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Consumer Reports Updates Its MacBook Pro Review (consumerreports.org)
Reader TheFakeTimCook writes: Last month, the new MacBook Pro failed to receive a purchase recommendation from Consumer Reports due to battery life issues that it encountered during testing. Apple subsequently said it was working with Consumer Reports to understand the results, which it said do not match its "extensive lab tests or field data." According to an article from Consumer Reports, Apple has since concluded its work, and says it learned that Consumer Reports was using a "hidden Safari setting" which triggered an "obscure and intermittent bug" that led to inconsistent battery life results. With "normal user settings" enabled, Apple said Consumer Reports "consistently" achieved expected battery life. Apple stated: "We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache. This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab. After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life." Apple said it has fixed the Safari bug in the latest macOS Sierra beta seeded to developers and public testers this week.
Read the article. It answers your question.
They did not update their review, they posted that they may.
By not disabling the cache Safari will just reload the web page from disk, instead of downloading it all over wifi. In normal use you don't sit around reloading the same page all day, you surf to different web sites, so caching extends battery life to unrealistic levels.
Read, then post:
Disabling the Cache did more than just cause Reloading each time. Apparently, it ALSO triggered an intermittent bug in Safari that caused REPEATED loading of "icons" from the page.
Apparently, THAT is what burned the battery. Very similar to a "runaway process", like I (and others) originally postulated.
So, you can safely remove that extra layer of tinfoil, Hater.
Apple are saying there is an obscure and intermittent bug that is triggered by that testing practice.
Presumably that bug can be fixed.
(As a total aside, in my daily use, I visit about ten websites more or less constantly -- I don't even mean social media. Caching very definitely is extending battery life for me. For those who use social media sites, or any webkit-based app, caching is helping enormously.)
It already HAS been fixed, and will be released in the next Sierra update (which is due out pretty much any day now).
That isn't what the article says.
There were no flaws in the tests. The tests were tickling an obscure bug, which Apple has now fixed.
Consumer Reports are retesting with the patch.
This is good news for everyone, surely? Methodology better explained, bug found.
The test was good. It was Safari that had the flaw. Thanks to the Consumer Reports test it was revealed so it can be fixed.
As for actual user, you do know that Macs are popular among web designers?