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2016 MacBook Pro Fails To Receive a Recommendation From Consumer Reports (9to5mac.com)
Consumer Reports has released its evaluation of the new MacBook Pro laptops, and it's not good. The 2016 MacBook Pro is the first MacBook to fail to receive a recommendation from the nonprofit organization dedicated to unbiased product testing. 9to5Mac reports: In a post breaking down the decision not to recommend the new MacBook Pros, Consumer Reports explains that while the new models held up well in terms of display quality and performance, the battery life issues were too big of an issue to overlook. The organization tested three MacBook Pro variants: a 13-inch Touch Bar model, a 15-inch Touch Bar model, and a 13-inch model without the Touch Bar. The general consensus was that "MacBook Pro battery life results were highly inconsistent from one trial to the next." Consumer Reports explains that the 13-inch Touch Bar model saw battery life of 16 hours in one test and 3.75 hours in another, while the non-Touch Bar model maxed out at 19.5 hours, but also lasted just 4.5 hours in another test. The 15-inch model ranged from 18.5 hours to 8 hours. Generally, according to the report, it's expected for battery life to vary from one trial to another by less than 5 percent, meaning that the battery life variances with the new MacBook Pro are very abnormal. Once that was completed, Consumer Reports experimented by conducting the same test using Chrome and "found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs." While the organization can't let that affect its final decision due to its protocol to only use the first-party browser, it's something users may want to try.
Something is rotten in the state of Apple.
Hell must've frozen over. Next thing you'll tell me a reality TV star became President....
The batteries aren't big enough, and Apple's power saving features are too aggressive, leading to a situation where the slightest load that pokes the machine in the wrong way (ie, anything that causes the GPUs to switch, or more CPU cores to wake up) will cause your battery % to drop through the floor.
It's a shame, really. If they weren't so obsessed with thinness to the point of discarding RAM slots, SSD sockets, and battery capacity- it might actually be a decent machine.
I wonder how many people pointed out these issues prior to launch. The answer is either "lots" (who were summarily ignored), or "none at all" (because everyone was fearing for their jobs- thou shall not go against thy word of thy great Ive). Either way, this only serves to highlight the growing dysfunction within Apple. And I can guarantee you their response to falling Mac sales won't be to release the machine people want, but rather to cancel the whole lineup entirely.
Consumer Reports is what it is, and for lots of stuff it is great, but because they do pretty well with appliances does not make them experts anywhere else. A very old joke in Motor Trend (or the equivalent; I forget.) has white lab coated guys in beards and spectacles carefully taking notes on clipboards as they push cars off a cliff. To one man's query another guy says, "Oh, that's just Consumer Reports testing cars again."
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
I got the mid 2015 15" pro and I'm hoping it will last years. I've had Lenovo, HP and Dell through work and they are fine. The Macbook Pro on the other hand is really really nice to work with. Trackpad is just superb and Magsafe should be standard on all laptops (IMHO).
The only thing I would like different is more RAM (I use several VMs).
So when the new model arrived I was sure I would be a bit anoyed about the increased ram size and other new features that I would miss, but no.
I'm actually happy I got the previous model. It's so much better for my use.
I wouldn't even consider the new model. Who the f..k buys a pro laptop without any USB A ports? How isolated are you? Dongles? I hate dongles. I'm not spending that much money to carry around a bunch of dongles.
If Apple wants their Pro line to be used by bloggers then ok. They lost their way.
I'm sure anyone looking to by a MacBook Pro isn't looking at Consumer Reports for advise...
Well, not anymore.
Consumer Reports is what it is, and for lots of stuff it is great...
Especially great at trashing Apple when it deserves to be trashed.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That would be a better response than their actual response: removing the battery life indicator from macOS. No, really, after reports of poor battery life Apple "solved" the problem by making macOS just not report how long the battery had left before it drains.
Plus that would involve Apple actually reading and caring about product reviews. They don't. iOS 10 is trash, the Apple Watch is useless, and this new MacBook Pro is a disaster - and they don't care!
Eventually they'll discover the lesson that Hillary Clinton discovered: you can't just ignore your "core supporters" on the assumption that they're dumb enough to keep buying the shit you're selling. Eventually they'll just abandon you for anyone else who promises them better.
The point at which I determined CR to be crap for automotive testing is when they gave the Honda pickup truck the recommendation because it had the most comfortable interior and smoothest ride. Of course, it had the smallest bed, the lowest hauling capacity, and the worst trailer rating, but why would you need any of that in a pickup truck?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I'm sure anyone looking to by a MacBook Pro isn't looking at Consumer Reports for advise...
Advice. Advise is a verb. Advice is a noun.
