Consumer Reports Retesting MacBook Pro Battery Life After Apple Says Safari Bug to Blame

[Ethosik]

I think it's hilarious how they keep stressing this pompous statement in every media blurb surrounding these devices.
I remember the days when Apple simply released a decent product and let people form their own opinions.

As for CR, I hope they make a new web test using their own server that generates random webpages that aren't in the cache on every hit. Then we'll see if it really was a bug.

Please. Go back and watch the old keynotes from Steve Jobs. He said these kinds of things all the time. "This is the fastest/thinnest/best/lightest/... system we have ever made". It is marketing. And even Steve Jobs said it A LOT.
[doublepost=1484117185][/doublepost]

The alternative is creating hundreds of thousands of distinct webpages on their internal server: the entire point of the test is active web browsing, not cache retrieval.

I don't think we yet know if this was a real "bug", or just that Safari is awful at wifi battery consumption.

Does anybody really visit thousands of pages within a few hours until their battery dies? Really? How is that a valid test?

 

[PalidinoDH]

I see...you are saying that even if this methodology worked for every other MBP they tested over the years and showed no problems with dodgy battery levels, they should have assumed their methodology was what was wrong when they found fluctuations, rather than come to the conclusion that it could be some kind of software bug.

Because any software developer knows that bugs happen and aren't always spotted by them, and that old features can develop bugs as the code behind them receives changes from other updates that impact them. It seems reasonable that Apple didn't turn on developer settings when they personally did all their battery testing. It's not like they didn't own up to there being a bug that needed to be fixed.

 

[Ethosik]

"Are you expecting CR to look thru source code they don't have? Do some software profiling? Run a debugger?"

Or even wonder why CR's tests which are properly being executed (and presumably monitored, observed, and supervised) were able to pull fresh web pages off their server, in some trials, for 12, 14, 16, 18 1/2, and 19 1/2 hours straight?

They should have been praising the battery life. 19 hours on a laptop is great!
[doublepost=1484118641][/doublepost]

I understand CR does not want to be influenced, but I agree one would think if you see test results that are very inconsistent and so at odds with the manufacturer's claim, you would want to ask the company if they have some idea why this is happening. Just in the interest of providing all the information to the readers if nothing else.

Agreed. If I tested something at work and found two widely different results, I would need to explain why as much as possible. That is what you do when you test things. If I tested something and got 1 hour, and tested the same thing a different way (different browser) and got 20 hours, people are fine with me just saying "Well I got 1 hour on this and 20 hours on this. Okay bye!"? No. That is not what you do. You would follow that up stating that "the fact that the laptop was capable of providing 20 hours of battery life is impressive. The test that got 1 hour of battery life must have been a software bug".

You can't deny the hardware limits. The fact that they DID GET 19.5 hours means the batteries are VERY GOOD. Therefore, software must be to blame here.
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I'm not accusing CR of click baiting because I don't know one way or the other, but some of the comments here make it sound a bit like CR is some altruistic organization because they don't accept ads.

CR is there to make money. If you go to the review in question here you will see you cannot even read the review unless you buy a CR subscription. So they do have an interest in driving traffic to their reviews.

View attachment 682865

Yep. And actually I never heard of them before this. (well maybe another similar article or something about them a few years ago). Everybody is talking about this.

How can they feel confident about their 20 hour test? That is better than any laptop ever made. That lasts 4x longer than my 2013 rMBP. That makes it seem like these batteries are INCREDIBLE!

I think their testing is very bad. I mean, come on. 20 hours?

Like I said before. This would be like me testing a GTX 1080 on 800x600 resolution and getting only 5 frames per second on my test. Or, (in the case of a WAY TOO HIGH result), it would be like me testing the GTX 1080 on a 4K resolution and getting 900 fps.

How could they look at that 19.5 hours and say "that looks good to us" and not question ANYTHING?
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I have trouble understanding why Apple would make a "pro" machine and then use the excuse that "most users" wouldn't use that feature. With a pro machine, there is an expectation that "most users" won't just be using it to watch cat videos on YouTube.

