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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
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.
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
So that's what you need to do to get Apple to fix your bug. A couple years I found a bug in their version of sqlite3, it stopped accepting international characters (chinese, japanese, specifically). I tried to submit a bug via their bug reporting console, and I got this error message. So I sent an email to the address listed there, explaining the situation, and I got a response,
"Please report that through our bug console." The console was still broken.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
.. - 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.
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?
What is this Hidden Safari Setting?
You visited Slashdot at least five times today (evidence.) Unless you were visiting using Lynx, it's hard to believe that you didn't benefit from having all the CSS and image files that make up every page on Slashdot cached.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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!"
Finding God in a Dog
I didn't assert 'No one develops websites on the Mac', all the websites hosted on my servers are developed on the Mac.
But the number of people who do this is Much Less Than the total Mac user population.
Furthermore, few people who develop websites on any platform get their tech advice from Consumer Reports.
But then, when you can't produce a useful thought, insults work just fine.
Rather, when you don't include pertinent information, and then simply post what sounds like an inflammatory comment, you invite insults.
Next time Apple test your software better.
I don't care if software has bugs (because it always does). I care if they get fixed in a timely manner.
The idea that your laptop's battery life will significantly extend or deteriorate based upon whether the data used to render a webpage (or video) is coming from an SSD or Wifi is absurd.
Yes it is; when everything is operating right.
But, Apple has found that, disabling the Cache in Safari uncovers an INTERMITTENT bug that causes assets from an ALREADY LOADED web page to be CONTINUOUSLY RELOADED, and THAT is what causes the excessive power-drain.
DO try to at LEAST read TFS...