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Consumer Reports says do not buy Apple’s new MacBook Pro, citing erratic battery life

“Apple launched a new series of MacBook Pro laptops this fall, and Consumer Reports’ labs have just finished evaluating them. The laptops did very well in measures of display quality and performance, but in terms of battery life, we found that the models varied dramatically from one trial to another,” Jerry Beilinson writes for Consumer Reports. “As a result, these laptops are the first MacBooks not to receive recommended ratings from Consumer Reports.”

“The MacBook Pro battery life results were highly inconsistent from one trial to the next,” Beilinson writes. “For instance, in a series of three consecutive tests, the 13-inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third. The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours. Those were just a few of the results; we tested battery life on these laptops repeatedly.”

“For the battery test, we download a series of 10 web pages sequentially, starting with the battery fully charged, and ending when the laptop shuts down,” Beilinson writes. “The web pages are stored on a server in our lab, and transmitted over a WiFi network set up specifically for this purpose. We conduct our battery tests using the computer’s default browser—Safari, in the case of the MacBook Pro laptops… Once our official testing was done, we experimented by conducting the same battery tests using a Chrome browser, rather than Safari. For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: It’s the software, stupid*. Not Apple’s hardware.

Luckily for Apple, Geritol has younger demographics than Consumer Reports.

Unluckily for Apple, they fired Scott Forstall and promoted the funny guy with the big hair who’s either stretched too thin or incompetent or both. The quality of Apple’s software since Forstall was moved out by Tim Cook is inferior versus the software quality under Forstall.

Yes, Forstall may have been regarded as a royal asshole by some, but so was Steve Jobs by those who couldn’t consistently perform at a high level.

Yes, we’d rather have faux leather and stitching throughout our UI in exchange for Apple’s old level of quality and usability.

*Safari, specifically and/or CR‘s testing software.

SEE ALSO:
Explaining the battery life problems with the new MacBook Pros – December 16, 2016
Users of Apple’s new MacBook Pro report improved battery life with macOS 10.12.2 – December 15, 2016
Apple ‘fixes’ MacBook Pro battery life issue by removing the ‘time remaining’ clock – December 14, 2016

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