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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.
... battery life wasn't really the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back anyway.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
By not disabling the cache Safari will just reload the web page from disk, instead of downloading it all over wifi.
Yes, that is the definition of a cache...
In normal use you don't sit around reloading the same page all day
You don't? Are you seriously saying you do not visit several sites multiple times in a day?
Not to mention, lets say some sites you only go to ever so often - say Amazon, I go to a few times a month. A cache is still useful there for many of the page components and CSS files do not change much over time.
In fact I would say 95% of the sites I visit in a day - news sites, recipes, various blogs, Slashdot, etc. benefit from caching, because they are places with logos and things that don't change much if at all over time. There are just not that many times I'm visiting a new site in a day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
.. - one that returns a USB and HDMI ports as well.
If there's a setting to make the dynamic touchbar a static set of function keys I'm used to using, vs. having to wonder what buttons/functionality is there at any given point in time, that would be helpful as well.
If you leave caching on, you'd can't test by loading a handful of sites over and over. They would have to have a script of non-repeating real-world web sites that would handle 8-10 hours of battery life.
By limiting to a handful of sites and disabling a cache, you can make a more consistent and repeatable test. While you're testing real-world (and real web sites), you still want to test in a repeatable and somewhat verifiable way.
Sounds more like Apple's updating CR's review. Not much in there about what CR thinks about all this.
First of all, yes, the implication was that nobody benefits from caching. And secondly, if you're getting every damned thing from the net and nothing from the cache, your network usage is orders of magnitude higher than "normal". AmiMojo is suggesting it's "cheating" to base power usage metrics in part on cached data. But most of the data that built the webpage you're looking at right now came from your cache. You think the HTML - the only dynamically generated part - made up most of the bytes of data that made up the page? Think again.
Worse still, you're focusing on something that's relatively meaningless. Do you think your Wifi card draws massive amounts of power when it's receiving data? I actually don't know if the difference in power between Wifi "listening" and Wifi "receiving" is more than the difference between "SSD drive idling" and "SSD drive sending data", and I suspect you don't either.
But I can say, without too much doubt, that the GPU and CPU suck much, much, more power than both of those put together when they're rendering a webpage. Hell, I just leave Twitter open in a tab before I go to work and my 2011 i7 laptop at home's fans are whirring by the time I get home.
On the face of it, calling it "cheat mode" when you instruct a laptop to cache webpages in a perfectly normal way is ludicrous hyperbole. The cache makes little or no difference to power usage, and it's normal behavior to have it enabled. It's also irrelevant - as others have pointed out - to why this particular benchmark turned out to be flawed, which was a bug in the no-cache mode, not something to do with caching specifically.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Apple: "Consumers don't want a touch screen or ports; they'll settle for a touch bar and dongles."
Every other laptop maker: "TOUCHSCREENS! PORTS! FRACTION OF THE PRICE!"
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