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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.
Read the article. It answers your question.
They did not update their review, they posted that they may.
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.
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.
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?
I believe it's called "Do Not Load TFA/TFS." Apparently it saves battery life because some can't be bothered to read the entire summary.
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.
Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab
That would obviously chew up battery life downloading icons over and over again, chewing up CPU cycles to refresh the icon on the window, and chew up wifi power because its easy to see how a stuck loop re-downloading icons could cycle thousands or millions of times.
Good for Consumer Reports for sticking to their guns, seeing an issue, reporting the issue, and forcing Apple to fix it. It's obscure sure. But many developers probably use Safari Developer Mode to work on their projects, and this will help them.
From how I read it, CR released the report.. Apple went "wtf that's not right" and then asked CR to help them solve a problem. This sounds like fairly standard debugging practices to me -- discover a problem, figure out how to duplicate it, and then fix it.
The fact that it was CR that ran into the problem rather than some random guy on the internet posting a rant on Reddit is just luck and maybe makes for a "fun" story for conspiracy nuts, but it doesn't indicate that either party did anything that they shouldn't have done or was being shady or misrepresenting facts or anything like that.
Sure CR added an update to their original report but didn't try to redact the problem out of existence. It seems to me to have been handled completely appropriately by both parties.
But many developers probably use Safari Developer Mode to work on their projects, and this will help them.
Yes, but those developers don't get their recommendations from Consumer Reports. That magazine's audience would never have encountered that bug.
Obligatory car analogy: say they're testing a Ford Focus. They disable its antilock brakes so that a professional driver can get its best-case dry pavement stopping distance. Along the way, the find an OBD-II bug that causes the brakes to take twice as long to stop the car. They report the bad results instead of the normal, expected values. Yes, their test was correct! It found a bug that needs to be fixed. However, the only people who would ever see that bug are the exact ones who'd notice something was wrong and be able to troubleshoot it. You and I aren't ever going to disable our antilock brakes, even if a test engineer might.
I think that's kind of what happened here. Again, yes, they legit found a bug. My problem with it is that they reported the buggy results instead of the actual ones that a normal non-developer would see. A developer would notice their battery draining in a fourth the expected time and that it only happened when they were debugging in Safari, so they probably wouldn't even be significantly affected by the bug.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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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