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Consumer Reports Now Recommends MacBook Pros (macrumors.com)
Consumer Reports has updated their report on the 2016 MacBook Pros, and is now recommending Apple's latest notebooks. MacRumors reports: In the new test, conducted running a beta version of macOS that fixes the Safari-related bug that caused erratic battery life in the original test, all three MacBook Pro models "performed well." The 13-inch model without a Touch Bar had an average battery life of 18.75 hours, the 13-inch model with a Touch Bar lasted for 15.25 hours on average, and the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar had an average battery life of 17.25 hours. "Now that we've factored in the new battery-life measurements, the laptops' overall scores have risen, and all three machines now fall well within the recommended range in Consumer Reports ratings," reports Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports originally denied the 2016 MacBook Pro a purchase recommendation in late December due to extreme battery life variance that didn't match up with Apple's 10 hour battery life claim. Apple worked with Consumer Reports to figure out why the magazine encountered battery life issues, which led to the discovery of an obscure Safari caching bug. Consumer Reports used a developer setting to turn off Safari caching, triggering an "obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons" that drained excessive battery. The bug, fixed by Apple in macOS Sierra 10.12.3 beta 3, is not one the average user will encounter as most people don't turn off the Safari caching option, but it's something done in all Consumer Reports tests to ensure uniform testing conditions. A fix for the issue will be available to the general public when macOS Sierra 10.12.3 is released, but users can get it now by signing up for Apple's beta testing program.
Cha Ching
Dammit, I guess I now missed my window to score a deal....
This is sketchy. Tests typically involve disabling the cache and reloading pages to measure the overall impact of visiting lots of different pages. Enabling the cache made a big difference, but these tests are usually done with the cache disabled. This is incredibly sketchy and calls into question the quality of this recommendation. I don't really trust consumer reports if they're willing to change a recommendation based on a setting that effectively helps cheat these tests. Why should the browser cache be enabled just for Apple?
If they had waited for the update to come out, I'd say it's great they're willing to keep their reviews up to date (even if it was due to pressure from Apple).
But if you're going to recommend a product based on a might-be-working-when-released beta, you lose some credibility to me.
Greased skids. . .
defense
is affecting everyday life. They pressured CR into this. Into This.
In fact, IT has made it clear that the new MacBook Pros are too expensive to be considered for purchase. It's leading to a rush to try and get the old 2015 MBPs while they're still available, since a whole lot of developers that use OS X because it's a Unix that IT supports are rapidly having to find new solutions. (And, no, Linux is not an answer because it involves a waiver process before you can access the network.)
If Microsoft gets their Linux layer working, Apple is toast. The new MBP is too expensive for specs that are too poor. The MacBook line isn't good enough for development work. If Microsoft can turn Windows 10 into an acceptable dev environment, OS X is toast. IT would love to find a reason to axe OS X support.
So the fact that a CONSUMER organization says they're OK for consumers is worthless. I still can't use it.
When we discussed this matter earlier, it was pointed out that this could very well be a software problem (with added emphasis):
This submission's summary now confirms that it was due to "an obscure Safari caching bug".
How was that Slashdot comment, which turned out to be right, modded? -1.
The same happened to several other comments that, it's now obvious, were correct. They're at -1, while a bunch of junk comments were modded up.
It turns out that ddtmm was wrong. reanjr was wrong. fuzzyfuzzyfungus was wrong. Shane_Optima was wrong. lucm was wrong.
All of those smug commenters turned out to be wrong.
Now that we know what happened in this case, I think it would be appropriate for the Slashdot admins to go back and fix up the atrocious moderating that happened in that other submission. Mod up the comments that were at -1 to +5, because they turned out to be right. Mod down the users who were wrong, sending their comments to -1.
Anybody who was responsible for such awful moderating should never moderate again. Strip them of their moderating privilege permanently. And since they screwed up so badly in this case, we should assume they screwed up every other moderating they ever did. Invert all of those moddings. Mod down anything they modded up, and mod up anything they modded down.
It really makes Slashdot look worse than it already looks when such awful moderating goes uncorrected.