Um. I am a web developer. I do not disable cache on the browser as a whole, as I visit more than just my local development site. Instead, if I need to force a reload without cache, I will do that when needed. I know a lot of web developers that do this. Change something, then do Shift + F5. They don't just disable cache for the ENTIRE BROWSER. If you do, fine. But I agree with Apple that (even most web developers) do not use these settings.
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I agree with you, it's fine to alter the cache settings. I'm referring to the fact that CR quickly realized a likely issue with Safari (or at least a very curious anomaly), but rather than hold off on an official opinion until they had more information, they appeared to rush the article as if to meet a deadline. As a result, the article has a laughably simplistic conclusion which almost seems to ignore the excellent battery performance under Chrome.

It would have made more sense to write, "The MacBook Pro achieved an excellent 19 hours battery life using Chrome, although we noticed inconsistent results using Safari, likely due to a software issue. As a result, we recommend monitoring your usage of Safari. If you aren't satisfied with results, switch to Chrome until a fix is issued."

YES. That is what they should have done 100%

 

[metabob]

It's the only way to test multiple different types of laptops and compare how they do.

Nope, it's not the only way at all. In fact, the method used by CR is a pretty braindead way to test battery life for real-life browsing.

The web servers send headers with every web page which control how long browsers cache each file. Caching should be controlled on the web servers set up for the test, just like in… real-life use. Doing a test with cache turned off is a different test entirely.

The test should, of course, use a large number of web pages. Who reloads the same page over and over? It's not very hard to do build a proper test for this with thousands of generated different web pages.

The test methodology used by CR here is amateurish, there's really no way around that.
[doublepost=1484121758][/doublepost]

I'd say CR was testing it right - browsing the internet means loading new pages over the network all the time, not loading a cached page (or pages) over and over again.

They tested reloading the same page over and over, with caching turned off by a developer setting. There's not way to be sure these kinds of settings do the same thing on different browsers and operating systems.

That's not the same thing as loading new pages over the network all the time. It's not very hard to build a test which loads actually new pages, instead of relying on a cheap trick like this that doesn't correspond to real-life usage very well.

 

[brentsg]

I know, it's hard to keep lunch down when you're continually having to read about Apple FUs, day after stinking day.

And here's more of it. Just another snarky *******.

 

[metabob]

Apple says it isn't a setting used by most users. So, no web developers ever use Macbook Pro computers?

This is not a setting web developers have turned on all the time. It's useful for debugging issues caused by overly eager caching. This, in turn, is a bug in your web app which you need to fix, instead of shoving your head in the sand by turning off caching. Your users don't have caching turned off, so you shouldn't turn it off, either.

 

[mrklaw]

No, not at all. It was tested in a manner not typically used by a user. Sure, one wants it to perform as it "should" even with developer settings adjusted, but at least this revealed a bug only seen under these circumstances so it can be retested and verified fixed, or not.

My guess was they turned the caching off to simulate browsing multiple different websites while only needing to actually browse one or two (or even just refresh the current one)? Isn't that at least partly valid? I suppose at some point most people will have cached versions of all their most-visited sites though..

 

[Vjosullivan]

Did you think for 5 seconds before you posted this?

Of course this could have been avoided if CR reached out to Apple before rushing to publish. Something is clearly wrong when their test results had such wide variances.

Or not, as it turns out.

 

[dntcry]

"Apple advertises that the latest MacBook Pro models get up to 10 hours of battery life on a single charge when watching iTunes movies or browsing the web."

Well they're not lying "...UP TO..."

 

[Ruggy]

Last month, the new MacBook Pro did not 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 noted do not match its "extensive lab tests or field data."

​

Apple has since learned that Consumer Reports was using a "hidden Safari setting" which trigged an "obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons" that led to inconsistent battery life results. With "normal user settings" enabled, Consumer Reports said it "consistently" achieved expected battery life.

Apple's full statement was shared with MacRumors:Apple said it has fixed the Safari bug in the latest macOS Sierra beta seeded to developers and public testers this week.

Consumer Reports has issued its own statement on the matter to explain why it turns off Safari caching during its testing and other details:The non-profit organization also acknowledged user reports of poor battery life that have surfaced over the past three months.

Consumer Reports said it will complete its retesting of MacBook Pro battery life and report back with its update and findings when finished.

Apple advertises that the latest MacBook Pro models get up to 10 hours of battery life on a single charge when watching iTunes movies or browsing the web. This estimate can be affected by several factors, such as screen brightness, which applications are running, and other system processes.

