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acomjean

even consumer reports had enough issues with the battery to make it a "not recommended" machine.

"The MacBook Pro battery life results were highly inconsistent from one trial to the next."[1]

did you see the same?

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

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The results were highly consistent for me (I tested the Touch Bar model 5 times just to be safe). I presume that a lighter test (e.g. only browsing, watching videos, etc.) would probably allow macOS to apply more battery optimizing techniques, which may vary depending on the exact test, WiFi conditions, etc.

For my test, it was full bore, using lots of CPU (all cores), lots of bandwidth, and lots of I/O, with the screen on 100% brightness the entire time.

Using 100% brightness makes the test basically invalid. The backlight is one of the biggest power hogs in the whole machine, and the new Macbook is 65% brighter at maximum. That's helpful for e.g. outdoor use, but for office use the proper setting is 150-200 lux (about 50% brightness on the old machines, 30% brightness on the new ones). Testing the machines at different brightness settings is akin to testing them running different workloads.

I'm less concerned with the regression from 2015 to 2016 models, and more with the fact that the Touch Bar model does so much worse than the Function Key model.

At 100% the test might be invalid but I don't think your percentages are correct. I'm sure it's environment specific but I run my new 2016 Macbook Pro w/ Touchbar at about 60% brightness most of the time. At 30%, in office LED lighting, it's way to dark. At 60% it's still darker than a Monoprice gaming monitor that sits right next to it.

Note that Consumer Reports and Apple apparently had a pow wow and it was discovered that the settings they were using in Safari (to disable all caching) exposed some bug that was causing the fast run-down rates in those tests. (their tests on Chrome were consistent and long lasting)

They are doing a retest this week.

So on the battery front it seems not all is lost.

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