Consumer Reports Stands By MacBook Pro Battery Test Findings

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Consumer Reports is standing by its initial findings that caused the agency to not recommend the MacBook Pro due to battery concerns. The agency said that it is confident in its results and won't be rerunning its tests.

In this case, we don’t believe re-running the tests are warranted for several reasons. First, as we point out in our original article, experiencing very high battery life on MacBooks is not unusual for us – in fact we had a model in our comparative tests that got 19 hours. Second, we confirmed our brightness with three different meters, so we feel confident in our findings using this equipment. Finally, we monitor our tests very closely. There is an entry logged every minute, so we know from these entries that the app worked correctly.
 
Clicked link without checking destination first, of course a pro Mac website would call out a valid third party's results. Apple could sell a toaster that sprayed water onto bread without any heating and call it magic toast; and, when people tested it and said their bread actually got soggy instead of toasty they'd claim you tested it wrong.
 
Only a bad scientist refuses to rerun a test.

I think they are afraid a second test might give a different result, and would require them to apologize to Apple.

Consumer reports feels that its better to be confident than correct
 
Only a bad scientist refuses to rerun a test.

I think they are afraid a second test might give a different result, and would require them to apologize to Apple.

Consumer reports feels that its better to be confident than correct
That's some fucked up logic there. If you conduct an experiment thousands of times over years and years well over the normal sample size and one product fucks up, you blame the experiment? Go back to the Apple forums.
 
That's some fucked up logic there. If you conduct an experiment thousands of times over years and years well over the normal sample size and one product fucks up, you blame the experiment? Go back to the Apple forums.

First of all, I am by no means an Apple fan. I would have said the same thing if it was Lenovo or Dell or some other brand of laptop

It doesn't matter if they have run the same test on thousands of other computers before. It's possible to screw up even with something that is almost routine. Maybe they stumbled on a CPU-eating bug that didn't exist in previous versions of the OS or something?

If you perform a standard test and get an unexpected result, the correct response to the skeptics is "let us run the test again, just to be sure" instead of CR's response of "screw you, our testing is ALWAYS perfect the first time, we don't need to waste time with a retest."

It just comes off as extremely egotistical of CR to refuse to even acknowledge the possibility that there could have been something wrong with the test, especially when their results were wildly inconsistent (somewhere between 4 and 19 hours of battery life) and differed greatly from other similar tests.
 
So Apple lawyers tried to muscle these guys. Comedy.
No they didn't. 9-5 Mac suggested the results were wrong, but all Apple did was announce that they are working with CR to determine what the problem is.
 
First of all, I am by no means an Apple fan. I would have said the same thing if it was Lenovo or Dell or some other brand of laptop

It doesn't matter if they have run the same test on thousands of other computers before. It's possible to screw up even with something that is almost routine. Maybe they stumbled on a CPU-eating bug that didn't exist in previous versions of the OS or something?

If you perform a standard test and get an unexpected result, the correct response to the skeptics is "let us run the test again, just to be sure" instead of CR's response of "screw you, our testing is ALWAYS perfect the first time, we don't need to waste time with a retest."

It just comes off as extremely egotistical of CR to refuse to even acknowledge the possibility that there could have been something wrong with the test, especially when their results were wildly inconsistent (somewhere between 4 and 19 hours of battery life) and differed greatly from other similar tests.

No, they're response is saying "We're confident in the accuracy of our tests and here are the reasons why". They clearly explain steps they took to verify things were working right. And, as the article states, Apple is working with them to verify everything. If we assume for a moment that your speculation is right and it's a hardware or OS bug then well too bad. That isn't CR's fault and the results are accurate to the system as it was given to them. In that situation CR did nothing wrong and a no retest is warranted. Reviewers are not obligated to retest products after bug fixes are done. Now if it was a problem with how the test itself was performed Apple's people will help them figure it out and correct it. But until they actually know for a fact that something they did was wrong then I see no reason why a retest is warranted. It wastes valuable time and money, neither of which are in infinite supply.
 
They shrank the battery size by around 25% on each model because the flat cells they wanted to use couldn't meet their validation process so they had to revert to normal cylindrical cells. They also claimed that 16GB was a power saving feature. Then when reports of wildly fluctuating run times started flooding in Apple sent out an update to remove the run time left indication.
IMO this launch shows what happens when a company is led purely by design. GM showed us the results of accountants running everything, and now Apple has shown us designers running the show. Neither is good.
 
So Apple lawyers tried to muscle these guys. Comedy.

Apple lost a principle case in Denmark too. They dragged a customer that wanted his money back and had won in the "consumer court" to court. Only to be completely humiliated and now may have to refund countless people that ever got Apple device repaired.
 
