I was consistently able to get between 8 and 8.5 hours of continuous use from the Retina MacBook Pro when running integrated graphics only. If everyone does that, nobody will need gfxCardStatus at all in the future.Turning down screen brightness to just two "dots," a technique I often use to maximize battery life when using a MacBook Air during conferences, caused OS X to report potential battery life as high as 10 hours. Then, you can get in touch with the author and/or Apple and tell them that the behavior isn't acceptable to you as it stands. Rather than hacking around the actual problem forever, gfxCardStatus is great to use as an informational tool to let you know when an app isn't behaving like you want it to. Think about it: this whole app wouldn't have even been necessary if GPU switching had worked really well out of the box in 2010 machines. For most everyone, the answer should be no. The only way I could get anyone's attention about this was to entirely remove it, and make everyone think about whether or not they really need the feature anymore. People don't ever want to read disclaimers. The issue with just putting the disclaimer in there is that I would probably still get a large volume of support requests. In what case does it help you a lot? Are there particular apps that you run that made you want to use power source-based switching? Almost every app (aside from Skype and Chrome, which are both garbage) that needs to use the discrete GPU at this point has a good reason to if you're on 10.8 (and if you're not, you should upgrade). It just so happened that in the 10.6 and 10.7 days, it was mostly the former, because nearly every other app caused the discrete GPU to come on. There's a good reason that OS X's automatic graphics switching is on by default – so that there can be a relative balance between graphics performance and battery life. Having Integrated Only mode available is convenient when you really need to squeeze some extra battery life out of your machine, but it's not what you should be running in 100% of the time. That way, you know when something is draining your battery, and you can send a note to the developer(s) of those apps, and ask them to fix it (unless the app has a good reason to use the discrete GPU, like Photoshop, Keynote, iPhoto, games, etc.). The recommended way to use it is to just start it up, and not touch anything – leave it in Dynamic Switching mode. GfxCardStatus is, first and foremost, a diagnostic utility. There's a good reason that OS X's automatic graphics switching is on by default so that there can be a relative balance between graphics performance and battery life. The recommended way to use it is to just start it up, and not touch anything leave it in Dynamic Switching mode. Rather than spend a ton of time trying to fix it, it's being removed altogether, because it's largely unnecessary if you're on 10.8 at this point. I just don't have the time to deal with that anymore. Power source-based switching was removed because a) it has never worked 100% properly, and was causing an unbelievable amount of problems for some people, and b) I get several hundred support emails about it per month.
If that was the whole point of gfxCardStatus, I wouldn't have buried the settings under the Advanced tab in preferences.
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