken, I have found that I stop paying attention to the battery indicator.  I’ve increasingly found myself getting the dialog telling me that my Mac needs to be plugged in very soon or it will have to power itself off.

Apple has made amazing strides in battery technology.  I can easily get more than 8 hours of battery life on my rMBP without paying any attention to conserving the battery.  As a result of this improvement, 20% of battery life remaining is no longer a cause for concern.  Apple needs to reconsider the point at which it warns me that my battery is low.  The warning needs to be early enough that I can complete whatever I’m currently working on, but not so early that I disregard it as something that needs action from me.