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> CR just rushed to report bad battery life but it kinda wasn't our fault and it wasn't the battery. I'm an Apple user, but I'm sad to say this is absolutely o

by Udo 10y ago

> CR just rushed to report bad battery life but it kinda wasn't our fault and it wasn't the battery. I'm an Apple user, but I'm sad to say this is absolutely on par with the company's past behavior. It brings up memories of the iPhone antenna story where the phone would lose connectivity if you held it "wrong". Apple clearly and emphatically stated that users were at fault for putting their fingers on the enclosure and the phone was supposedly working as intended. It's the same with the MacBook Pro now. The battery isn't too small, you're just using the laptop "wrong" by making it do more work than Apple intended. This is corroborated by the article where CR implicitly admitted fault for not browsing content that was already in the device's cache during the test. This sounds absolutely ridiculous, and it is, but this pricey downgrade of a laptop is still selling like hotcakes. Personally, as an Apple user, I'm not in a rush to buy "new" hardware from them anytime soon.

makomk 10y ago
Not only that, this seems like a deviation from Consumer reports' normal policy of testing the end-user experience. If an ordinary end-user ran into an edge case which caused the battery life to plummet beyond the advertised level, as a number seem to have, Apple wouldn't rush to find and fix the issue. They're effectively retesting with a special fix aimed at their test process, and there are so many ways this could be rigged (for example, by throttling performance during the test).
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  Of course you can use the computer in a way that the battery will last shorter than the advertised battery. The advertised battery is neither minimum or maximum number of hours the machine can run without needing a charge. If CR wanted to find the minimum battery time, fine. But that is not what they are after, so triggering an edge case the increases battery usage is a bug.

by Udo 10y ago

makomk 10y ago

Not only that, this seems like a deviation from Consumer reports' normal policy of testing the end-user experience. If an ordinary end-user ran into an edge case which caused the battery life to plummet beyond the advertised level, as a number seem to have, Apple wouldn't rush to find and fix the issue. They're effectively retesting with a special fix aimed at their test process, and there are so many ways this could be rigged (for example, by throttling performance during the test).

wodenokoto 10y ago
Of course you can use the computer in a way that the battery will last shorter than the advertised battery. The advertised battery is neither minimum or maximum number of hours the machine can run without needing a charge. If CR wanted to find the minimum battery time, fine. But that is not what they are after, so triggering an edge case the increases battery usage is a bug.