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Consumer Reports Reverses Course, Recommends MacBook Pro Following New Testing After Apple Bug Fix
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15.25 to 17.75 hours? That comports with the experiences of exactly zero real world users that I've talked to or read about.
That is clearly not what he meant, and your argument is flawed. The first half of the second sentence is linked with the first sentence, but the second half is not.
You're linking the second half of the second sentence, with the first sentence, which the original post did not do.
I really hope they don't go back to this crazy quilt of paid software updates. I like knowing that, when I buy a Mac, I get to enjoy at least 5 years of updates so the machine is supported and feels new. I hated the idea that I had to buy annual updates to the OS and then purchase updates to iWork and iLife. It sucked.
They never discovered the bug. They merely said we have inconsistent battery results so instead of doing more thorough testing we will give this a not recommended rating. Apple dug through what CR were doing and found the bug.
Your post is a great example about how facts are bended through incompetent journalism and careless retelling by forum posters who didn't bother to read the entire story. Facts: CR was using a non-default, debugging configuration of Safari that can only be activated via a hidden developer menu. Virtually no users use that configuration. Yes, its Apple's bug in the end, but this bug only affects a very particular, low-profile operation mode and is therefore much less tested than the configuration a normal user would use. CR should know that using non-default settings of a browser cannot be representative for default operation. They have enabled that setting to emulate a particular scenario — and that made sense — however, they should have implemented that scenario at their server's end instead. Their mistake, one that I consider to be very crude for such a well-known organisation — is that they used a non-default configuration of the browser while not mentioning this fact in their original review(!!), observed some conflicting and overall clearly weird results (they even say it themselves!), and with all that, still proceeded to publish the article. I come from the scientific community, and thing like these are considered gross negligence and unprofessionalism. If you get non-systematic results in your experiment, which also conflicts with other related experiments, the only conclusion you can make is that your test is obviously not working properly.
I don't know what you guys do to get 10h battery life. I get around 3h with my new 15" just doing browsing. It simply sucks
They didn't discover the bug. Apple did.
Smells like an emissions test scandal. Either they paid Consumer Reports a hella bunch to lie, or they wrote software that cheats battery tests.
I do not believe this looks good for Apple. The better option would have been to accept the initial results. This sudden U turn looks very, very suspicious.
Why would you accept a result that says your product is crap and the first ever to not be recommended to consumers. They are trying to sell these things... please tell me your not in charge of sales or marketing
Hopefully people will start reading the news article properly before burping a random comment
Curious what the technical explanation is because the variance is huge for something as simple as browser cache? I'm guessing a ram disk cache is utilized to keep SSD and WIFI in a low power state but those hardly draw any power to begin with. Perhaps CPU is also kept in a low power state.
Yup, and even 18 1/2 and 19 1/2 hours on some trials/machines.
From CR tests where laptops were continuously receiving and displaying non-cached web pages. As a well-respected consumer testing organization I'm sure their rigorous test protocols included observation, monitoring, and supervision.
You would think there might be even a tiny bit of intellectual curiosity that would cause them to revisit their test protools, or at least try and understand how those results could possibly be achieved, especially where Apple's published specifications list up to 10 hours use, in test scenarios that were much less stringent.
What's really surprising (but not really when you think about it), is when this story broke around a month ago, many here thought that was OK. Clearly not engineers...
Right. Screw all the objective testing and the evidence that these laptops have great battery life! Lets just ignore all that and bash Apple because its what all cool kids do nowadays.
I understand why Apple publicly addressed this PR problem head on but can't help but feel it reinforces the feeling of insignificance for low level complaints and problems that Apple will happily publicly/privately ignore due to skirting liability issues. I'm not aware Apple ever officially admitted that iPhone 4 had an antennae issue so they could save face. That phone most certainly had issues and they darn well knew it.
The problem is the results are unrealistic because they don't use methods of testing that are representative of real life usage.
Your point about unprofessional I also agree with. A paid for company needing click bait to sell itself I could accept rushing to release a juicy bit of news on a poor Apple product. But an independent respected institute ( or so people treat it as such ) you would think would wait and put together the most comprehensive and accurate report in the first instance to the consumer. Make reference to an issue with Safari that working with Apple you managed to fix but don't jump the gun.
It's still there. Just open activity monitor..
Alternatively, iStat Menu's can show it in the menu bar but with the same issue that made Apple hide it. Due to the extreme power throttling of the Haswell CPU's, the estimated time just jumps back and forth while your working with various loads.
For example, while using Xcode for app development, it shows over 8h while coding, than jumps down a bit while compiling just to go up again.
Not a real issue but obviously confusing enough for some "PRO" users to complain and have Apple remove it from the top menu. And this is not something that can be magically fixed. There simply is no simple way to predict remaining battery time in combination with aggressive power management..
This kind of reminds of when you need AA batteries for your flashlight and you decide on said Name Brand or those generic Heavy Duty batteries over there. You always pick up the Name Brand for high drain devices and pick the generic battery for low drain devices.
We all know the MacBook Pro has great -no awesome power saving features which seems to make it last a long time but once the system is tagged it drains much too quickly - see reference above. Just my opinion.
We all know the MacBook Pro has great -no awesome power saving features which seems to make it last a long time but once the system is tagged it drains much too quickly - see reference above. Just my opinion.
Sorry friend, but as a scientist, if I see someone do a shabby experimental work and spending a wave of misinformation as the result, it just seriously rubs me off the wrong way. Every other reviewer's battery tests show that these laptops have very good battery life, my laptop has very good battery life, but when CR hits an obscure bug in their testing and release a rushed write-up, thats more credible for some reason.
P.S. There is evidence that there is indeed a bug in OS X that prevents higher-powered GPU states from being deactivated when they are not needed anymore. I have seen a bunch of reports both here on the forums and on other resources. This could account for the poor battery life some people are seeing. If that is true, the people affected are probably those who use photo/video editing software (in particular Adobe's products).
