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Consumer Reports Stands By Its Verdict, Won't Recommend Apple's MacBook Pro (mashable.com)
Consumer Reports took many by surprise last week -- certainly Apple -- when it said it doesn't recommend the company's new MacBook Pro models. The American magazine, which has garnered credibility over 80 years of its existence, said battery life on Apple's new laptops was all over the place -- hitting 19 hours in a test, but less than four hours in another. Last week, Apple's VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller insisted that Consumer Reports' findings didn't match the company's field data, and that Apple was working with Consumer Reports to understand its review. Now Consumer Reports has responded: The nonprofit organization is standing by its initial verdict in which it did not give the MacBook Pro (2016) its "recommended" rating. The organization has now said it doesn't think re-running the tests will change anything. "In this case, we don't believe re-running the tests are warranted for several reasons. First, as we point out in our original article, experiencing very high battery life on MacBooks is not unusual for us -- in fact we had a model in our comparative tests that got 19 hours," it said. "Second, we confirmed our brightness with three different meters, so we feel confident in our findings using this equipment. Finally, we monitor our tests very closely. There is an entry logged every minute, so we know from these entries that the app worked correctly," it added.
Common, CR. You have to know what real courage is to understand and accept Apple products!
"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
What do gay nerds use?
Consumer Reports has no incentive but to produce accurate reports on consumer products. Apple on the other hand has a motive to produce positive results with its product tests. But this is not the first time Apple has over inflated battery life and I am sure it's tests were done to provide a good specification under certain conditions. But my own experience with devices today has tended to be overly optimistic battery life tested under not so realistic conditions. Consumer Reports has always provided more accurate battery life results.
What does everyone else use? You know those non-cool people?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
umm you are either with us or against us....
however if you find out the third category let me know.
sent from a windows vm on a mac
Consoles.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I love Oranges too!
We let them know that a big bag of money under the table would help us rerun the tests, but they said no...so we stand by our findings!
That sort of kinda happened with the BBB. It got out that businesses that paid to be an, "Accredited Business" were automatically given an "A+" rating and the BBB's credibility was shot.
The BBB really helped me once so they aren't really corrupt, but when you start taking money, people get cynical.
PBS takes sponsorship - the Kochs are BIG time PBS sponsors.
I like NPR, they do stories that are negative of some of their sponsors at times. I really can't say if they ever put a kibosh on one because it would hurt their donations, but I hear many disclaimers when they do stories on companies that donate money to them.
I have a brand new Dell laptop for work, and a brand new Macbook Pro for home. As a testt I used both in the same manner over the holidays, browsing the web, playing movies, listening to music, checking email.
Mac battery life was 2x better than the Dell/Windows laptop based on recharge cycles over several days. 8-10 hrs on the Mac, 4-5 hrs on the Dell. Same brightness, same wifi connection.
Pick whatever works best for you. But clearly Apple has better battery technology and energy saving features.
Consumer Reports, as they said, is pretty careful with testing. But even if they were not quite as careful as they are, as long as they tested different devices in the same way and used consumer purchased models, they results they found should stand.
Hopefully Apple will get to the bottom of what happened in the tests, and make the laptops better. Then they can get back on the list next year. It does seem like some mix of software and hardware has some quirk if you can find the range of times Consumer Reports found.
One thing I wonder is if it will even have much of an effect. Do many people really rely on consumer reports for laptop info? It seems like there are so many other sites comparing laptop hardware, that consumer reports is just one of many data points...
And for Apple in particular that matters even less, because if you want a MacBook Pro you are buying what they are selling. It may mean someone would wait another year. Or it might mean that you would possibly purchased an older model instead (I had read somewhere that refurbished 2015 MacBook Pros were selling really well).
I think Apple will iron this out within a month or so and then it really will not matter, but it makes me think more of Consumer Reports that they are willing to stick by results as they found them and not cave into pressure for a re-test.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or maybe, just maybe, Apple couldn't pay CR off.
Not really. They take their independence to somewhat of an extreme, but it's one reason they're so trusted. For instance, they buy everything they review at retail for cash. While sometimes they may receive pre-release items, they pay for those items, and those items are not included in the various tests they run and don't form part of the overall recommendation.
Working with a manufacturer such as Apple, when CR has roughly double the experience testing products than Apple has been in existence, would fly in the very face of what CR is all about: what a consumer is likely to report if they had themselves bought the item.
