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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.
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.
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
At least he didn't post at Slashdot as an AC. :-)
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
The problem that CR has was not with the battery life that they could get but that the results were inconsistent. That speaks to a problem. Now, I don't doubt that different activities should affect battery life but the difference is dramatic. If they got 8 hours one day and 7 hours another, that would be another matter. 19 hours vs 4 hours is a huge difference. I don't have access to CR so I don't know which tests were run.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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
Sigh. Apple does not have battery battery technology. Heck, they don't even make the Macbooks. Quanta does, and Quanta also makes laptops for all the other major brands.
Apple's battery life advantage is because of the limited number of hardware configurations they have to support. They can fine-tune OS X to run on a few dozen models with minimal power use. Windows has to support millions if not billiions of possible hardware combinations, so a lot of times has to sacrifice power-thriftiness in order to maintain compatibility.
And you can't just straight out compare battery life between laptops. Different laptops place a different priority on battery life. So some laptops simply come with smaller batteries since they're aimed at customers who don't care as much about battery life. But if you did want to compare how power-thrifty laptops are, historically several models outlast the Macbooks in terms of minutes per Wh of battery. Topping the list is, not surprisingly, the Microsoft Surface Pro. Like the Macbooks, putting the OS-maker in charge of picking the hardware allows Microsoft to fine-tune Windows to work best with the hardware.
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.
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.
Sigh. Apple does not have battery battery technology. Heck, they don't even make the Macbooks. Quanta does, and Quanta also makes laptops for all the other major brands..
You don't know the first thing about the difference between Design and Manufacturing. Apple Designs all their Products in-house. But, ever since the early 21st century, I don't think they actually manufacture any of them, except possibly the Mac Pro.
You're a moron. Go away.
I'm surprised you didn't blame this issue on the fact that those engineers in Cupertino use Windows to design the Macs...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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
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.
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.
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.
Solidworks and Altium. Used for mechanical and electrical design inside Apple. Runs on Windows only - not OSX. Yes, Macs are designed on Windows...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
In the olden times, Asus only made motherboards, and there was no alienware.