New MacBooks for the first time did not receive a recommendation from Consumer Reports (due to the Safari browser)

Laboratory Consumer Reports to test the brightness and durability of light bulbs. Photo: Consumer Reports

The US Consumer Union is a non-profit organization that has been publishing monthly Consumer Reports for the past 80 years. This is a unique magazine of its kind. He does not publish ads on his pages at all. He also does not accept product samples from companies and prohibits the use of the results of his tests to promote products. All this is done for one thing: to preserve maximum objectivity, independence and impartiality of testing, which is carried out in 50 specialized laboratories. The annual budget for the purchase of goods by secret buyers in retail stores and tests is about $ 21 million.

Annually, about 1,000 consumer electronics products are tested in approximately 20 categories in the Consumer Reports laboratories, including televisions, mobile phones, computers, digital cameras, e-books, laptops, etc. Top selling products are trying to test immediately after it becomes available. This applies to almost all Apple products that have recently become very fashionable and in demand in the market.

Apple products were often honored with high ratings and purchase recommendations , despite the high cost. But in 2016, an unexpected event happened. For the first time in history, the MacBook laptop model failed to pass the test properly and did not receive a purchase recommendation from Consumer Reports. The trouble happened with the line of MacBook Pro 2016. The corresponding press release explaining what happened yesterday was published on the official website of Consumer Reports.
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Laptops were purchased by a secret buyer in a regular store, in accordance with standard procedures. This happened in the fall shortly after they became available. The report says that the test procedure has just been completed: “Laptops performed very well in terms of display quality and performance, but in test battery life the test results were radically different in different tests.”

Experts note that complaints about the strange work of the new MacBook Pro batteries appeared on the Internet immediately after the start of their sales in November. The manufacturer stated that they should work up to 10 hours from one charge, but also complain on the Apple forums that the battery lasts only three to four hours.


Information message in the new MacBook Pro 15 "laptop with a charge rate of 95%. The user complains that simple surfing once consumed the battery in about 3 hours, without watching the video

Obviously, the system predicts the operating time in the operating system can not work perfectly perfectly. If the indicator immediately after turning on the charged laptop shows a forecast of 2 hours and 38 minutes, then the laptop will most likely be able to work longer than this time. But he is unlikely to last the declared 10 hours.

Engineers tested three models:

• 13-inch MacBook Pro with touch bar
• 13-inch MacBook Pro without touchbar
• 15-inch MacBook Pro (all with touchbars)

Test results were extremely strange. A 13-inch MacBook Pro with a touchbar worked 16 hours in the first test, 12.75 hours in the second test and 3.75 hours in the third.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro without a touchbar worked 19.5 hours in the first test and 4.5 hours in the second.

For the 15-inch model, the figures were 18.5 and 8 hours.

The test consists of an infinite number of cycles to open 10 pages in the browser, which are transmitted from the local server via WiFi. The cycle starts when the battery is fully charged, and ends when the laptop is turned off. The test was conducted on a standard browser (in this case, Safari) on the OS with the latest patches. The test began a few weeks ago, then continued after the release of macOS Sierra 10.12.2, but there was no difference.

On these laptops they ran a lot of tests on battery life, but these results are the strangest. Usually the difference between the results of the same tests does not exceed 5%, and the final score is calculated as the average result. What to do with such results - the staff of the test lab could not understand. In their opinion, with such a spread, the average estimate will not be representative, that is, in any case, it will mislead the consumer. Therefore, it was decided to take the minimum estimate of battery life, and with this indicator, the MacBook Pro failed to show a decent final result.

Engineers say that the minimum battery life is the only thing they could officially and objectively inform users without access to the laptop's electrical circuitry. They contacted Apple for clarification. But the company limited itself to the phrase: "Any user who has questions about a Mac computer or his work should contact AppleCare."

Consumer Reports experts noted that in recent times, operating systems and software have increasingly had a significant impact on the operating time of consumer electronics from batteries. If Apple updates the software and corrects this flaw, they are ready to repeat the tests. For example, in this case, they repeated the tests on the same laptops with the Chrome browser, and the battery life remained high and did not change significantly in each of the six launches. The methodology of Consumer Reports does not allow you to rate using even small “hacks” (such as installing a third-party browser), but for users this may be the way out.