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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.
I blame the Russians. Clearly they influenced the reviewers, so the results should be ignored.
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.
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.
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.
Working as an Apple employee in the part of the company that performed non-user updates, how many times did you THINK you would encounter customers who wanted to do the upgrade themselves?
Why would Mac owners who wanted to upgrade their own hardware have even come into contact with you??
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.
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!
As someone that works in IT I've seen the number of replaceable parts get reduced over time. Today if there is a problem with a computer, and it's something other than a hard drive or it's a really high end computer, then the computer is replaced. If under warranty it gets sent back, if not then it's old enough to write off and send out for recycling. We keep some other parts for the high end stuff, but even that is shrinking.
We keep a pile of spare hard drives for all the newer computers. The CAD people have some big HP towers that we keep spare power supplies and video cards for. We have some old computers that get beat up because they are in workshops, and we keep some RAM for them that we pilfered from the ones that died before. Adding RAM and a new hard drive to an aging computer can mean getting a couple more years out of it. We had a large a pile of spare DVD drives for them but any more the stuff they need comes on USB flash drives. When we run out of spare internal DVD drives then I doubt we'll get more. Since the pile is small now we've become a bit reluctant to replace DVD drives that die.
The pile of spare DVD drives is larger than our pile of spare computers. Not because we have more DVD drives but because the computers are so small. These aren't pokey little things either, Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 250GB SSD, dual DisplayPort, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, USB3.0, and all in a little box smaller than those old DVD drives.
Come to think of it these computers aren't all that different than a MacBook. The only ports on it are video, USB, Ethernet, power, and a little threaded nub for a WiFi antenna if the one built in isn't strong enough. Since the video ports are DisplayPort and VGA we keep a box of DP++ to DVI adapters since most of the displays we have are DVI. If anyone wants a DVD drive, which is rare, we have a pile of USB DVD drives for them. On the MacBook the USB-C ports play the part of video, USB, and power. One would need the right kind of cable to plug into a display or whatever but that's something we'd have to do anyway. Hard drives don't die as often as they used to, I expect our pile of spares to last a long time. In fact we may never have to buy spares again, if trends continue.
I'm starting to feel like a horse veterinarian, if the horse is sick shoot it and get another.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.