Sounds like they have stopped being "objective" and have moved on to "defensive".
HOWEVER, an interesting anecdote comes from reading another online forum (MacRumors.com), last evening, where a poster with a tbMBP 15" noted that, ONE TIME, when he unplugged an external Thunderbolt display (TB displays FORCE the MBP to use the dGPU), "Activity Monitor" said in the "Energy" tab that, instead of the 10 or 11 hours he was getting on average, it was showing that he was expected to get 3 hours.
However, no Processes were showing as being Energy-Hogs, and, he also stated that the "CPU" Tab showed that nothing was using over 1.5% CPU (which was reasonable for what he had running). And what he did have running SHOULD (and probably was) running on the iGPU. (???)
But, what was really "telling", was that he reported that the area under the "E" and "R" keys on the Keyboard was getting REALLY HOT. Hot enough that he panicked, and Rebooted the laptop.
Everything returned to normal, battery life report back to normal, no heating, hasn't happened since...
So, looking at the iFixit teardown of the 15" MBP, you can see in Step 6, that the components that would be under that area of the Keyboard would plainly be the AMD GPU (outlined in Yellow) (and not the CPU, which is over nearer to the "I" and "O" keys, basically).
So, something is (maybe) occasionally causing the AMD GPU, not the CPU, to run amok (or even be in some sort of power-guzzling "SCR-Lockup" state (hopefully not!)), sucking down the juice. Obviously, CR and others haven't triggered this behavior in the same way as the MacRumors poster; but there may be more software paths to this bug, likely involving switching between dGPU and iGPU modes, and/or power-savings involving same.
More than likely this is still a software issue; but it is not one that Users can see in Activity Monitor (other than it does seem to "know" that the battery is being drained by something, hence the low "Time Remaining" number). Apparently, Activity Monitor doesn't report separately on GPU Energy usage (they need to change that!)
Just an interesting little tidbit, that belies the assertion that a "retest" wouldn't make a difference (after Apple has a chance to address this issue, of course).
CR does not accept vendor payments, nor does it accept advertising.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Is that Apple had no interest in actually sending the logs and test data to their engineers to figure out what went wrong and develop a solution. Instead, they wanted to solve the issue with PR: insist that CR somehow ran incorrect or non-stringent testing, have them re-run the tests according to how Apple wants them to be run, and have them revise their recommendation. Obviously I'm extrapolating a bit here, but it feels consistent with Apple's action up till now. Not to mention they put their head of marketing on the case, not any actual engineers. Good on Consumer Reports for sticking to their standards instead of caving to pressure.
Arstechnica's test shows similar results to Consumer Reports. Stop parroting Apple's head PR guy.
Under a very basic web browsing test, which the author admits that "this test is probably actually too light", the Mac book pro got good battery life.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/charts.010.png
But under a heavier test using webgl, the Mac book pro got 2hrs 13m
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/charts.011.png
At least when it comes to cars, most of their recommendations are as plain vanilla as you can get. Anything that generates even the smallest bit of excitement is usually voted down. Oh well, what did you expect from the company based in Connecticut?
Look in a copy of CR magazine. Notice what's missing? Advertisements. Same with the website.
Also Consumer's Union is a non-profit which publishes its financial statements. The income statement is particularly simple in that operating revenue comes from the following sources: subscriptions, newsstand sales, tax-deductable grants, and interest.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
https://slashdot.org/~TheFakeT...
Shall we wait for him to turn up, or does somebody want to go bait him?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Last week, Apple's VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller insisted that Consumer Reports' findings didn't match the company's field data"
What's he supposed to say? "Yeah, the whole battery thing is a clusterfuck and Consumer Reports is spot-on."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
At least Macbook Pro's aren't potentially deadly
Then anyone can run the tests CR refuses to re-run. If they're that confidently of their results, they should be happy to provide the detailed equipment and steps, along with corresponding results, to the public. This is the way science is done: if you make an assertion, then you have to provide the raw data to let someone else try to reproduce your results.
Anything less is unscientific anecdotal evidence.
they also don't allow their trademarks, articles or ratings to be used by retailers or manufacturers for their own advertising purposes.
Just wondering if these are the same Macbooks that have USB-C poert instead of standard USB ports, and have the touch bar that replaced part of the keyboard ? As I am not a (Cr)apple fan, I really don't care enough to look this up for myself.
Yes, they have the standard USB-C/TB3 ports, just like many, many other laptops.
Idiot Slashtard.
No love for systemd???
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Chromebooks
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Get off my lawn!!
This is what is wrong with Intel's approach to power management. Its idle current can approach that of arm chips, but once it works on full steam it munches close to ~90% of its TDP.
Intel guys once thought that pushing cpu to work on full steam will allow it finish the task faster, and enter the idle state. It is of course not so easy, and even in the ideal scenario such approach would only work for certain work profiles like work with low interactivity apps like msoffice
Apple quest to be super thin needs to stop!
or at the very least not on the mac pro and maybe at least 1 mac mini system.
The mac pro is held back by being that thin that it can even run both video cards and it's cpu at full power. An bigger one with 2 cpu's will give them the needed pci-e for TB 3.0 or they just to back to the tower case and have an voodoo like look back cable to feed DP over the TB bus like how other pro workstations do it!
Blame the messenger much? Face it, the new product is lame out of the gate.
I canceled my CR subscription decades ago.
At the time, I disagreed with their conclusions on things I knew about ( PCs and cell phones come to mind ), I then realized, I shouldn't count on them for things I didn't know about.
On the PCs, they were recommending (at the time.. decades ago) much more powerful PCs than needed for email. Cell Phones, my experiences just didn't match theirs.
My issues were not with their integrity or testing, just commentary and conclusions.
Since this thread is full of fanboys rationalizing Apple's failures, I think I'll eat their mod points by recounting my personal experiences with their failures.
I bought a 2007 MBP. It's battery swelled and had to be replaced. Eventually, it's 3d graphics card died and the only way to use it was to boot into safe mode.
I bought a 2012 MBP. It's trackpad quit working and had to be replaced. The replacement trackpad also failed within a month, but by then it was out of warranty. I quit trying to get it fixed because I use a mouse anyway, and I'm sure those cunts would try to charge me because I didn't buy "Apple Care".
I was given a 2015 MBP. So far it hasn't failed, but it has behavior that is intolerable. With the lid closed, it goes to sleep unless there is a keyboard plugged in. Apple says "Fuck you, software KVM users". And even with a keyboard plugged in, it immediately goes to sleep if the power cord is yanked out. Apple says, "Fuck you, cat owners".
I have no interest in their new crippled laptop and its gimmicky function key overlay. That shit was lame when it was called the Optimus Maximus in 2008 and it is just as lame now. Apple says, "But muh innovation! Muh courage!"
My first laptop, a ThinkPad from 1998, still works and boots to a 2.4 kernel. (Many nostalgia, such rugged, wow.) My other Toshiba, Dell, and HP laptops also worked up until I got rid of them, and they all took way more abuse than my precious, delicate MPBs.
So this year, I bought a cheap laptop from Dell. I'm using Linux again for the first time in a decade, and it is liberating. Buh-bye Apple, you prissy, shark jumping freaks. I can't wait until I retire and never have to touch your shit again.
Not only no, but hell no.
Tons of reports showing messed up and inconsistent battery life. cR was just the first that apple took seriously.
I forget now where I read it (might have been over on Engadget)? But supposedly, some employees at Apple spoke about this new Macbook Pro off the record, saying it was supposed to receive a multi-tiered, custom battery in it, similar to what Apple did with the new Macbook in 2015. Except at the last minute, they ran into some issues and were told they'd have to scrap that and just make a standard battery fit inside it instead.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit if these odd power problems are a direct result. (Had no time to really re-optimize the system for a battery that wasn't going to supply as much power as what they intended all along.)
I'd have say I side with Consumer Reports on not recommending this notebook right now. I think the touch-bar is very cool and the computer looks great in the new "Space Gray" color option. Not a fan of losing all the ports besides USB-C, *but* if everything else was fine, I'd accept that as a downside I could live with. The problem is, this one seems to have fundamental flaws of the type that you won't see fully corrected until the next revision is released.
If you've been following things closely on the Mac-specific forums, you'd see there are some serious questions about this computer's video performance too. There's a guy on YouTube who put the high-end configuration through its paces running a number of modern 3D video games and the performance was, frankly, god-awful! In one title, he was only getting 3 or 4FPS! As he admitted himself, people aren't buying the new 15" Macbook Pro as a gaming machine. But they ARE paying a premium price to get the latest AMD Polaris series GPU in it, and that's supposed to be 2 generations newer than the best available mobile GPU AMD had to offer for any older laptops. The graphics performance in games is so abysmally bad though, it's clear something else is going on here. IMO, Apple probably underclocks the GPU to help conserve power and to control heat generation -- and may have done so far too aggressively, given the last minute battery change that had to be done.