The bit about Safari and battery life is telling of QC issues.It sounds like safari processes are getting stuck in a race condition and are probably eating 100% cpu on a core. (I've seen this happen with lots of browsers and not just Safari. Modern webpages with megabytes of shitty JS can do this easily)
But, if it's the browser, why is this only happening with the new Macs? I don't see anyone complaining about this problem with older Mac hardware. It certainly isn't something I'm seeing with my 2015 13" MacBook Pro - the battery life is consistently good.
I use Safari as my default browser, but I'm not on Sierra (I was, but rolled back after running into too many annoying bugs.
#DeleteChrome
Of course I'm mostly hoping for funny comments (as of days of yore), but in the case of this specific article I was hoping to find something about the possible causes of the variability in battery life. The mention of Safari was quite speculative, but I guess it isn't the job of Consumer Reports to diagnose the problems, just find them?
Anyway, for what it's worth, I have a long history with Apple, but as of this writing I do not anticipate any future purchase from Apple. The company is now dedicated to monolithic Apple-style thinking, which I find rather humorous considering the slogan of their most famous advertising campaign. Anything resembling criticism of Apple is now regarded as double-plus-ungood. Shut uppa your mouth!
I'm not sure how much to blame Apple. I think it is the American laws that basically require big companies to become increasingly evil in order to survive. Being an evil company is not a guarantee of success and huge profits, but being a nice company has become an absolute guarantee of failure, usually via acquisition. (My current list of examples includes NetScape, Palm, Sun, and Nokia.)
I'll check back later, though my hope of finding truly funny comments is fading these years.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Apple's bread and butter is fit/finish and consistent user experience.
It was when Jobs was in charge. Ives and Cook don't have anyone to keep them in line.
I feel like if Zombie Jobs was forced to use a Dongle to connect his brand new phone to his brand new computer he'd go in search of new brains.
Says a majority of the people who buy pickups and who, by the way, never fill the bed, haul anything that can't be lifted by two people, or pull a trailer.
This has always been the case with the MacBook Pro. For example, on the 2014-ish 15" retina models, you could easily burn through an "8 hour" battery in two or three hours by running things like Lightroom, Xcode, Finale (with Garritan instruments enabled), etc. For folks running high-end pro apps, Mac laptops haven't gotten great battery life since they took away our ability to put the machine to sleep, swap in a second battery, and keep going.
Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that the newer batteries don't stop working after a couple of years like the older ones, but I would kill to have a MacBook Pro with current-generation LiPo batteries in a removable form factor at 100 Wh apiece.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If a background daemon gets into a tightly rolled loop consuming 100% of a CPU, the battery will run down quickly. And if that background daemon is one that is specific to the new hardware, it would affect only that model. So chances are, the problem is caused by some of the software that manages the new touch strip.
That said, it is likely that the smaller battery in the new model makes the problem worse than it otherwise would be.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Says a majority of the people who buy pickups and who, by the way, never fill the bed, haul anything that can't be lifted by two people, or pull a trailer.
1. If that were the case, the Honda would be selling pretty well. Honda pulled the vehicle from N.A. sales a couple years ago due to almost non-existent sales. The F-150 is the best selling vehicle in the US.
2. The F-150 is the most popular vehicle amongst people making more than $1 million a year. It's, pretty much all, contractors and ranchers. You know, people who actually use pickup trucks.
3. I know this because half of my family work directly for automotive manufacturers and suppliers, and they know the market.
Sure, there are plenty of people who buy pickups who don't need them. People buy sports cars and don't race them. People drive Jeeps without ever taking them off road. That doesn't mean a sports car with lousy performance is a good sports car, or an off road vehicle that doesn't do well off-road is a good off-road vehicle.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I was eagerly awaiting the new MBP release expecting it would support 32GB like everyone else (hell, you can buy relatively svelte laptops that supports 64GB from Dell). The 16GB limit, the fact that you can't upgrade the RAM or the SSD, the lack of ports... the new MBP was just a giant middle finger to the "power user" community. It's very apparent that the executive/senior management at Apple could give two sh*ts about their technical/professional user base any more and are more focused on users who are concerned about how their device looks. The recent article on Bloomberg.com bears that out. The thing is, from a business stand point it makes sense. The average users is, well, average, and represents a much larger user base than you or I. "Space Gray" and "Rose Gold" are much much easier and cheaper options to implement during assembly than multiple memory options, etc. You can either spend more on R&D to appeal to 10-25% of the market or you can appeal to the 75% of the market like my wife whose still happily chugging along on her 8GB MacBook Air. From a business standpoint it's a no-brainer. I'm disappointed, I loved my MBP's but it's time to move on.