Article Link: Consumer Reports Retesting MacBook Pro Battery Life After Apple Says Safari Bug to Blame

I received my 13" MBP about 3 weeks ago.Yes it is my first MBP, bought to replace a beloved iMac that has outlived 4 Windows machines and which outclassed 2 newer ones until the day it died.
Originally, battery life was about 6 hours of average use with Safari but after having read the consumer test I decided to give Chrome a try and it was clearly much lighter on resources.
But here's the funny thing. Going back to Safari again recently clearly something has happened to increase battery life. I now easily get 10 hours of actual use and can get as much as 16 hours of actual use- not what the app says including all the time it spends sleeping.
We binged on three 45 minute episodes on Netflix the other night streaming HD quality, screen bright and it used 35% of battery. I should mention this machine charges extremely quickly too.
Mentioning the screen, it is 60% brighter than the old machine at 500nits. It really doesn't need to be that bright for everything you do and maybe getting in the habit of turning it up and down a bit is the difference? I also encrypted the drive with no hit at all.
Mentioning the touchbar: it is really useful and the touch id sensor is the real star. Fantastic for changing user and it's a must for mobile devices nowadays because we really need the security.
I have an excellent Asus with touchscreen and the touchscreen doesn't get used much for several reasons ( too far away , fingerprints, moves the screen, in awkward position, hides the screen etc) but the really big difference between the touchbar and a touchscreen is the screen only gives you what you can see and you can already get to what you see with the trackpad quickly anyway. The bar takes you into menus and links and therefore extends your usage. You have to remember to use it and then it starts to become a real tool.
It's irritating to buy new cables but if we didn't do that we'd still be using parallel printer cables and scart.
I bought a certified USB-C to B for about $8 and that connects the external HDs and DVD player, a C to lightning for about the same but I also found a dongle with 3 USB ports and ethernet for $20 just in case so cables aren't a big deal for me.
Sound quality is excellent-way better than on any other laptop I've had and that's a surprise.
Maybe it isn't what people expected but spend some time with Windows machines for a while. The history of Windows computing has been one of, adopt the latest technology and everyone fight with buggy and incompatible drivers for 2 years. My 2 year old Asus doesn't support 802ac wifi at all. I bought a Dell when firewire came out and firewire was incompatible with the mother board and an HP in 98 with USB that weren't supported for 6 months. I have loads of other example and you will see the same story today if you go on forums for Asus, Alienware etc.
This is fantastic machine in the Apple tradition and it's still the best laptop out there.
Too expensive though but worth it for the security you just don't get on Windows and I know I won't have to spend hours working out why this has stopped working or getting updates.
The only thing that worries me is I feel the keyboard is fragile. Time will tell.

 

[metabob]

My guess was they turned the caching off to simulate browsing multiple different websites while only needing to actually browse one or two (or even just refresh the current one)? Isn't that at least partly valid?

A modern web browser is a complex piece of software. Quite a lot happens when you view a web page. Fetching the data from a server is a small part, and one of the least computationally expensive (doesn't use a lot of battery, time is spent mostly waiting).

After that, time is spent parsing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, decoding images, fonts, storing files in the disk/memory caches, and whatnot. Then there's actually rendering the content on screen. Running JavaScript, and all sorts of magic in the JavaScript engine to make it run fast. All of these use the CPU, GPU, and therefore the battery heavily – albeit the work is usually over in a fraction of a second.

A typical person browsing the web is not loading a completely new website with every click. Most page views are on the same sites, and only occasionally go to a completely new website they haven't recently visited. This profile goes out the window if you completely disable all caching on the browser – probably causing more battery to be used than real-life browsing does.

Also, if you turn off caching, resources will not be spent on managing the cache. The battery saving effect from this is probably negligible, though.

Then there's all the bits we don't even know about Safari and how it works internally. There are several separate caches used in a web browser. Will this setting also cause the JavaScript engine to re-optimize the JavaScript for every page view, or will it still use a cached version?

The point is that turning off caching is meant as a debugging tool for web developers. Who knows what happens inside Safari when you use these developer settings. In our normal day-to-day web browsing, it's the servers that control caching by telling browsers how long each file should be cached (to simplify things a bit). A good battery life test will use the same mechanisms as real-life browsing would.

