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So Consumer Reports deceived all 7 of their readers by using a non-standard config and pretending like that was normal battery life.

I didn't much care for them before, now I know they post fraudulent results.
 
No, this just altered the standardized testing for all laptops to improve Apple's results. Basically this is "you're holding it wrong" again. With that phone, holding it differently yielded better results. With this testing, changing a common testing parameter used with all laptops is going to yield a much better result...

Nonsense. The odd testing method caused a bug to be exposed. It's fixed now.. simple as that.
 
Well, that's great news for the hostages! I assume Apple will be releasing them soon, if that haven't already sent the kids back to their parents.
 
test gives bad results.
apple changes the test's rules.
classic.

edit: the scope of a test is not to give a real case usage result, but to have a common ground to compare results from many manufacturers' machines. if one tested machine doesn't abide to the rules, its results are biased.
also, as with every other time apple has received a bad review, i don't really buy the "obscure bug" excuse.
 
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Apple quizzed Phil about where he put those goal posts ... and Phil's response was "yeah, they just cluttered the field so be took 'em down and put 'em under the stands ... hell who needs goalposts anyway?"
 
Some people can't read...

According to Apple
, it wasn't the caching setting itself that caused poor battery life, it was that the setting was triggering a bug which caused icons to constantly be reloading for no reason.

According to Apple, this bug is now fixed in the latest beta release. One would expect a new CR test that once again turns off caching to yield much better results this time.

People here no longer even try to read. Every day is just another opportunity to bash a company they hate. I'm frustrated with myself for even glancing over here while eating lunch today. I no longer read the forums regularly for this reason. It's just a bunch of hate.
 
Apple said: "Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab."
For all those who are complaining that CR was incompetent, dishonest, etc., take note: There was a real problem, and it was a bug in the MBP/Sierra. The fundamental problem was caused by Apple, not CR.
 
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It still doesn't fix the problem with the 2016 model having 1/3 smaller battery than the 2015 model.

It doesn't need any bigger battery, at least the 15" doesn't. I've been running it for 3 days now and the battery life is better than any other laptop of thecsane class I have ever worked with. Certainly outperforms the 2015 model.
 
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Disabling caching in a browser should not cause this type of battery drain. It simulates real world usage of a web browser.
No, it does not. When you visit MR or this forum, most of the files are coming from your local cache and you probably visit a lot of the same sites every day (search, blogs, news, facebook,...), so a lot of files these sites are using (images, javascript, css, fonts) are already in your cache.
CR could design their tests to use a mix of cached and non cached files in their test web-sites to simulate real browsing better.
And then I am not even sure if all browsers handle the files that belong to web-pages in the same way and use more or less battery power. So using different browsers as in their test, can have a significant impact on the results (even if those browsers don't have bugs in developer features) but then it is a browser test, not a laptop test.
 
Nonsense. The odd testing method caused a bug to be exposed. It's fixed now.. simple as that.

I stand by what I wrote. It seems a crowd of us is trying to make this about a testing protocol. It's not about that at all. They use the same testing protocol with all of the other laptops they test too. That's how they work. Put a bunch of like products from different manufacturers against each other. Make it as apples-to-apples as possible. Then see which ones perform best. Write down those results so that us consumers have at least one, very objective source of information to help us buy the right Toaster... or Fridge... or Printer... or Laptop, etc.

This cache variable was not changed this ONE time just to make this one product from this one company look bad. This is how they test that particular part of things. The same is applied to laptops from everyone else too.

Some of us are trying to redirect away from reality here. Why? That's what some of us do.

When they retest with the cache functional, I would bet it all that the new MBpro will yield a much better result than it did in the standard testing with cache off. However, if using the cache becomes the new protocol, all other laptop results are likely to rise too (because they'll get the very same benefit of working from cached content).

I'm not making this up. Go back and re-read it for yourself. Why does CR turn off the cache? They say why right in the first post. Did they turn it off for just the single laptop? No.

And one more time: historically, CR reviews of Apple hardware yield very high if not top ratings. So all this "CR is stupid", "amateurish", "doesn't know what they're doing", etc posts seems like it should equally apply when they offer very favorable ratings of Apple tech. But of course, when CR is praising Apple tech, all is fine. They are only wrong when they find some fault with Apple... like analysts... or patents... or press... or fellow consumers.
 
My MBP 13 gives me up to 3 hours of casual browsing and the odd youtube video with medium brightness. I guess I'm testing it wrong?

I got about 7 hours yesterday with my 2016 13" MBP doing browsing, and watching some video. I know this because I was stuck in an airport all day and didn't realize that I packed my charger in the luggage that I checked in.
 
