Hacker News Reader

Comment by riprowan | Hacker News Reader

Also the news today reports "Apple Working with Consumer Reports on Macbook Pro Battery Issue" [1]

Reading between the lines:

"Apple Pressures Consumer Reports to Change its Story"

You don't need to "work with" Consumer Reports to fix the issue. Just fix it.

Why "work with"? Does Consumer Reports have engineers that will help Apple understand the problem? Is Consumer Reports an isolated incident that just needs some tech support to help them understand the computer? Smacks of whitewashing to me.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer-report...

View on HN

Imagine for a moment that you thought you'd made a good device. Now imagine that a respected organization did their own testing and said they couldn't recommend it.

Would you want to work with them to understand why you came to opposing conclusions?

There's no real chance of bullying, as CR buys the products they test, and has decades of experience with huge companies not loving their reviews.

Consumer Reports already sent Apple their logs on the test machines before the review. CR had already made a good faith effort to find the source of the opposing conclusions. However:

> In his tweet, Schiller linked to a story from iMore that says Consumer Reports was just going for a pre-Christmas headline and should have done more testing.

Apple is trying to bully/influence the public reception to CR's review. Gruber has spent more time dissing the CR review (and distracting from Gurman's expose on the Mac troubles which he hasn't linked to on DF)

Don't know how much you know about Consumer Reports, but I don't think they can't be pressured.

What if Safari attracted a heavy WebGL ad in their web browsing test? What if Chrome had an ad blocker in place? What if they used an automation system to drive the test which wired on the discrete gpu?

I see a lot of questions an engineer could answer to help Consumer Reports better understand why their test showed such large variances and then they can decide if it is a testing artifact or indicative of a real variance.

And yet none of these issues seemed to plague CR in the past, when they've reviewed every single MBP release of the last several years (in addition to hundreds of other laptops)...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com