Consumer Reports has a history of embarrassing itself with its recommendations. I think we all saw that something was wrong with its results and that they were published specifically to get headlines. That certainly worked for them, but it also further damaged their reputation. They should have postponed publishing the results until they were sure everything was correct. Rene Ritchie has a nice article on it.
Consumer Reports MacBook Pro bullshit
Its still a meh of a product battery issues or not. Apple has embarrassed itself lately with the Mac. Lets hope they get some redemption in 2017.
What I find amazing is that Consumer Reports got 17 hours on an initial charge — if they questioned that as much as they accepted the 4 hour charge, they might have done more investigative testing to learn the underlying reason before publishing their nonsense. Seems CU has fallen victim to the “clickbait” that defines today’s journalism.
I bought one — it’s the best MacBook Pro I’ve owned. The battery life is comparable to my 2013 MBP — which is very good. The display, keyboard, Touch Bar and Touch ID are solid improvements. Enjoy your DELL….
I always thought CR was great, until they started reviewing some things that I knew something about.
what an utterly worthless troll post of nonsensical bullshit. at least your icon is self-descriptive.
“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming
They should have spent a little more time collecting reliable data.
I bought one as well. Its also the best MacBook I’ve owned, but the first one I can remember which wasn’t unequivocally the best (and I’ve owned at least a half dozen machines going all the way back to the original Titanium Powerbook).
Consumer Reports’ testing seems questionable, but there absolutely is a battery life issue with these new models.
The low-travel keyboard is growing on me, but I doubt I’ll ever fully adapt to the arrow keys, which are dumb as a puck mouse.
Not including a ten dollar USB A/C adapter in the box – something virtually everyone will need – is chintzy. This is a $3000 computer! Similarly, not paying the extra couple bucks to make the power cord a full high speed USB C cable is going to confuse people. In general, I think a lot of people are going to be confused by the all the different combinations of USB C and Thunderbolt 3.
I agree an adaptor for USB-C to Lightning should have been included. The low travel keyboard is fast, if a bit louder than the old one. USB-C is the future. If there’s a battery issue, it’s very likely to be a software fix — my battery life seems totally normal.
Same here. Their camera reviews are worthless.
Isn’t this the same publication that said that said people complaining about Apple Music deleting their music were lying and that they deleted it themselves and then a week later walked it back when the users and Apple showed them that they were wrong? iMore frequently defends Apple first then asks questions later.
I don’t know for sure if there’s anything wrong with the battery in the MacBook. I haven’t touched one yet. Judging from my older MacBook, though, there is something wrong with macOS 10.12.
Could there be two problems? Sure. But if there’s one that covers all symptoms, I’d start with that.
Edit: I meant 10.12, of course. 🙂
Rene is THE biggest Apple fanboy around. Cook could take a shit in his breakfast and Rene would come up with a long-winded way as to how it was his own fault.
Between taking photos of his Apple products, playing Pokemon and defending Apple, he seems a strange guy
I know that Consumer Reports is the same publication that downgraded the first iMac—which had built-in Ethernet—for not having a PCI slot to add a network card.
Whatever you think about him, the criticisms in the iMore article are kinda valid.
bahaha. that says it all.
Consumer Reports generally builds tests that simulate how ordinary human beings use products, and gets results similar to those ordinary human beings would get. This often annoys enthusiasts who tend to spend a lot of time studying instructions, doing research, and using products so as to derive optimum or maximum performance (depending on goal). Problem is, enthusiasts typically make up no more than a few percentage points of the user population, and most people using the product don’t do what enthusiasts do.
I dunno, it’s not CR’s job to figure out why these specific Macbooks act wonky for their tests when no other laptops they’ve tested have had the same issue. He said they should have tested other machines, but they saw the issue on the 3 machines they tested. He accuses them of not sharing their test method, when they clearly lay it out in the review.
And it’s obvious Rene has an agenda. He does the, “I’m not comparing them to fake news, but I am, thing” and in his update, he says he hope CR will share their info with Apple, when CR clearly stated in their review that they shared their results with Apple.
is 10.2 slow for you? My main machine is 10.11x and fast – a friend upgraded his 2013 iMac 24″ and it is damn slow – he does have a regular HDD, but damn, some of that hardware is better than mine (or nearly as good).
Was 10.11x the OS where Apple “cleans everything up” and optimizes things – like they did for 10.6x?
I think his agenda is that he’s tired of the incessant “This thing that we’d ignore if it were Samsung etc is the WORST THING IN THE WORLD and Apple is doomed and Jobs wouldn’t have allowed this!!!” BS that people do because it gets them traffic. Look at the news about this… this would NEVER generate as much news if it were, say, LG.
As for CR – he’s right. When you see a 5-6x difference from one test to another you take some time and see if your tests are wonky, if there’s a pattern (early tests all being good or all bad) etc. They don’t have to chase down any Apple bugs, but saying “When battery life was bad, X was taking a lot of CPU… we’re not sure why, but that seems to be the cause.”
“Look at the news about this… this would NEVER generate as much news if it were, say, LG.”