 

[bobob]

Via Daring Fireball:

That still doesn’t explain how Consumer Reports’s testing showed results ranging from 3.75 hours (poor) to 19.5 hours (seemingly too good to be true).

​

CR is the gold standard.

CR was the gold standard.

Actually, the organization used to be highly credible, but it's not so much anymore. A change of leadership a few years ago brought an end to the credibility of its recommendations, which today are sometimes based on political correctness or on what management wishes were so. In 2013 its entire editorial division was eliminated. By 2015, most real journalists had left, and experienced staff had been forced out. This is the outfit that highly recommended the Samsung top-loading HE washer -- the one that rips clothing to shreds, disgorges sheets that don't even get wet (to say nothing of clean), and explodes. If you're looking for assessments of consumer products, you're better off studying the user reviews on Amazon. http://www.alternet.org/media/... and https://www.quackwatch.org/03H...​

 

[ofarlig]

I see...you are saying that even if this methodology worked for every other MBP they tested over the years and showed no problems with dodgy battery levels, they should have assumed their methodology was what was wrong when they found fluctuations, rather than come to the conclusion that it could be some kind of software bug.

Yes they should have. I see the same behaviour when dealing with companies in the US at work. They trust their system to 100% even when someone with half a brain can tell the result it completely wrong. You should always be critical of your methods and models, they can be proven incorrect at any point.

 

[leman]

I am truly sadden to see this much irrational Apple hate on these forums. Facts: CR tests were flawed and the way the results were reported was incomplete, rushed and misleading. Not only did they use a debug configuration of Safari which was never intended for normal users (and any developer knows that turning debug configurations on means that all performance guarantees are OFF, unless you REALLY KNOW WHAT IT DOES), but they also knew that Safari tests were inconsistent with other browser tests (Chrome), yet they still proceeded with their conclusion that MBP has bad battery life. The official justification: " only the default browser matters", which is really hilarious, because they are NOT RUNNING THE BROWSER IN THE DEFAULT CONFIGURATION. They failed to disclose their methodology properly, they knew that their results were unexpected and inconclusive and they reported a random conclusion without further investigation. This is shabby work, by any definition.

And yet its still somehow "Apple's fault". The funniest thing about this — I have no doubt that the CR tests will show excellent batter life, but people will still complain about Apple, because hey, its Apple, its fashionable to bash them these days.

P.S. Yes, there is a bug in Safari and its Apple fault. But its irrelevant — because this bug only affects a debugging configuration that is never used by an end user. And again, if you turn debug options on, all performance guarantees are OFF.

P.P.S. If CR were doing their job properly, they would set up their server to serve content over randomised URLs and thus emulate the 'no caching' behaviour where it should be emulated: at the servers end. No offence meant to CR, mistakes like this happen and proper testing is very tricky. But I am very puzzled by the attitude of many posters here who are willing to ignore glaring methodological issues with CR testing just so that they can bash Apple.

P.P.P.S. I have been using my 15" touchBar MBP for over three days now. I consistently get 9 or more hours of real world usage, and this includes programming, office work, browsing, a lot of data transfer, statistical modelling and other tasks which put 100% load on the CPU. This is an excellent result and way better battery life (by at least 2 hours) than any MBP I used before. Not to mention that the new MBP is about 30% faster, which means that I can work more efficiently.

 

[thespacekid]

Looks like a good example of two companies working together. CR found a problem in testing and reported it. Apple calmly took issue and worked with CR to investigate it and find the cause and fix it. It appears that CR will re-review the laptop and presumably would update their findings should the new test results warrant it. In the past, benchmarks had been optimized for one side or the other but this wasn't the case here. Good job to CR and Apple!

 

[kdarling]

Nope, it's not the only way at all. In fact, the method used by CR is a pretty braindead way to test battery life for real-life browsing.

You could argue the same about benchmarks, video viewing tests, and on and on. This is not a web browsing test per se.

Here, the purpose is simply to have a consistent web load, so they can get repeatable results. That's why the same pages in the same amount of time are downloaded.

The test should, of course, use a large number of web pages. Who reloads the same page over and over? It's not very hard to do build a proper test for this with thousands of generated different web pages.

APPLE DOES THE SAME KIND OF TESTING TO OBTAIN THEIR BATTERY LIFE SPECS.