Consumer Reports showed REAL courage in not recommending your product...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Well, now you can, kinda, right? Since you can charge standard USB-C, any USB outputting external battery should power the Mac. Carry as many as you want!
requires courage.
I didn't read that article, but I can see a reasonable justifcation for the rating. Maybe sometimes people bump the turn signal stalk the wrong way and indicate the incorrect turn direction, and the indicator would help them to know that they're indicating incorrectly, thus avoiding an unexpected (from the point of other drivers) turn.
Not saying that I think it's worth dinging a car's rating over, but there might be some sense to it, especially if you consider the very limits of safety features to be an important component of a car.
I mean, there's something bordering on bats**t crazy about adding a second CPU and simultaneously cutting the power capacity by 25%.
To be fair that SoC uses next to no power so it isn't a real drain on the system at all. The problem is cutting the power capacity by 25% when the only significant saving in power usage is due to the screen. That's great if you're just doing web browsing or email or whatever but if you're using the CPU and GPU for things like, well I don't know, professional work then just because the screen uses 30% less power isn't going to make up for the reduction in power capacity. You need that 25% average saving across the board which hasn't happened hence the poor battery life.
More importantly, the web browser makes the difference between recommended and not. Ignore all of the hardware, its the browser.
I'm curious now, exactly what they are testing. I'm guessing Facebook and YouTube, or similar. Ajax and video. Not my use case, but certainly a popular one.
I guess I won't make fun of Microsoft pimping their browser efficiency any more...
Apple and Microsoft both intended to use Kaby Lake processors in their latest iteration but ended up using SkyLake processors instead because of delays. This according to a very reliable news source that never succumbs to hyperbole, bad journalism or gives in to the temptation to post click-bait. The linked article even mentions the forced decision to use SkyLake processors as the reason for poorer battery life. The current Microsoft/Apple offerings in this device class are interim devices., so the thing to do is defer purchasing decisions until devices with the Kaby Lake processors arrive. On the plus side, this story will allow all the Apple critics out there to come here, vent their rage and thus lower their blood pressure.
Oh excellent that really helps with usb wireless dongles, usb sticks, usb mouse/keyboard, you know the kinds of things you plug into your computer.
Those all attach to the more convenient cheap USB-C hub I got, that includes HDMI, VGA, a charging passthrough USB-C port, and a few USB-A ports. It's actually easier than it was because I used to plug things like keyboards into my computer seperatley, now I just connect one cable and leave everything attached to the hub. With everything going to USB-C it means hubs and USB-C components are all much cheaper. I guess you hate lower prices??
You dutifully defend every decision Apple makes
I have been critical of them before, you just choose to remember what you want. The fact is that I would not buy a laptop today from ANY computer maker that did not have all USB-C ports. It's just obviously a better situation all around.
One thing I have said about the current laptop is that it's notably more expensive than past models.
"oh with the removal of the headphone jack you just buy lightning headphones, look they're available everywhere"
No you just use the adaptor INCLUDED IN THE BOX. I only have one set of earphones so I attached it to that... what is your damage Heather?
The new macbook pro was so underpowered from day one
It's one of the more powerful laptops around. Yes there are higher end gaming laptops but they also have worse battery life or are much bulkier.... the MacBook Pro has always been about the tradeoffs that come with a laptop, optimizing it for both size and speed combined. So it will never be the fastest thing around but it is super easy to carry and powerful to use for pretty much any task... I care because I am a consultant and I'm not just using my laptop for fun, I am often working 10+ hour days. I usually use the MacBook for about three years before upgrading, and it has never failed in all that time...
One thing it is absolutely the fastest at is storage though, there they did not skimp because they didn't have to. That is a huge gain to any laptop user and a major reason why they perform better than some of the other specs would indicate, because laptop power has always been a combination of not just CPU/GPU, but also storage speed being significant...
But by all means tell us "but Tim Cook said they care about the Mac" like a good Apple fanboy.
Unlike you I don't talk trash about Apple based on what they say, I look at what they actually do. I'll see what comes out in the next few months for new Mac desktops and then we'll see where they are... I know you wont care because you just pass judgement (as you already have) with no reasoning or evidence, indeed here I see you say Apple is poor at desktops based on a three-year old system.
Sorry, basing my opinion and understanding on facts instead of raw burning hate is just kind of how I roll.
I'll let you have the last post since I know you irrational Apple Haters just need to vent raw bile constantly and cannot stop yourselves from doing so any time someone might slightly indicate that Apple is OK. What a shame you let Apple control your mind like that! I wouldn't let any company drive how I feel.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley