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Phil Schiller: Apple Working With Consumer Reports to Understand MacBook Pro Battery Test
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Most likely they were working on something similar to the sculpted batteries used in the rMB. Of course Apple engineers (and I would even argue industrial designers) wouldn't make the decision to ship an older design. That's clearly coming from the top and my guess is Schiller made the call that they had to ship something for the holiday season. But maybe they would have been better off waiting for Kaby Lake and the engineers to solve the battery issue.
Seems to me Apple hints at hiding an actual problem here with the actions they have taken. And now they are trying to hide it with how the OS presents battery information. This is not good, I didn't just spend $3199 for this, they better address this issue the right way and get it right none of this obscuring information to hide a problem. I didn't receive my computer yet it's been almost 2 months on back order. Battery life is very important just like it is on a phone but at the same time when I need to I want to ensure that my machine is operating at it's fastest speed possible (CPU and GPU) so I also hope they are not clocking both down to address real battery issues.
I think the pressure from Consumer Reports is good here although it seems Apple continues to just want to dance around the problem!
-Mike
I think the pressure from Consumer Reports is good here although it seems Apple continues to just want to dance around the problem!
-Mike
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Or perhaps not enough people with good battery life are reporting, but going on with their lives? A negative is always blown out of proportion where as a positive is often ignored. That is human nature.
Oh good lord get over yourself. The plainly sad truth is that as much as I may love the Mac Platform it has seriously been lagging since 2013. And the first signs of it began with the discontinuation of the 17" MacBook Pro in 2011. Honestly 2011 was the last year they had a nearly complete line of mac desktops and laptops and had one focus on mobile (with exception to the iPad).
Now it's become a different phone for every mood and vanity watches with poor battery life and questionable practical value.
Honestly the single greatest thing Apple has done in the last 5 years is improve the Apple TV to the point where it is a nearly complete entertainment system with a passable OS and AppStore.
But everything else has been minutely iterative and disconnected.
Less frequent desktop and laptop refreshes.
Forgoing a retina MacBook Air in favor for an underpowered netbook equivalent called the MacBook?
Dumbing down the pro machine to be a glorified MacBook Air with retina and no removable storage interface built in and zero native legacy port support for even USB? Adapters for everything? And now battery issues?
Not to mention the tremendous OS glitches and promised and missed opportunities for feature improvement.
It's December and auto-unlock with Apple Watch was promised to the Dev community in June and today it works maybe 70% of the time.
I mean it's a lovely concept and when it works I'm always pleasantly surprised but it's so inconsistent I can't say it adds value to my daily computing experience.
Why is Apple mail so damn stale compared to Microsoft Outlook on MacOS?
I mean the list is really really long and this is starting to look like Microsoft 1.0.
Before you accuse me of not having adequate investment in Mac / Apple. I have thunderbolt displays. Multiple iMacs from 2011 to as recent as 2014. I have a high end MacPro from 2013. Thunderbolt raid storage arrays and multiple MacBook Pros from 2014. I've owned nearly every iteration of Mac and MacBook. Oh and may I also include multiple iPad Pros at 12.9 and 9" display sizes. As well as multiple iPhone 7 Plus S . How the hell are we even supposed to write that? LOL.
Seriously Apple needs to have a product powwow and get their roadmap cleaned up.
And for God's sake. Bring back a music player with a Dark background please. Why I have to glare at a bright white screen on my phone when I wanna see album art. And who said magenta was the best color contrast on that?
Ugh. This has gotten out of hand.
PS: I test and evaluate technology like this for a living. And I would say my PC vs Mac investment has been about 1/10th as large. Not too much exciting happening on the PC front outside of the MS Surface line of products.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
So, after rating almost every past Apple product very, very highly, CR just figured out this click marketing trick... and decided to compromise their long-term reputation of objective consumer product reviews to get more clicks? How can we write such stuff down?
They should hire Consumer Reports to do their QA testing because its non existent and horrific the past several years.
It seems Apple waits now after releases to address issues they DO know about and hope people dont complain. And yes they do and have known about many of the major issues before release. Shame, they used to be a better company pre-iPhone.