For example, for iOS web browsing times, Apple writes this:

"Internet over Wi-Fi tests were conducted using a dedicated web server. iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus browsed snapshot versions of 20 popular web pages and received mail once an hour. All settings were default except: the Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks and Auto-Brightness were turned off; WPA2 encryption was enabled."

For the MacBook, they use 25 web sites, and change the display brightness to 75%.

Just the same as Consumer Reports, Apple uses an in-house web server, serving up the same small set of stored web pages over and over again. They also turn off some settings which users might normally leave on.

If you want to bash a test, bash Apple's test as well. Who only gets mail once an hour? Who only goes to 20 web pages? Why are Join Networks and Auto Brightness turned off?

Well duh, for the same reason CR turned off caching. To get consistent results no matter what the outside environment was like.

Again, the test was not the cause of the wacky results. The cause was a bug in Safari, which is now fixed. It happened. It's done. If any lesson is learned, it's that Apple should've responded with better help when CR first reached out to them.

 

[nwcs]

The point is that turning off caching is meant as a debugging tool for web developers.

Not really. It's also extremely useful for any valid QA tests. If I was writing unit tests, functional tests, Selenium tests, Telerik Test Studio tests, or others for Safari I'd disable caching so as to make a very predictable scenario for the test. It puts everything on a very even platform and better simulates actual usage in load testing scenarios.

CR's methodology is just fine for what they are wanting to do. In fact it's basically a controlled functional test. It exposed a bug Apple introduced. That's what tests are good for. In fact, I'm surprised Apple doesn't have a battery of functional tests for Safari that covered this area. They probably do now, though.

Predicting battery life is a fool's game but having a consistent functional test that reduces the randomness as much as possible is at least one way to get a comparative measure. It's not like Apple's method has much actual validity to it, either, as it doesn't represent typical user behavior. Mostly because there is no such thing as typical usage behavior.
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CR was the gold standard.

They still rather are. Here's a more balanced viewpoint on Consumer Reports plus noting that people are flocking to sources of reviews that are increasingly biased and potentially fake. Given how many reviews are "bought" by companies who give free or reduced cost products (and how many people offered services to give fake reviews) it's amazing that people still trust those opinions so blindly.

https://www.theatlantic.com/busines...ports-in-the-age-of-the-amazon-review/477108/

 

[Martyimac]

It's a bug that simply won't apply to the majority of MacBook Pro users who won't run their browsers in that way ever. So maybe Consumer Reports should rename themselves to "0.1% of consumers who use their computers in the same idiosyncratic way we do" Reports.

You are right - it sounds logical, except it wasn't. They assumed Safari would work in a certain manner (except that Apple wasn't obligated to make Safari work the run they felt it ought to run). So the fault is on CR here for making an erroneous assumption, not bothering to verifying their hypothesis, and running with it.

So, Safari didn't work the way CR expected it to using a setting that Apple includes in Safari. Yet Apple acknowledged there was a bug found by CR. By your reasoning, Apple wouldn't have acknowledged that bug NOR would they have publicly stated they were going to fix the bug.
Sorry, your logic doesn't hold water.

 

[Abazigal]

So, Safari didn't work the way CR expected it to using a setting that Apple includes in Safari. Yet Apple acknowledged there was a bug found by CR. By your reasoning, Apple wouldn't have acknowledged that bug NOR would they have publicly stated they were going to fix the bug.
Sorry, your logic doesn't hold water.

The setting exists in Safari, but most consumers are not going to disable cache in their right minds.

Even if it is a bug, it's not one that is going to apply to the majority of mac safari users out there, much less affect them in any meaningful manner. Whether Apple acknowledges it or not is immaterial.

 

[AdonisSMU]

Seems to me Apple resolved the problem yet more whining.

Only on MacRumors do you get people complaining when Apple starts to show the Mac some love.
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The setting exists in Safari, but most consumers are not going to disable cache in their right minds.

Even if it is a bug, it's not one that is going to apply to the majority of mac safari users out there, much less affect them in any meaningful manner. Whether Apple acknowledges it or not is immaterial.

I don't think its immaterial depending upon the extent of the bug.