When you’re the largest, most profitable technology company in the world, the standards are going to be quite bit higher than for a 3rd tier player like LG. Walmart and McDonalds get hammered for wages and labor practices that people ignore for smaller competitors. Heck, Walmart would have taken much more of a public beating over the meal and rest break issue that Apple case that Apple recently settled.
But that’s not how CR tests. They do “ordinary user” tests and log it. It’s not a robust test, but it reflects the experience of most buyers. If you test thousands of machines and one set goes completely nuts when you run the test, the issue is the machine, not your test. They’re testing it for reviews, they’re not a lab to troubleshoot for Apple. They sent the logs to Apple to have them figure it out, and presumably fix. CR is not Anandtech, they fit different niches and are useful to different populations.
Also, saying that CR should do more rigorous investigation and testing is a bit rich coming from iMore, who dismissed the iTunes/Apple Music deletion issue because “that’s not what it’s supposed to do”.
I don’t believe you have to be an enthusiast to know that there’s a bit of difference between how ten different ordinary humans will likely use a washing machine, and how each of those same people might use a computer. Not to mention the differences in the length of time either device is typically used.
For my money, CR’s strengths have historically yielded more helpful information about things like nutrition, personal finance, and single-purpose household appliances. I look elsewhere for assessments of personal computers.
Can’t really agree with you on that. For example, iPhone/Apple enthusiast forums were at one point overrun with posts about how the 5c was “useless” and “a failure”. Observation of daily life, particularly at schools, showed that there were a lot of people out there who preferred the 5c over the more ‘powerful’ and ‘capable’ 5x/6x series, and are disappointed that Apple let that design direction drop. Enthusiasts tend to get very caught up in spec chasing, extremely detailed operational minutia, and pursuit of technical perfection whereas ordinary people think of and use technology very differently.
I’d hope, though, that if they got such a wide variance in test results, they’d want to know WHY. They hold themselves up as scientific (if you ever see stories about a test they do it’s in a lab style environment etc) and part of that is making sure your methodology is actually measuring what you think it is.
I guess I’m slightly more of an enthusiast than most, but not as much as some. Given an opportunity, I like to ask non-enthusiasts how their gear is working out for them.
Their test results are wildly inconsistent. It doesn’t matter if they are simulating “ordinary human beings”, it just doesn’t add up.
Well, unless the MacBook is producing wildly inconsistent results.
That’s one possibility, or maybe the fine folks at Consumer Reports failed Grade 7 math and science.
P.S. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds like there are battery problems likely related to runaway processes. However from a sampling point of view CR just sucks. Throwing out results they don’t like, then highlighting them to grab page reads, no investigation into causes, etc.
Ars Technica does a much better job on reporting about the issue, but they don’t grab the headlines like CR.
The ATP folks (especially Marco Arment) talked about this extensively on their podcast a week ago.
The new MacBook Pros utilize efficiency gains to allow for a smaller battery (=lighter and thinner product), but the efficiency gains assume the CPU and GPU work at certain power draws. If the OS switches on higher draws, especially by turning on discrete GPU, that destroys the new MBP’s battery life.
This is a problem as macOS doesn’t provide good tooling to control this (e.g., you don’t really need the discrete GPU for most tasks). Hopefully CR’s and other reports helps Apple realize that this needs to be improved in macOS. (Rumors in fact suggest 10.12.2 is better.)
Nice post. I bet the CR test pages use WebGL.
We already knew this product had battery reporting issues. This CR article did not invent that.
Rene Ritchie has no integrity. He is an Apple apologist who parrots the Apple PR until it changes, then he parrots their new PR like nothing ever changed. The whole while, his website is 98% ads by weight.
Being a good member of a user community means defending users, not massaging corporate ______.
“Rene Ritchie has no integrity.”
Um, no. He is widely read and referenced for good reason. He is one of the more positive, upbeat, and well informed tech journalists out there.
If you don’t agree with him, that’s cool. Don’t go to his website, or even better, develop your own opinions based on, you know, facts. But if you’re going to simply take anonymous cheap shots at people’s characters then no one will take you seriously.
10.12 (oops, fixed it) is mostly speedy. It just always has something running with high CPU usage. This being a laptop, that shouldn’t be the case. Physical memory is there to be used to deliver a better experience, but that’s not true of CPU. But when I make some other demand of the computer, it’s able to satisfy it. These tasks seem to be background.
Example: kernel_task is currently using 30% of my CPU. I’m sure it has its reasons, but I have no idea what they are. It’s not like I just restarted, mounted a disk or anything interesting like that.
Consumer Reports likes to set up repeatable tests. Then they repeat them and study the results.
Unfortunately, they’re out of their depth in much of computing. They don’t know how to do repeatable tests of much. That isn’t really a problem, except in cases like this where they try to ascribe some meaning to that.
There may be one here, but CR hasn’t proved if it’s battery, some other bit of hardware, or software. They haven’t checked other generations to narrow that down.
Arguably, none of that is their job, but putting out a recommendation without doing that is foolish. Would a “Buy last year’s model instead” make sense if last year’s model was also affected? They don’t know.
I doubt that. They’re very good at arithmetic. It’s things like “confidence” that they seem not so good at. 🙂
Pencils down. We have a winner.