The mother-in-law has subscribed us to CR for the past 5 or 6 years. Nice of her. Helped us pick a new car some years back. But I never noticed there were "no ads" -- i.e. all ads are for CR itself. I had no idea my ad filtering mechanism had become so good.
Stop parroting Apple's head PR guy.
Wait! There's a guy at Apple in charge of who gives/gets head? Does he decide on time of day, locations & frequency as well? Whats the salary?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Given how idiotic your comment is you'll probably sell it for $10 despite it being solid gold.
No love for systemd???
Probably a new fleshlight HW module under development by Lennart.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Everyone seems to think this is a scam article by CR. It actually plays right in with Apple. Remember 3 weeks ago they removed the "highly inaccurate" time remaining indicator from OS/X. Now I realize it was because the new MBP was so random at battery usage they had no choice. It wasn't the indicator that was the problem, it was the MBP. The CR report just backs that up...completely.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
When my 8 year old macbook died, I needed something quick, and Best Buy was my option. I was pissed at apple for general product shittiniess over the past few years, and especially pissed because what killed my macbook was it turning on and roasting itself in my backpack (over temp shutdown? We don't need that... we're Apple). So I bought an HP laptop with some trepidation, as the last HP laptop I bought 12 years ago was an utter piece of shit that failed after 4 months and they refused to warranty. (2 years later a class action suit forced them to fix it... woo hoo! 2 year old computer!)
So this fucking thing from the get go has a dodgy HDMI output... flickering and shutting down whenever you run 3d on an external monitor. Fine. I didn't buy it to use with a monitor. So 4 months later, the fucking thing won't accept power from the supply while running... so the only way to use it is to charge it up, run it till it dies, and charge it up again. I am going to call about it today, and fully expect to get dicked around just like last time.
As pissed as I am at apple, something that lasts 8 years before shitting the bed... pretty good in comparison to 4 months.
Moral of the story? Fuck, I don't know.
EVERYone who? For anyone not sticking to Safari for browsing (heavily optimized), playing video (hardware decoded), or running at a relatively low screen brightness, the numbers recorded have not been great.
Well on the plus side, for once Apple has run into a publication that it can't simply "press blacklist" for the crime of not giving one of their products a glowing review, like it has done to so many others.
Then again, maybe they will, because fuck it, they're Apple.
Then why haven't they disclosed the full test protocol so that Apple could repeat it?
CR has decades of experience with companies pulling shit like VW ... and worse. Maybe you trust that the "you're not holding it right" company would never, ever try to game a test whose results they have demonstrated they care about, but CR is right not to trust.
It's basically a revision one product. Long-time Apple fans know what that means.... Better to wait for the second rev. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
As a long time Mac user, this is exactly what I'm doing. It's not only over-priced, but I truly see no advantage to upgrading from my current Macbook Pro to the new one. If anything, I'd have to buy tons of adapters which I'm not keen on doing, and until GPU performance is fixed on laptops, there's no way I'm going to upgrade.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Sad reality is that the brick and mortar stores only carry the crappy PC lines. All the PC companies are pretty much forced to make crappy product to make price points or else not be in the shelves. A decent experience pretty much requires you to seek out their professional lines (latitude, ProBook, Thinkpad)
Orange Computer was an Apple 2 compatible maker that Apple sued out of existence.
In the early years, Apple ran a LOT of competitors out of business with their legal muscle.
So you bought a $1300 HP notebook and it broke after 4 months? That is unfortunate.
It's not as bad as the last HP that died after 3 months... .that one was $2500
The software that hp has been putting on their computers has been slow as crap and laggy for years go ahead try and tick a box during inital setup and watch that thing hang there and stutter at the extra fancy transitions they just had to do but don't happen to sell a computer fast enough to play them smoothly.
Anyway as for your problem you must have one of the newer hp's with the center pin for communication (dells have these too) check and see if your center pin is bent off to the side on your power adapter.
If so just bend it back to the center and your probem is fixed.
If the pin breaks you can get a new power adaper for >$20 on ebay.