Consumer Reports does testing for....consumers. To see what the consumer experience with a product is going to be. As the bug would never affect a normal user, it should not have been used to give the program a poor review.
Apparently, you need to shame Apple publicly in a magazine that quite a lot of people read and seriously consider before making a purchase. Apple still is very much a hardware company, and if CR says their hardware isn't good, their sales will go down.
So, if you find a bug in one of their many software products, don't report the bug as usual. Instead, make an argument that the bug causes unacceptable battery performance and report it to Consumer Reports instead. Then, maybe Apple will start fixing software bugs.
Meanwhile, the customers still have the bug.
Seriously, the new Macbook "Pro" is a bad joke.
And I say this having been an Apple user for a long long time ( I bought an original Macintosh ...).
Tim Cook needs to leave, that's all there is to it. It's bad ebough that Cook
is misusing his position to advocate for his sexual preferences. That alone should
cause the Apple board to reject him. But his approval of crap products is the last straw.
I'm done with Apple until Cook is gone.
Because of this report, I bought a MBP. But now, I cannot fine the Escape key. Can anyone help me?
Macbooks run Windows better than many "PCs".... The typical PC nowadays has a very cheap, crappy feel to it. All this screen detachment, flipping around to double as a tablet, overall bad design :\
Not only is the hardware design mostly crap, so is the software. Windows 7 was the last decent product released. Windows 8 feels more like a fisher price toy for 8 year olds, not even gonna begin with data mining on 10. Nothing is "free", it was pushed/forced upon so many people, and in return those people are sending MASS amounts of data back to MS, this is the price they paid.
It's still very expensive due to the new touchbar that hasn't proven its worth as yet. The build quality is still there, certainly, but it still fails for not being the latest Intel hardware (yes, I know the issues with low TDP Kaby Lake packages at the time of launch) and a poor AMD graphics chipset. It's the iPad 3 of the Macbook Pro line, and hopefully will be replaced by August with a Kaby Lake version. I don't hold much hope for a Nvidia 1060 version, but those two changes would be the only reason for me to buy it (even less hope for Apple to concede and get into the eGPU game). In the meantime, I've spend $1k less on a brand new laptop that I'll be living in Linux-land for the forthcoming cycle.
This is what Apple doesn't get. The more pissed developers leave their ecosystem, the worse apps they'll get, which means the worse customer experience, the fewer devices sold, and their eventual decline. Of all the times to double down on catering to the smaller but more valuable element of their customer base, it's when you're rolling in infinite money. Instead, they're trying to make infinity*2 money.
I find the whole thing a terrible example of a once respectable online outlet jumping into the clickbait world: CR used to have near print-level standards - where at least the dollar-centric parts were constrained away and didn't govern the copy (Remember what 80% of your print PC mags used to be?)
The reality was that the testing method was *evidently* at fault: they couldn't reproduce the issue reliably, they couldn't reproduce it with Chrome (which is the dominant browser on most platforms) - but rushed to print before Christmas because of clicks. This should always have been a non-story, and it's worth nothing that the *exact* same software that has been fixed has been present on every other MacBook for years - it's not like this was a touchbar related issue. Odds are some OSX update introduced the issue that screwed with the testing outcomes, and it's affected every one of the models they'd already approved previously too. Thats the trouble with static recommendations like this.
Economically though, the clicks meant that despite breaking the rules of professionalism and common sense that they probably made enough from the click rate that jumping to the press like this with half a story has won for them - David vs Goliath always sells. That means next time they've got a dubious outcome they'll not learn anything from this.
I guess this means I'm not getting a replacement for a battery that actually lasts 10 hours one day.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Oh my god people on the internet were wrong! The horror...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I've got 20 of these things seeing daily use as testing machines within our company, with the potential to purchase anywhere between 4K and 20K machines should they be deemed acceptable.
Right now, they are not.
So far, every single user that has a testing unit has complained about dongles at least once. Nearly half of them have complained about accidentally activating the touch bar, simply because their fingers accidentally brushed across it. We've also seen three laptops outright fail- the touchbar would randomly hang up, severely reducing the usability of the machine (apparently it's controlled by an embedded computer running it's own OS, rather than being accessible as a second display of pixels through the host OS).
