Apple Details How Consumer Reports MacBook Pro Battery Tests Were Flawed

Consumer Reports done something unusual late last month, they decided not to recommend the 2016 MacBook Pro as their tests showed that the battery life wasn’t as good as Apple was claiming. Apple took notice of the report and said that it was going to work with Consumer Reports to understand why they’re not getting the claimed battery life in their tests. Apple today detailed just how Consumer Reports MacBook Pro battery tests were flawed and it’s glad that they’ve revisited their findings on its latest notebook.

In a statement provided to AppleInsider, Apple said that it sat down with Consumer Reports over the holidays to find out how its testing methods for the new MacBook Pro were flawed.

“We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache,” the company said in its statement, adding that “This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab.”

Once Apple asked them to run the same tests again using normal user settings, Consumer Reports told the company that their notebooks were consistently delivering the expected battery life. Apple also adds that it has fixed the bug that was uncovered in these tests. “This is the best pro notebook we’ve ever made, we respect Consumer Reports and we’re glad they decided to revisit their findings on the MacBook Pro,” the company concludes in its statement.

Apple has made the Safari bug fix available to beta testers right now in the current beta build of macOS. It’s going to release the fix to the public in the next full update.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: Consumer Reports, Macbook Pro