If the pin looks fine you may still want to try another power adaper to see if the problem is there as its the easiest thing to replace.
If none of that fixes it the problem is likely in the power connector on the board if your lucky it's a seperate connector and relatively easy to replace but on most its soldered to the board and a pita to replace. If that doesn't fix it it's something on the board but i've never had that problem with the board.
Anyhow good luck with that warranty thing most everything I get to work with the warranty has long since expired or been voided.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
The bent pin was the power problem... THANK YOU! What a spectacularly fragile piece of shit this connector is... its like they deliberately added plastic to make the cord stiffer so there would be more stress on the whole assembly. I'm not going to begin to speculate on why a data pin is needed, or why the default reaction to no data isn't "Power the fucking laptop" Unfuckingbelivable.
I spent 2 hours going back and forth with support. Flashed the bios. Upgradeded all drivers.... at which point they wanted me to reinstall windows before I finally hung up on them. Unfuckingbelivable.
HP really should take on the Packard Bell name now... they've earned it.
The 2015 Macbook Pro at work. It's very nice. I wouldn't touch one of the 2016 models though.
Next time get something from ASUS. IIRC Apple manufactures at least some of their laptops at Pegatron. Guess where ASUS manufactures their laptops... In their Pegatron division.
Well ya, even PC fans know not to buy an HP PC. This is not the same Hewlett-Packard that used to be a technology company.
Moral of the story? Fuck, I don't know.
The moral of the story is that HP/Compaq is shit and has always been shit. Compaq was shit before being acquired by HP and the resulting combination is also shit. In case you're wondering, Sony is also shit. You want Asus, Lenovo, or Toshiba, in no particular order.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Carly Fiorina's legacy.
but once it works on full steam it munches close to ~90% of its TDP.
Are you seriously saying that if a workload start using 100% CPU would would rather Intel make its CPUs throttle instead of actually running at the frequency that you paid for?
I'm sorry but Intel is the LAST thing you can blame for the MBP battery life sucking. If it was Intel's fault then we would see it in all the Skylake Windows laptops, which we definitely do not (most Skylake laptops have 10+ hour battery life.)
Blame for this issue falls squarely on Apple. My best guess is its a combination of small battery capacity along with issues with their power management software. One area that would be particularly suspect is some problem with the switchable graphics control software being too aggressive with powering up the dGPU when its not actually needed. Or maybe there is a bug where they power it up but then in some cases forget to shut it down after it is no longer being used.
Moral of the story? Fuck, I don't know.
The moral of the story is that HP/Compaq is shit and has always been shit. Compaq was shit before being acquired by HP and the resulting combination is also shit. In case you're wondering, Sony is also shit. You want Asus, Lenovo, or Toshiba, in no particular order.
I agree with the "HP is shit" comments, and that includes their printers.
For laptops and desktops, my employer only buys Dells, and we've had pretty good luck with them.
Ones who give are called employees.
One who gets was Steve Jobs.
Salaries vary.
...but they seem to have real problems with hi-tech.
I remember when they rated the Atari home computer to be the worst of the bunch because of the "nonstandard Basic." Once the advantages of Atari Basic were pointed out to them they completely reversed themselves and decided that the Atari computers were the best of the lot, especially for learning how to program. but this was listed as a correction to the cover story in the previous issue and the adage had already been done.
They have a reputation for testing camera lenses by pointing them at newspaper spreads and looking for aberrations when there are already much more reliable and accurate tests for such variations.
I have dismissed Consumer Reports as any kind ofd testing expert since I found the Wirecutter.
Some people just don't know how to use a fucking computer.
I can barely count on one hand "computer problems " I've had in my 20 year it career. And definitely can't count 5 serious problems I couldn't solve with Google and patience.
And I ran a small datacenter.
Sounds like you might be the problem. Your the only constant in all these laptops.
Just buy the cheapest fucking thing that works.
Despite the shiftiness of MacBooks these days it's really sad that they still seem to have the best build quality. But it keeps going downhill which pisses me off but somehow there still isn't any other Brandâ(TM)s I've tried that seem to match up.
It's not just Apple that seems uninterested. It seems everyone else is uninterested.
So my verdict is just buy the cheapest fucking thing that works and deal with it.
Toshiba: the company writing most of the ACPI spec yet for years didn't manage to use a single BIOS that got anywhere close to being compliant or even just working correctly. I sure wouldn't recommend them...
