Apple fixes battery life bug that cost the MacBook Pro a ‘recommended’ tag from Consumer Reports

By tech2 News Staff /  11 Jan 2017 , 13:15

The latest MacBook Pro from Apple has received a great deal of criticism for its lack of USB-A ports, smaller battery and limited RAM. Topping this criticism was a damning report from Consumer Reports, which cited inconsistent battery life as the reason for not giving the new MacBook Pro its ‘recommended’ tag.

In the course of its testing, Consumer Reports (CR) noted that the MacBook Pro’s battery life varied between under 5 hours to over 19 hours. This inconsistency failed to impress CR.

Apple, understandably puzzled by the widely varying results, approached CR to understand the test process and hunt out the cause for the variation in battery life.

Apple’s investigations unearthed a bug in Safari’s (the default browser on macOS) developer mode which affected the test results. The mode specifically disables the browser cache and is enabled by CR as part of its test process. Apple says that this mode is not used by the average consumer and hence, will not affect the average user.

Describing its test process, CR explains that it disables features like browser cache, automatic screen dimming, etc. to establish a reliable base line for battery performance. Following Apple’s findings, CR ran the tests again with caching off and found that battery life was now consistent.

Apple has since published a patch to fix the issue, but it’s currently only available to subscribers to Apple’s Beta program. The fix will be released to the general public sometime later as part of a larger software update for macOS, says Apple.

In a statement, Apple said, “This is the best pro notebook we’ve ever made, we respect Consumer Reports and we’re glad they decided to revisit their findings on the MacBook Pro.”

CR has promised to report its findings once it finishes retesting the MacBook Pro.

The new Apple MacBook Pro offers much less battery life than claimed: Report

By tech2 News Staff /  09 Dec 2016 , 15:01

Apple’s new MacBook has earned more than its fair share of complaints since its launch. Apple’s “revolutionary” new device introduced the world to dongle hell and that alone has drawn more ire than any other issue with the device.

Folks, including ourselves, have complained about everything, from its exorbitant price to the lack of an SD card slot, USB port and even the much-loved MagSafe connector. One more complaint to add to this growing list comes in the form of a report on 9to5Mac.

Apple promises a “up to 10 hours iTunes movie playback” with the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar and also specifies that the test was conducted on a “2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5-based 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 512GB SSD and 8GB of RAM.”

As far as test systems go, that’s a bog-standard system to test on and a claim of 10 hours video playback is commendable.

When put to the test, however, 9to5Mac discovered that in practice, the battery life rarely crossed the 8-hour mark.

You can find the full details of the test setup on 9to5Mac, suffice to say that the test was run at 50 percent brightness and that the test MacBook Pro used a 3.3GHz Intel i7 (vs the i5 that Apple used) and 16GB of RAM.

A more powerful CPU does equal less battery life, but  it must be noted that both the CPUs in 9to5Mac’s reports are essentially the same, offering a 28W TDP and Intel Iris Pro 550 graphics. The only notable difference between the two comes in terms of clock speeds.

Given this information, one can expect the i7-based MacBook Pro to perform slightly worse than the i5-based MacBook Pro that Apple used, but only in light workload scenarios, like video playback on iTunes.

If the results are to be believed, the 13-inch MacBook Pro offers significantly worse (20 percent) battery life than Apple claims.

Yes, this is nit-picking at its finest. No manufacturer in our experience has ever precisely quoted battery life for their offerings and our regular workflows differ so wildly from laboratory tests that claimed battery life is nothing more than, well, a guideline.

The bigger problem here is that Apple is officially claiming less battery life than their 2015 MacBook Pro (12 hours of video playback), which uses the same CPU architecture used in the current MacBook Pros.

Here’s a Pro-tip, Apple: When it comes to battery life, less is never more.