Non-profit organization Consumer Reports, defending the interests of consumers since 1936, has revised its previous conclusion and now recommends that the new MacBook Pro to purchase. This is stated in the official blog of the organization.
Professional laptops of 2016 were the first devices of this series that Consumer Reports initially did not recommend for purchase. The main reason was that under the same conditions, the battery life of laptops can range from 4-5 to 16-18 hours, with allowable fluctuations experts believe 5%.
The significance of the opinion Consumer Reports is so great that Apple has officially expressed disagreement with test results and offered to redo everything. In the process of working together, Apple and Consumer Reports was discovered one feature that influenced the test results. The fact is that the experts Consumer Reports when testing in Safari settings turned off caching, which is connected with internal error browser. This aspect influenced the poor results in the autonomy of the laptop.
Apple has released an update for Safari, but so far only for the participants of the beta program, and asked Consumer Reports to re-test. After repeated tests, experts get the expected result:
“With the new ON all three MacBook Pro models in our laboratory showed good results, and one model worked 18,75 hours on a single charge. We tested each unit several times according to our traditional scheme, but with the new software”.
Reasons why browser caching is disabled at all, are rooted in the specificity of the tests Consumer Reports. The fact that the specialists download 10 web pages and place them on your own server. After this starts the cyclical opening of all these pages as long as the laptop battery is discharged fully. But since there are only 10, caching is disabled in order to simulate typical user situation where every time you open a new website. But if under such circumstances, caching is enable, it will turn out that the browser only once will load all 10 sites and then most of the data taken from the cache, and it does not correspond to the real usage scenarios.
In the end, the average battery life for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar made of 15.75 hours for the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar – 18,75 hours and 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is 17.25 hours.
Safari bug affecting the battery life MacBook Pro fixed in version macOS Sierra 10.12.3 Beta (16D25a).