Since when do HP notebooks cost $2500? I only ever see them in madness sales staff BestBuy for 349 with flashing signs ", great deal here".
they held back on RAM because of battery life and they still blew it. they should have gone with a bigger battery and more RAM.
This is the real tragedy actually. There is no market for a "manufacturer of quality PCs". Unless your name is Apple, you are slave to the magical pricepoints that the consumers care about and that's all there is to it. If you can't match them, you go out of business. Large vendors do have good individual product lines, yes, but nobody could actually survive on making and selling those alone.
Best build quality? LOL. Sit the fuck down you shill.
Moral of the story? Fuck, I don't know.
The moral of the story is that HP/Compaq is shit and has always been shit. Compaq was shit before being acquired by HP and the resulting combination is also shit. In case you're wondering, Sony is also shit. You want Asus, Lenovo, or Toshiba, in no particular order.
You cannot tell people to buy on a brand any more even at particular pricepoint. Only thing you can trust is researching specific models at your pricepoint and intended use. Only 2 of those mentioned are good IMO (anbd many others share that view), and lenovo lost its touch a little these days imho so I mainly buy asus when I used to drift toward lenovo. Toshiba are shit. Thing is they ALL make stuff that sucks at various pricepoints so a little research goes a long way.
Try a carwash.
IP67 is lies, and everything corrodes.
Long ago, young one, a gaming laptop was a specialty item that commanded a steep premium...
Gaming yes but one usually buys Asus or Alienware
I've owned a couple of iMac computers but never a MacBookPro. Everything else I've owned has been Windows based and mostly Dell. Having said that, from what I've read, Comsumer Reports did a test and it didn't come out well for MAC. Well that's fine. Mac has 2 things, they can either call it bunk, or they can find out what the problem is and fix it. They shouldn't be asking for a retest unless they take the machine back, find the problem, and return the same machine for a test.
I've always believed Mac's are over-rated. If you pay the extra money required to own a Mac, you have a right to expect a superior machine. All I've ever run in to is compatibility problems. I have to buy this software or that software that is specific to Mac and, in most cases, it's just not as good. You buy Microsoft Office for Mac and you can't get Outlook you have to get Entourage for e-mail. It's just a pain. Now it may be purposely so, but you really have to be committed to Mac to put up with that crap. I can buy a top of the line Dell, with an I7 processor, great memory and a lot of hard drive, and still be below the cost of a MacBookPro. I just could never justify the cost.
In the olden times, Asus only made motherboards, and there was no alienware.
And can you blame them? They know which country they're in.
Pepperidge Farm remembers
I believe you misread the GP to say "Consumer Reports has no incentive to produce accurate reports on consumer products," meaning that CR doesn't necessarily want to be accurate.
What it actually said was "Consumer Reports has no incentive but to produce accurate reports on consumer products," meaning that CR really wants to be accurate.
I suspect that, if you had read and understood GP, you would have found your erroneous reading of the sentence inconsistent with the rest of what GP was saying, read it again more carefully to see why the sentence would be so out of place, and realized your mistake. At least, one would hope that members of the Slashdot community would put a little more thought in before posting. Would make for a higher level of collective intelligence (and maturity).
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
You want Asus, Lenovo, or Toshiba, in no particular order.
No, you definitely don't want Toshiba. Toshiba is a dead company walking. It's been hurting for some time, first from market decline, then from an accounting scandal. Now it's bleeding from a bad nuclear-power deal. The company has lost US $6.8 billion in market value since mid-December.
And their laptops are pretty crappy. The last Toshiba laptop I bought, just over a year ago, ate its hard drive within three weeks. And it was a Toshiba hard drive.
I don't know whether the new Macbook Pro is a good computer or a bad computer; I've never seen one and won't be replacing my current laptop for quite a while yet.
But, I do have some expertise in a few other fields. And I have to say that with regard to non-computer equipment I know like the back of my hand that Consumer Reports evaluates ... well ... they haven't a clue. They recommend junk and hate excellent product. I don't know why, but they do.
So, whether they love the new Macbook Pro or hate it, or lay somewhere in between, is irrelevant to me. They have shown themselves to earn near-zero credibility in my books. Which leaves me with coming to my own conclusions, and I'm OK with that.
Casio fx-115v
No Lagging, No Hanging,
No Bugs, Solar Powered
Best Device Ever.