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.

Comments

Re:"Real-world usage"

[david.emery]

How many Mac users develop web sites?

Re:So they didn't enable cheat mode

[Just Some Guy]

But they disabled cache by putting it in developer mode. Which turns out has its own bugs that Apple said they've now fixed, but that's kind of beside the point: they weren't running Safari in a configuration that an end user would ever have found themselves in. I'm in dev mode right now so I can test some stuff on my laptop. You very well might be too. But my non-techie wife will never run in dev mode, so she'd never see the behavior that Consumer Reports experienced.