It seems Apple waits now after releases to address issues they DO know about and hope people dont complain. And yes they do and have known about many of the major issues before release. Shame, they used to be a better company pre-iPhone.
Disagree, Q&A and innovation have gone down since Steve Jobs passed away. They need a new idea guy since Cook is just a numbers guy IMO.
There's no "probably" about it. Apple posts precisely what they turn on/off for their battery tests at the bottom of every product page that has specs that include battery life.
Who is surprised by the lesser battery life?
The surprising part is the 19.5 hours, 18.5 hours and 12.75 hours results...
How the hell did that happen with a 25%-33% smaller battery?!
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Does Apple need to work with 'consumer report' to find out their battery is insufficient ?
Seriously ?
Apple solution? your macbook processes will be sleeping and processors throttling 99.9% of the time to conserve the battery !
be prepared to have a SNAIL macbook pro !!!!
Seriously ?
Apple solution? your macbook processes will be sleeping and processors throttling 99.9% of the time to conserve the battery !
be prepared to have a SNAIL macbook pro !!!!
Disagree on the QA part.
Going back to 2000, Apple's never had a period of more than a year or two without a product that's had a systematic QA issue, either from them or because of a third-party component they used.
That's an Apple thing, not a Cook thing.
You mean the the company that measured and reported 12 hours, 16 hours, 18 1/2 hours, and 19 1/2 hours (almost double Apple's maximum life claims) in their real-life usage battery test, apparently not blinking an eye or thinking that was strange?
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
In the end- and as physically sick as I presume it makes some of us- a "loud" stink like this tends to accomplish something all the collective consumer whining can't- it presses Apple to do something.
A few people have referenced the infamous "you're holding it wrong" iPhone 4, which- I think- was the last Apple product that got less-than-stellar ratings from CR. Of course, CR and anyone else sharing any gripes were "holding it wrong", were trolls, etc, etc but that was a stink too loud to beat down with marketing spin, blame shifting & redirection. And what came of it? In spite of it being spun as a user problem, the next iteration of iPhone made changes to actually address the problem. It was better- one could not "hold it wrong" because the negative noise was loud & prevalent enough to move Apple to actually do something about the problem in the next iteration.
If this keeps up, I expect the same here. Apparently the MBpro was intended to utilize the tiered battery setup so that Apple could get it's "thinner" and still wedge in enough battery to meet some marketing claim. But that did not make it in this one. If the public stink about battery persists, I bet the next edition ends up with the tiered batteries as intended, making this edition the iPhone 4 of the MB line: CR testing methods are wrong, users are using it wrong, battery manufacturers are to blame, Fedex probably dropped this shipment somewhere, it's all Google Chromes fault, the Chinese didn't build it right, the magnetosphere of the earth is affecting this, it's Obama's fault, it's Trump's fault, it's the Velocirapters, it's Samsung's fault, it's Chinese smog, it's cheap third party adapters, etc.
Is that not working? Then redirect: "but who makes the most profitable laptop" or "99% don't need 10 hours of battery life anyway" or "mine will run any apps for 11 hours without ever having any problem" (so yours must too), or "$X00 Billion in the bank says Apple is right in every way," etc.
A few people have referenced the infamous "you're holding it wrong" iPhone 4, which- I think- was the last Apple product that got less-than-stellar ratings from CR. Of course, CR and anyone else sharing any gripes were "holding it wrong", were trolls, etc, etc but that was a stink too loud to beat down with marketing spin, blame shifting & redirection. And what came of it? In spite of it being spun as a user problem, the next iteration of iPhone made changes to actually address the problem. It was better- one could not "hold it wrong" because the negative noise was loud & prevalent enough to move Apple to actually do something about the problem in the next iteration.
