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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.
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.
Consumer Reports now admits they were holding it wrong.
I knew it wouldn't take Apple long to fix the bug in the RDF.
consumers union and consumer reports is a non-profit organization that accepts zero funding or advertising from the manufacturers or retailers of the products that they evaluate. while they may have given apple the benefit of the doubt with regards to the initial results of their testing and giving them an opportunity to correct the issues, they most certainly did not get paid for the 'recommended' rating.
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.