 

[Fall Under Cerulean Kites]

Consumer Reports’ testing methodology is lacking. Continually reloading the same web page, cached or not, is not a real world test. And for someone to believe that Apple just got their battery wrong in the latest rMBP, you’re pretty delusional. Say what you will, but we’re talking about arguably the best computer hardware company in the world. I think they pretty much know what they’re doing. Even if you don’t like their decisions. What I mean by this, is they probably did a bit of testing. And if they say it gets 10 hours with normal use, it probably does.
[doublepost=1484142617][/doublepost]

So, Safari didn't work the way CR expected it to using a setting that Apple includes in Safari. Yet Apple acknowledged there was a bug found by CR. By your reasoning, Apple wouldn't have acknowledged that bug NOR would they have publicly stated they were going to fix the bug.
Sorry, your logic doesn't hold water.

I believe the tester is called Consumer Reports. How many consumers turn off browser cache? I know you don’t have data. But go ahead. Guess. 5%? Naw. Too high. 1%? Nope, probably still too high. 0.1%? Probably still too high. Unless you have a specific reason for doing so, you’re not going to turn off browser cache. Therefore, the test results, bug or not, are invalid for the intended audience.

 

[jmgregory1]

Really? Do you sit for hours refreshing the same content or do you browse new content? It was a simulation of browsing for a battery test. How would you have done it?

If the bug wasn't present, the test would have run fine.

I don't visit unique websites throughout the day until the battery dies on my rMBP. I don't think anyone visits only new and unloaded websites throughout the day, so the way they executed the test is unrealistic. They should have created a test that loads a series of website, one after the other allowing for one or two minutes on each site (as people would normally do). Even if it were a loop of 10, 20 or 30 sites, it would be more realistic for how people actually browse the web - but they would need to keep caching on, as that is what 99+% of people do.

That is, if Consumer Reports is trying to show consumers what they can realistically expect for battery life. If what they're trying to do is create attention grabbing headlines for a click-bait article, then they can do whatever they want.

 

[SarcasticJoe]

I'd say CR was testing it right - browsing the internet means loading new pages over the network all the time, not loading a cached page (or pages) over and over again.

Yes, people don't load the same pages over and over again, but they way in which CR was testing battery life they did just to ensure the test was as reproducible as possible. To then make the results more realistic they turned off the browser cache, but ran into a bug where Safari would constantly reload many of elements on these few pages several times over between refreshes.

What they actually did to test battery life obviously wasn't equivalent to real world use and their attempt to make it consume the battery like it was ended up running headlong into a bug that Apple has now fixed.

In short: Yes, they did test it wrong.

I'd personally compare this to a magazine reviewing a bike with a choke valve (a feature for helping with cold winter starts that works by causing a really rich fuel-air mixture by constraining airflow to the engine) for a publication that is only published in places where you don't need one and then complaining about rough running because the valve your readers wouldn't even be using got stuck. A minor problem that doesn't even affect their audience.

 

[kdarling]

Consumer Reports’ testing methodology is lacking. Continually reloading the same web page, cached or not, is not a real world test.

To you and all the others who keep repeating that claim:

See my post #416. Apple also uses a very limited number of canned pages for their own battery tests.

So if you bash CR's test, then you must also bash Apple's test.

--

This all brings up an important question: does Apple allow its own battery test to use cached pages??? If so, then theirs would be a very bad test, because it wouldn't reflect any usage of the internet connection after the first page load.

However, since the bug was apparently about loading a web page icon, it's possible that Apple also turns off the cache, but their stored set of web pages does not load any icons. So they simply never saw their bug in action before.

 

[fishmongerer]

so Safari kills battery life and Chrome kills battery life. Basically we shouldn't browse on our new Macs =/

Use the Lynx text browser. I'm sure it works just fine and doesn't affect battery life too much.
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Definitely the best MacBook Pro I have owned. Not saying the last generations weren't good either, but these are great machines. Wonder when that Safari fix will make it to us.

People need to try out the competition. I was sucked into the negativity towards the new machines, but playing around with the new ones and looking at the Windows choices, the MBP comes out way ahead in build quality and OS experience.

I like the Dell XPS and the MS Surface Book, but they just don't measure up. I feel like the Dell keyboard and case are just going to look old and worn out in a couple of years. I have the 2009 MBP and the sucker looks like new and it's been around the world.

I wish Apple would lower prices, though. The base 13" is fine for the price, but the others...just a little too high.