If this keeps up, I expect the same here. Apparently the MBpro was intended to utilize the tiered battery setup so that Apple could get it's "thinner" and still wedge in enough battery to meet some marketing claim. But that did not make it in this one. If the public stink about battery persists, I bet the next edition ends up with the tiered batteries as intended, making this edition the iPhone 4 of the MB line: CR testing methods are wrong, users are using it wrong, battery manufacturers are to blame, Fedex probably dropped this shipment somewhere, it's all Google Chromes fault, the Chinese didn't build it right, the magnetosphere of the earth is affecting this, it's Obama's fault, it's Trump's fault, it's the Velocirapters, it's Samsung's fault, it's Chinese smog, it's cheap third party adapters, etc.
Is that not working? Then redirect: "but who makes the most profitable laptop" or "99% don't need 10 hours of battery life anyway" or "mine will run any apps for 11 hours without ever having any problem" (so yours must too), or "$X00 Billion in the bank says Apple is right in every way," etc.
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Assuming Apple can eventually make this new battery design work properly, which PRO machine would pros rather have:
1) Something as thin as the 2016 MBP, with consistently reliable 10-hour battery life, limited to 16GB RAM, dongles required for many of your external devices, rose-colored case option.
2) Something with the same dimensions as the 2015 MBP, with consistently reliable 14-hour battery life (more room in the bigger case for newer battery design), up to 32GB RAM (more battery power for power-hungry RAM), ports for the devices you own now, rose-colored case option.
The 2015 models are thin enough. Apple obsession with thinness has gone too far. At some point you have to put FUNCTION before form. Apple passed that point with the 2016 MBP.
Mark
1) Something as thin as the 2016 MBP, with consistently reliable 10-hour battery life, limited to 16GB RAM, dongles required for many of your external devices, rose-colored case option.
2) Something with the same dimensions as the 2015 MBP, with consistently reliable 14-hour battery life (more room in the bigger case for newer battery design), up to 32GB RAM (more battery power for power-hungry RAM), ports for the devices you own now, rose-colored case option.
The 2015 models are thin enough. Apple obsession with thinness has gone too far. At some point you have to put FUNCTION before form. Apple passed that point with the 2016 MBP.
Mark
I agree to an extent but it has never been as bad as it is now. It isn't just hardware, software is terrible too.
Interesting expectations these days. I remember when I purchased my first Air in 2010 and was amazed to get five hours of battery life for such a small, thin and portable device. My previous traveling laptop, A Sony Vaio, was thin and powerful but barely got a 1/2 hour on the factory battery. I had to purchase an extended battery to get over an hour.
Yes, the 13" 2016 MBT I purchased should get and consistent battery life for $3000. It should also be able to easily achieve the Apple estimate of 10 hours and that is the failure which we seem to be facing.
If CR is getting wild differences in life using Safari over Chrome, something in Safari is driving the hardware into a higher power consumption mode.
PS. Right now, using Safari, my power consumption should get about 6 hours of life.
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Battery life on my 2016 13-inch MacBook Pro TB (fully loaded) has greatly improved since 10.12.2 (16C67) update for some unknown reason, since Apple says the update had no battery issue fixes. My MacBook Pro is now acceptable
My personal feeling about Consumer Report testing is they are great for refrigerators, washers/dryers, laundry soap and automobiles....but weaker with their electronic's testing. Anyone feel the same?
My personal feeling about Consumer Report testing is they are great for refrigerators, washers/dryers, laundry soap and automobiles....but weaker with their electronic's testing. Anyone feel the same?
Rene Ritchie sounds like an Apple apologist. It is not CR's responsibility to find Apple's glitches.
Conversely, CR should have provided more detail on their test results and testing process when issuing such a bombshell review. I am not saying they owe Apple anything, yet they definitely owe their readers a better explanation after a decade of uninterrupted Apple laptop recommendations.
I like nearly everything about the new macbook pros except for two things. The price and battery life. My 2015 MacBook Pro is already rediculously thin, Apple don't need to make a laptop any thinner, it just results in these avoidable battery problems. Nevertheless consumer reports is obviously only interested in an attention seeking headline, there own advise contracts everyone else's experience with chrome - in which is makes battery life worse. So I can only imagine the whole review was bankrolled by google.