However, the current show stopper is the battery life.
If you use these machines lightly, they're great. We get anywhere from 10 to 15 hours of use. If you load the machine down in any significant way- be it causing the GPU to kick in, or all the CPU cores to fire up- battery life drops to a measly 4-5 hours, sometimes as low as 3.
It's pretty clear that Apple has implemented some very aggressive power saving features, but at the same time this appears to be something they had to do to get any kind of reasonable battery life out of these machines- it's not something they did to extend an already excellent battery life, because if you're actually using the hardware then the runtime isn't that stellar. This is in line with what CR originally found, regardless of any Safari bugs. The machine simply isn't capable of lasting that long if you're using the hardware, regardless of what that use is caused by (be it a stray daemon sucking up 100% of a CPU core, or a Safari bug doing something similar, or anything else).
As it stands right now, these are going to be the first Apple laptops our company won't purchase for any of our employees. The hardware just isn't capable of consistently meeting our requirements. I get the feeling that Apple would have loved to have crammed netbook quality hardware inside this thing for thinness, but they knew that was marketing suicide so they came up with this machine instead, where you've got impressive specs and it works well as,long as you don't try to use them.
It's a shame, because if they'd made the machine a bit bigger with a higher capacity battery, we wouldn't have any complaints. 7-8 hours of life under moderate to heavy use is great, but that's nowhere near what we're seeing with these units.
u r dum
I'm sorry, but without a scientific study being involved, your statement is invalid.
Shane_Optima was wrong.
I most certainly was not wrong. I said that if it was a software bug in Safari (as alleged) that it was obviously still Apple's fault. I didn't address the possibility of CR screwing up one way or another. And guess what? According to TFS, Apple *did* screw up.
Apple is responsible for Safari bugs. That was my assertion then, and it's my assertion now.
How was that Slashdot comment, which turned out to be right, modded? -1.
Wow. So you're complaining that an Anonymous Coward (you?) speculating baselessly (yes baselessly, because no preliminary observations or experiments were mentioned) about the possible cause of the poor test result and then implying that Apple should be let off the hook if it's a Safari bug received a single -1 downmod instead of being modded up to +5, Nostradamus?
No one is going to have their mod privileges revoked. Instead, try re-working your tone to sound less like a perpetually whining fanboy.
I mean, for many years I liked Google (still do, in some ways) but I don't flip the fuck out when people criticize, for example, their decision to drop microSD card slots from their devices. That was a horrible anti-consumer decision and I made sure to mention it any time I talked to someone who was thinking about buying a Nexus device. There's a reason why Apple fanboys have the reputation that they do. No other tech company on Earth inspires this kind of rabid and unthinking loyalty.
Incidentally, if you register for an account people are around here will be less likely to assume you're a blithering fool or astroturfer.
The real moderation tragedy is that your comment here is currently modded up to +4. "Admins, go back and fix the moderation and mod everyone else down! My speculative Apple apologia turned out to be correct in fact [just not in conclusion]!", Jesus fucking Christ...
... to put on their MacBook Pro to pass the tests?
And just to quickly get this out there, in the name of everything that's holy of course I'm not saying that all Apple users everywhere do this, or that they're in any way bad or stupid for using Apple products. If anything they make suits your requirements perfectly in features and performance and price, great. If you want to mention their advantages in a public forum, great. (I reserve the right to mention their disadvantages.)
And if you want to gently mention how this was an obscure bug that wasn't likely to affect average users, a bug that has now been fixed, that's great too. I agree. This bug obviously wasn't a huge deal.
It's just that this frothing at the mouth, "how dare you blaspheme against the mighty Apple by claiming they're responsible for their own bugs?!" segment of the Apple userbase... is getting really, really tiresome.
Can confirm that they are about to lock down everything like iOS, no more modifications.
They're done, MS is going to take a lot of their customers in the next few years.
The attitude I heard from the rep was unbelievable, they ACTUALLY think they have the right to dictate how their machines are deployed in private orgs.
