The MacBook Pro has finally received a stamp of approval from Consumer Reports, a U.S. nonprofit magazine that publishes product reviews and focuses on consumer advocacy. The magazine pays for all the products it reviews, does not accept advertising and has no shareholders.
“This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage”
Initially, Consumer Reports withheld its ‘Recommended’ rating due to an issue with battery life varying “dramatically from one trial to another.” Apple convinced the publication to revisit its latest Pro laptops, however, stating that the battery issue came down to an “obscure” bug that only occurs when users change the developer settings in order to turn off Safari’s browser cache.
“This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage,” Apple said in a statement on January 11th. “Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab. After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life. We have also fixed the bug uncovered in this test.”
One day later, on January 12th, Consumer Reports officially confirmed that it had changed its rating to “Recommended.” With the bug fixed, the publication reported a significant change to its battery test results.
Whereas the initial inconsistent results showed the 13-inch Touch Bar model ranging from 16 hours to 3.75 hours, the tests now indicated solid, stable battery life for all three models. The 13-inch models with and without the Touch Bar respectively came in at 15.75 and 18.75 hours, while the 15-inch model ran for 17.25 hours.
[source]Consumer Reports[/source]