Apple lost a principle case in Denmark too. They dragged a customer that wanted his money back and had won in the "consumer court" to court. Only to be completely humiliated and now may have to refund countless people that ever got Apple device repaired.

Link? I'd like to read about that!
 
I bet you the problem is charging and the meter saying full when its not.. as in shitty ass devices.
 
I added another link. However this may be a bit better:
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/1...les-california-lawsuit-just-the-beginning.htm

FYI, Apple didn't appeal. it would also just be another humiliation of its VPs.
Honestly I have mixed feeling about this.. personally I would prefer new new!.. but eco-friendly like refurbished makes sense.
I changed something with MS once, I think it was re-furb, and it crapped out again quite fast, but out of warranty then.. meh.
 
Honestly I have mixed feeling about this.. personally I would prefer new new!.. but eco-friendly like refurbished makes sense.
I changed something with MS once, I think it was re-furb, and it crapped out again quite fast, but out of warranty then.. meh.

Refurb can mean 2 year old components(Or more I guess). Also Apple doesn't sell refurb for the full price.

Imagine buying a new car, engine breaks down after a week. The replacement is an engine with 100000km on it. Would you accept that?

Plenty of people are willing to buy the refurbs. There is nothing "eco" in it. Its just a matter of getting premium price for used components.

http://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/iphone

Here Apple directly says its worth 15% less than a new.
 
Refurb can mean 2 year old components(Or more I guess). Also Apple doesn't sell refurb for the full price.

Imagine buying a new car, engine breaks down after a week. The replacement is an engine with 100000km on it. Would you accept that?

Plenty of people are willing to buy the refurbs. There is nothing "eco" in it. Its just a matter of getting premium price for used components.

http://www.apple.com/shop/browse/home/specialdeals/iphone

Here Apple directly says its worth 15% less than a new.
Huh! and they argue in court its the same as new :/ no wonder that shit didn't fly :)
 
I seem to remember Consumer Reports saying they would rerun their child safety seat crash tests only for them not to but when the NHTSA did the tests correctly they found Consumer Reports had screwed up. If I were Consumer Reports, I would probably rerun the tests on the Mac. Or are we going to just get a postcard again when someone else does?
 
So basically, (correct me if I'm wrong), Consumer Reports reports that the MacBook Pro gets something like 18 hours of battery life - which far exceeds what Apple says. Far exceeds what consumers are reporting. And they refuse to do a retest while people form theories about why and how the test made it that high? Theorizing it was using the integrated graphics chip instead of the nVidia graphics chip?

And - if that's actually what's going on - doesn't that only stand to make Consumer Reports look bad when in the reality, most consumers are only getting 5 hours of battery life?
 
So basically, (correct me if I'm wrong), Consumer Reports reports that the MacBook Pro gets something like 18 hours of battery life - which far exceeds what Apple says. Far exceeds what consumers are reporting. And they refuse to do a retest while people form theories about why and how the test made it that high? Theorizing it was using the integrated graphics chip instead of the nVidia graphics chip?

And - if that's actually what's going on - doesn't that only stand to make Consumer Reports look bad when in the reality, most consumers are only getting 5 hours of battery life?
No, that's not what this is about.
 
OK, it was very confusing because the linked article didn't explain a damn thing and pretty much left me to fill in a bunch of blanks.
So I'm still in the dark then.
 
OK, it was very confusing because the linked article didn't explain a damn thing and pretty much left me to fill in a bunch of blanks.
So I'm still in the dark then.

going to the linked articles in this article would have given you the back story if you aren't aware of it. The issue is that CR did test with the current models and during one run would get a number lime you said of 18 - 14 (depending on the model). Then during their second test only was seeing something like 5-3. So they recommended people not buy the current mac book pros because battery run time is all over the place. They expect their test to be within 10% of each other and these were more like 1/4 the run time on the second test. Apple questioned the results and wanted them to rerun the test. To which CR said no that they tested everything correctly and that this is a valid representation of what people should expect running a new mac book pro.
 
It's not just Consumer Reports noticing the battery problems. It's also being reported in Apple's own support forum, like this one about a month before the CR test: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7755374?start=0&tstart=0 Separate, but other odd battery issues on Touchbar models: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7786627

It's also not just a single bad test. As CR puts it:

For instance, in a series of three consecutive tests, the 13-inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third. The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours.

Those were just a few of the results; we tested battery life on these laptops repeatedly.

At this point only die hard apologists still have their heads in the sand. This is fairly significant bad news, and Apple is doing what lots of other tech companies do when there's an unresolved problem in current products: deny the existence of the problem while working on a solution.
 
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