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Comment by duggan | Hacker News Reader

This is an article that (incompletely) summarizes the Consumer Reports article[1]. The reason for the wildly varying performance appears to be due to a bug (presumably) in Safari. They had consistent results with Chrome:

> 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.

I've been using a 13" MacBook Pro (without Touch Bar) for six weeks now, and have found the battery life very impressive (I use Chrome rather than Safari).

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

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The fact that Apple would ship a version of Safari that so deeply affected the battery of their newest MBP is concerning, and perhaps illustrative of why many MBP afficionados are so upset about the situation.

I've been having Safari issues since I updated to Sierra. Every once in awhile Safari will peg my CPU at ~250% and brings my computer to a standstill.

I took a screenshot of the activity monitor while this was going on[0]. Note that this wasn't the "Safari Web Content" process, which I typically see where there is a rogue tab doing something crazy. This was simply the Safari process itself. The only extension I have installed is 1Password which I've temporarily disabled to ensure it wasn't causing the issue. It isn't.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/YDv7c

I'm not familiar with the activity monitor, what does 247.9% even mean?! Two cores at 100% and one at 47.9%?

Yes - though it's a little more abstract. Those 57 threads could be occupying the available cores in any number of ways to get to 247.9%

This is how CPU usage has been calculated across Windows, macOS, Linux, and the BSDs practically as long as multiple cores have been a thing.

Windows? Last I checked, the max is 100%. Pegging 1 core of a Core i7 shows 25%. Probably a more consumer-friendly way to measure. But 400% sounds cooler.

Yes, I believe so. It was pegging multiple cores.

I haven't upgrade to Sierra but have started having Safari issues after the last El Capitan update. Same you're having - peg out the CPU and bring the computer to a standstill. Once I even had to power off the machine to get things back under control. I've never had to do this before in my 11 years of running MacBooks. I'm getting really concerned with Apple's overall quality. Their competitive advantage has always been they control the entire computing experience from the software to the hardware and they're starting to blow it. I hope they make adjustments before this gets out of hand.

I wonder if its not the Touchbar that draws the battery down. Chrome doesn't seem to have as much for the Touchbar to be doing as Safari does - though Safari surely demonstrates the functionality of the Touchbar in impressive ways. When I'm not laying flat in bed (i.e. sitting at the office) I've actually used the Touchbar a few times ..

From the article:

"The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next."

No excuse for shipping buggy software, but it has to be said that Safari uses a lot less CPU than other browsers under normal circumstances. I wonder how they do it.

They do it by caring. And the reason they care is because it reflects poorly on the entire platform when one gluttonous app drains the battery. Other browser vendors couldn't care less about how their app makes the platform look, especially if it comes at a cost to their app's performance.

Isn't it still a bug that is not new MBP specific therefore a completely wrong diagnosis of the problem?

Wouldn't it be observed on any Apple notebook?

Wow, I decided to make the switch to Safari when I got my new mbp to optimize for battery life. I guess this is the end of that experiment. Safari devtools are terrible anyway.

While I use chrome for debugging most of the time, I've had a good experience with Safari as my "general use" browser, and found that battery life does tend to be better on MacOS compared to Chrome, this particular issue notwithstanding.

Also, I believe that by default Chrome now sends your browsing activity to Google for ad targeting (https://mobile.twitter.com/phlsa/status/754337623964053504/p...).

It doesn't seem like it was that long ago that Apple was marketing Safari as the least power-hungry browser.

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