>Quite an amazing coincidence that they recognized this right after they released a new line of computers whose battery life failed to live up to expectations.
Or was reported to have "failed to live up to expectations", by idiots who merely assumed the estimate and didn't bother to do an actual clock wall check.
No, I doubt they changed it to punish Mike Ash specifically.
Rather they decided to cut the fake precision (X hours YY minutes) and stick to the segmented-battery icon display.
It's like some statistics were saying there's a 45.32% chance of something, just because that's what their simplistic division of the samples gives them, despite the confidence margin being plus/minus 5 percentage points.
Instead, they now tell you it's "between 40% and 50%".
The target audience of the statistics is not "punished because some idiots took 45.32% literally". They are just shown a better value.
More correct but less useful isn't actually better. An estimate of time remaining is more meaningful than a percentage of battery capacity remaining, even if the latter can be provided with more accuracy.
Correct but inactionable is useless. It's basically undeniably correct that our universe will eventually die of entropic heat death. This isn't useful, though.
Projections about Earth's global warming are undoubtedly less correct but far more useful because they are actionable.
Or was reported to have "failed to live up to expectations", by idiots who merely assumed the estimate and didn't bother to do an actual clock wall check.