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Apple says it isn't a setting used by most users. So, no web developers ever use Macbook Pro computers?

If it was indeed a bug, then the only response from Apple should have been, "We thank CR for testing our products so thoroughly. This high standard of testing has revealed a bug in Safari that would have affected many of our pro users. We have addressed this bug, and invite CR to retest our product, which we are confident will pass or exceed thier standards."

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

Seriously? Do you really have an issue understanding how "most users" is different than "no developers"?
 
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This still doesn't explain the inconsistent battery life users are getting. I wonder what other "bugs" Apple needs to fix...
 
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Well, it doesn't really speak for Consumer Reports that they didn't do additional testing. If it's a Safari setting, then an alternate battery life test with Chrome (very common use case) would've easily showed the anomaly in battery life. Why do they have so much credit anyway?

There is something very strange going on in the universe when it is suggested using Chrome would give you increased battery life.
 
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For sure. Is my next door neighbor, who is a school teacher, going to 1) Turn on Developer settings, and then 2) Go to the setting to Disable Caches?

Why?
They explained this in the original article: "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. 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"

They want the pages to load fresh from their server as if coming from the interwebs. If the web pages are loading from Safari cache then their testing isn't consistent across all laptops. All previous macbooks have passed this exact same test with flying colors. The '16 MBP's had a bug in Safari that cause the erratic results, not CR's testing procedure.

Their testing has nothing to do with your neighbor, mine, me, or you. It's about consistency when testing all laptops.
 
So Consumer Reports deceived all 7 of their readers by using a non-standard config and pretending like that was normal battery life.

I didn't much care for them before, now I know they post fraudulent results.
If that's your takeaway then I assume fixing the bug that Apple identified as the cause was wrong on their part?
Any other fact twisting to share?
 
They explained this in the original article: "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. 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"

They want the pages to load fresh from their server as if coming from the interwebs. If the web pages are loading from Safari cache then their testing isn't consistent across all laptops. All previous macbooks have passed this exact same test with flying colors. The '16 MBP's had a bug in Safari that cause the erratic results, not CR's testing procedure.

Their testing has nothing to do with your neighbor, mine, me, or you. It's about consistency when testing all laptops.

I understand their motivation. That's not a a real life usage test, though.
 
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Trust me. It's not. I have had the shocking 2006 model. I've had the kernel panicking GPU ridden 2008 model. I also had the image retention, screen peeling, pixel blowing 2012 model. I loved them all, but this is a huge step up for me and the smoothest first gen MacBook Pro I have used.

Although Apple fixed them all no questions asked (the 2012 one 4 times!), visits to the Genius Bar are hardly what I consider a Pro feature.

How can you say that this current Pro is "the smoothest" you've used when it's practically brand new? That guy stating the twist is starting to make sense.
 
Speaking as someone who has been fairly critical of Apple in recent years, and has some affection for Consumer Reports based on its pre-internet reputation, CR is the party clearly in the wrong here. As they themselves said in their initial review, the battery issue was erratic and clearly had something to do with Safari, since they pointed out that it didn't occur with Chrome. Rather than either (a) delaying their report until discussing it with Apple, or (b) trying to figure out whether the error was a deep, important one (i.e., relevant to their readers) or something more idiosyncratic, they choose to assume the former and/or rush to publication for the attention (and everyone wants attention, that's not specific to CR, but a weakness of all journalism).

No, it's not their job to debug for Apple or paint Apple in the best light, but it is their job to evaluate the major aspects of a product and not inflate minor or idiosyncratic drawbacks that apply more to them than to the average user (eg, if they rated a car poorly because a tester found that her favorite purse didn't quite fit into the glove compartment). CR's error was relatively minor, inasmuch as they reasonably felt that if it was a bug, it was unlikely to be idiosyncratic to them, since they use the same testing protocol on all laptops. But they should have taken a second look, talked to Apple, or otherwise caveated their findings until they figured out what was going on. The result is that now both Apple and CR look bad, and that could all have been easily avoided by CR.
 
If it's a Safari setting, then an alternate battery life test with Chrome (very common use case) would've easily showed the anomaly in battery life.

...because the point of CR testing is to produce figures that let customers compare diverse machines. That means the tests have to follow rules and, clearly, CRs rules were "Use the stock web browser that comes with the OS" (which is what the majority of users will do) and "Disable cacheing" (so you're not just re-loading the same site from cache). There's no "right" or "wrong" set of rules - they're arbitrary and just need to be consistently applied across machines.

Anyway, we already know the real reason for these sorts of results: the new MBP has a 20% smaller battery than the previous model and is completely reliant on Skylake's idle-power-saving tricks to achieve the same battery life...
 
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