This is where it gets more bizarre. They did not use Chrome. According to their website: "We conduct our battery tests using the computer’s default browser—Safari, in the case of the MacBook Pro laptops."

They proceed to find serious aberrations with battery life under Safari.

Then they say, "Once our official testing was done, we experimented by conducting the same battery tests using a Chrome browser, rather than Safari. For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs."

Chrome giving much better battery results than Safari? That is unheard of. It's not a software issue either. I can confirm that with the latest Chrome my Air runs for about a third of the time that it runs with the latest Safari(I have the most recent Sierra).

So this makes very little sense.

Read from the orginal source[1]. They do their laptop tests with default browser, Safari, and got those highly variable results. They then did tests with Chrome and got more consistent results (but still lower than Apple's promised estimates)

[1] http://www.consumerreports.org/laptops/macbook-pros-fail-to-...