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MacBook Pro Touch Bar

Last month, Consumer Reports declared it would not recommend the new MacBook Pro, on account of its poor and highly erratic battery life. This report followed weeks of controversy that has dogged the latest refresh of Apple's mobile hardware — many users likewise oasis't been happy with Apple's reliance on dongles or its minimum improvements to the platform (the cost increases mostly don't offset the addition of new features like the Touch Bar). Apple initially refused to acknowledge that the platform might accept bombardment issues, preferring to sweep the problem nether the rug past removing macOS's "Fourth dimension Remaining" judge, merely the Consumer Reports review was ugly enough that the company was forced to investigate.

It turns out Consumer Reports' bombardment life tests were being impacted past a Safari bug, as we had hypothesized was the instance. Apple has resolved the bug in the latest beta version of macOS (10.12.3) and will push the solution out to all users when that flavor of the Bone is ready for prime time.

Apple's statement on the matter reads: "We appreciate the opportunity to piece of work with Consumer Reports over the holidays to sympathize their battery test results… Nosotros 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 enshroud…. We have too fixed the problems uncovered in this test."

Apple MacBook Pro 15

The reason Consumer Reports disables its browser cache is because the publication is trying to test battery life, which means information technology wants its benchmark to hit the Wi-Fi radio rather than repeatedly loading web pages from the browser cache. This is the sort of configuration modify a publication might make when trying to isolate something as circuitous as battery life — there's an intrinsic tension between the need to automate a test to consummate information technology in a reasonable time frame and the need to design a test that reflects real-world usage. Since most people don't spend hours refreshing a single page, forcing the browser to reload one page repeatedly is a meliorate manner to capture web browsing than reloading the same page from the browser cache.

Here's how CR describes its laptop testing practices:

Nosotros download a series of x web pages repeatedly, starting with the battery fully charged, and ending when the laptop shuts down. The web pages are stored on a server in our lab and transmitted over a dedicated WiFi network. We conduct our battery tests using the browser that is native to the computer's operating arrangement—Safari, in the instance of the MacBook Pro laptops…

We also turn off the local caching of spider web pages. In our tests, we want the figurer to load each web folio every bit if it were new content from the net, rather than resurrecting the data from its local drive. This allows us to collect consistent results beyond the testing of many laptops, and it also puts batteries through a tougher workout.

According to Apple, this final function of our testing is what triggered a bug in the company's Safari browser. Indeed, when we turned the caching part back on as part of the research nosotros did later on publishing our initial findings, the 3 MacBooks we'd originally tested had consistently high bombardment life results.

Apple, of course, is hinging its rather testy reply on the idea that this exam doesn't reverberate 'real earth conditions,' and that may be true. But it doesn't explicate why many users have reported terrible battery life before the CR tests. According to Apple tree, Consumer Reports' unusual testing scenario "also triggered an obscure and intermittent problems reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab." No explanation is given for how an obscure icon-reloading bug can cause laptop bombardment life to vary between iii.75 and 19 hours, and no caption has been offered for why some users have seen bombardment life reject from 9-10 hours on previous MacBook Pros to vi-7 hours that many users accept reported with the newer models.

Given that Apple tree already had an obscure problems that was triggering in this specific case, it's entirely possible that other obscure bugs have caused issues with other battery life scenarios. And while the CR bug may be specific to its testing practices, information technology's also a useful demonstration of why publications publish results corporations aren't going to similar in the showtime place. Previous Apple laptops didn't have this problems, which means Apple tree introduced the flaw at some signal. When a company isn't willing to work with you prior to publication, publishing results is oft the only way to go a company to investigate a problem.