The clever bit is it's entirely enforced through deliberately locked down and limited software and firmware, which isn't really illegal but now I'm seeing the need for new laws against it....
Apple really does believe that they still own the machines that you buy from them, literally, I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
Imaging and deploystudio are going to be explicitly killed by apple's coming changes, they're literally pushing their older users and support orgs away.
MDM is being pushed HARD this year, cloud based management and killing imaging are all on the agenda, you already can't image the new MBP, it kills the touch bar, and they did it on purpose to catch out those who are imaging.
Yes it does involve APFS and encrypted OS images.
Testing new products can be tricky. If a bug shows up that skews the results, as this Safari bug did, they _publish_ the nature of the bug and recheck their results, and post the _new_ results. They didn't create the bug: they tested the product in a reasonable way, to measure the actual battery performance without having build a huge test suite.
Kudos to Consumer Reports for working to get clear, factual results, and for working with Apple to get the very real Safari bug fixed. This has happened again and again with Consumer Reports reviewed products. Some manufacturers *fix the flaws* and wind up selling a better product.
being bought and paid for is a news story.
You totally missed the real problem: unjustifiable downmodding to -1 hides content here.
The real problem here isn't reputation, or online karma points, or any irrelevant crap like that.
The problem is that the comments that were right, the ones that were most valuable, were hidden by default.
Readers were denied access, unless they went out of their way to browse at -1.
They were subjected to all sorts of wrong analysis, while not being able to easily view the analysis that was correct.
It's stuff like that which makes Slashdot look like such a joke site.
It's also why so many of the best commenters here have left over the years, never to return.
The fact that you, and so many others, can't see the wider implications of bad modding is disturbing.
But maybe it shouldn't be surprising; Slashdot wouldn't have lost out to Hacker News and even Reddit were the mods here not total idiots.
Tim Cook is a shameless Sodomite.
So Apple released a closed-source patch for this issue and Consumer Reports is supposedly taking them on their word that the new software is legit. Is there any way to verify that the fixed software is definitely not using cached data so that the test accurately reflects the browsing habits of a user visiting many different sites over the course of the battery cycle? If not, then how do we know that Apple isn't faking the test by using cached data in a similar fashion to the way VW faked emissions tests in their diesel vehicles?
Damnit. You mean that the first result set WASN'T released just to prompt Apple to give them a bunch of cash for a BETTER result? It was really a bug? Shucks. The economy isn't working like it used to anymore. /sarcasm
I'm just going to C&P this on over:
Methodologies should assume that features do what they say they do and nothing more. If I press the hazard lights on my car and (somehow) the muffler falls off and I report that the muffler fell off while I was driving (not realizing that pressing the hazard lights was what triggered it), my methodology isn't flawed. Clearly, the car company is at fault for creating a flawed product. "But most people never even use the hazard lights! You should have tested it without touching the hazard light button!" is not a reasonable response. This entire tone and focus is steeped in the rankest of apologia via bass-ackwards thinking.
On another note: And it's entirely conceivable and reasonable that they would be using debug mode to either examine more closely how it's performing or to configure it to more closely match their other tested notebooks (perhaps they disable caching in all browsers, for instance.)
What this whole story is really about is that a bunch of Apple haters got a reason to gloat, and are now feeling ripped off when their reason to gloat was taken away from them. The actual technical reasons behind the original decision and the decision to reverse the decision are beside the point.
I'm sorry, but without a scientific study being involved, your statement is invalid.
Hold on.. I gotta spend years whipping up some shit that makes eyes widen and dicks become erect with the vision of unstoppable and immeasurable income in the future, but I'll get there. When I do, I'll get grants or funding and get on with that study. By then, the subject of testing will be completely different and hard to even re-create, but.. wait, there's an idea. I can keep getting grant money and funding because the answer will never be given, but little morsels of "it's right THERE, we're almost done" can take up most of my time and keep the cash flowing in. I should patent this idea right now!
Heh
Seems CR is developing a propensity for trashing high profile products - Tesla and now Apple. I think they are doing this to generate "controversy" and publicity for their product.
snydely
I guess it still takes up to 10 business days for checks to clear.
The holidays must have delayed it's processing.