Consumer Reports Now Recommends MacBook Pros - | Hacker News Reader

Consumer Reports Now Recommends MacBook Pros -

consumerreports.org

39 pointslladnar28 comments

> "The new average battery-life results are, in order, 15.75 hours, 18.75 hours, and 17.25 hours."

This is even more of a red flag than the original tests. On what planet do you get 18 hours of battery on a single charge? Or even half of that?

Something is way off here.

This is only browsing web pages in one tab though right? Not even running multiple apps. Nobody does that anyway. I for instance have 50+ tabs open on any given day.

Normal people don't have 50+ tabs open, ever. Your idea of who represents "nobody" is upside down.

Yes I'm obviously an extreme example but the fact is, people who own a MacBook Pro are multitasking on it. They're not running one tab in just Safari with nothing else open.

Right, I never meant to defend the CR test methodology here... it's pretty absurd.

I think you have an idealistic view of the way normal people use computers, making an absolute statement like "ever".

Here's an example of a "normal" person with 1250 of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/4urdh...

It's not a unique occurrence: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5iixe...

Don't you think the fact that it was submitted to /r/talesfromtechsupport implies that it was something of note, and that a handful of people offering of anecdotes of their own bizarre encounter with a tab hoarder support my claim that it's not the way most people use a browser?

My point is that you didn't say "it's not the way most people use a browser", you said that normal people don't "ever" use that many tabs. You made an overly absolute statement and I'm refuting it.

I concede that. But your initial use of "nobody" is also overly absolute.

That was someone else, not me.

It's a real test result. It's just that the test setup is not indicative of real life.

Brightness is set to 100 nits. That's very, very low, at about 20% of the maximum brightness of the new MBP. I use mine at at least 75% when I'm on the road.

The workload is simple. Consumer Reports says they have turned off caching in Safari (from the Develop menu), in an effort to simulate "real-life" browsing, but that's just not a very good way to simulate a real-life browsing workload.

Fetching pages from a server is mostly waiting for the network, using very little CPU. If anything, turning off caching might give you better battery life in a test like this. Also, who knows how much the browser is caching data internally. It may fetch pages from the web (using no CPU, mostly waiting), but may still internally reuse cached, optimized versions from the previous page views.

Also, I'm sure they don't have any background processes running, such as Time Machine (or other backups like Backblaze or Crashplan), Dropbox, Google Drive, playing music, Bluetooth headphones, etc. I'd be willing to bet that the Touch Bar is turned off during this test, too, which it wouldn't be in real life if there is real keyboard input.

Finally, to be honest… just yesterday, I spent over 9 hours total developing a Django web app on the new MBPtb without recharging. I had plenty of opportunities to plug in, but chose not to, to see how far I can go without power. Also, I had brightness set so about 30-40%; less than what I would like normally. Anyway, I'm very happy with the battery life.

So we all moved to Linux for nothing? ;-)

Not so sure people that take Consumer Reports seriously run Linux.

I honestly don't see any logical negative connection between those two groups of people. Actually, I see many potential good reasons why someone running Linux would care to listen to them. Care to explain your thinking?

Out of the box, most Linux boxes are broke, especially with new hardware when compared to the status quo Macbook Pro. You have to wrestle with kernels, hardware, software updates, different pkg repos, GPU power management, GPU drivers, touchpad, HiDPI, Thunderbolt, etc. (HN: please spare me the drama of quoting this list and nitpicking, you know a subset of it is true.)

My Dell precision 5510 (optionally ships from Dell with Ubuntu) takes an hour or two of work from a competent Linux nerd to be on par with a Macbook. In the past I owned a System76 Galago Ultra Pro which prides itself on being Linux ready. Instead it shipped with impressively miserable battery life, "meh" keyboard, and no UEFI (what year is it@!?).

If Consumer Reports were to review either of those laptops, they would give it a failing grade relative to a Macbook Pro.

Yet Linux still thrives fueled by the DIY or open source communities. These communities look for different thing out of the box. Furthermore, the person who consider Linux would have probably discovered the Safari bug LONG before it took Apple + Consumer Reports to find the real cause. This person would probably run Chrome or Firefox until the inevitable fix rolled out from Apple.

So, the reason for the inconsistent battery life was a Sufari bug (I just scanned the article, didn't read the whole thing)?

Pretty much[0]:

> After working with Apple over the holidays, Consumer Reports now says that the problem was caused by an "obscure" Safari bug specific to page caching, which the publication disables when it runs its battery tests. To test battery life, Consumer Reports sets laptop screens to a specific brightness level and then loads a series of webpages in the laptop's default browser (Safari in this case) in a loop until the battery dies. Apple suggests that disabling browser caching for a test like this doesn't reflect real-world use, but it does make sense for a synthetic test—users will continually read new pages rather than visiting the same static pages over and over again, so Consumer Reports wants to make sure that its test is actually downloading data over the network rather than simply reading cached data from the disk.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/consumer-reports-will-r...

What about users that reported bad battery life?

Migrating to a new Mac puts some stress on battery while everything is indexed for Spotlight or backed up to a Time Capsule. That's why Macs will tend to have bad battery life in their first few days.

Meh.

Doesn't everyone just restores from a previous backup? Why would one start from scratch?

Most importsntly, I doubt a developer wouldn't see there's a process draining the battery.

For a short time MBPS and Linux notebooks had comparable battery life ;)

I'm quite surprised with the battery life numbers they are reporting:

- Macbook Pro Escape: 18.75 hours - Macbook Pro 13": 15.25 hours - Macbook Pro 15": 17.25 hours

I've tested both the Macbook Pro Escape and the Macbook Pro 15" and under very light work load (web, email...) I'd say they were closer to 9 and 8 hours, which, by the way, I find pretty decent considering weight and dimmensions.

I really don't know what methodolgy CR uses, but seems to me that is not very realistic.

A fairly simplistic workload, probably. On my 2015 MBP, I get about 4 hours using nothing but Safari, VSCode, Spotify, Slack and occasionally running build + test of Go code. I briefly owned a 2016 model (but strongly disliked the Touch Bar, so returned it), and I got the same mileage there.

According to this page, Consumer Reports tested this computer at 100 nits brightness, which is 20% of the maximum brightness. This is probably a lower brightness level than the average user, contributing to the battery lasting longer than expected.

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

The thing is, I would actually tolerate a larger body/battery if it would realistically get me 9 hours. I know that it's not sexy, and Apple needs to retain its image.

I would think that laptops with insane battery lives would be desirable, particularly in the business/enterprise/travel markets. Maybe not.

They invented this super cool tech to increase battery life, called larger batteries. For some reason every time the processor gets more efficient, the battery gets smaller. Soon we'll be able to use phones as chinese throwing stars.

Still unrepairable and unupgradable (unlike previous MBP non-Retina), foisting ultimate, overpriced Apple control over a previously much more flexible product. Also, the touchbar and new keyboard aren't very practical.

When there is a Retina model with RAM DIMMs, changable SSDs and superior keyboard, I'd consider looking at MBPs again.

Battery too. The hilarious thing is that they could do all of that and probably only add a few mm thickness. Check out the Dell XPS or Thinkpad X1 Carbon lines.

Also hilarious to me is how thick the dongles are, and how the power brick is the same (other than now needing an expensive proprietary Apple USB-C USB 2.0 higher-than-spec power delivery cable which is sold separately from the actual brick and an extension cable which is also now sold separately).

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