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9to5Mac recently probed Consumer Reports on its testing of the newest MacBook Pros, in particular the wide varying results in battery performance. In one test, a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar netted 16 hours of battery life and just 3.75 hours in another. The non-Touch Bar model reached 19.5 hours and 4.15 hours respectively. Insane! Consumer reports still stands by its testing method as well as its “non-recommendation”, which is a first for the MacBook Pro. Maria Rerecich, direct of electronics testing says:
In this case, we don’t believe re-running the tests are warranted for several reasons. First, as we point out in our original article, experiencing very high battery life on MacBooks is not unusual for us – in fact we had a model in our comparative tests that got 19 hours. Second, we confirmed our brightness with three different meters, so we feel confident in our findings using this equipment. Finally, we monitor our tests very closely. There is an entry logged every minute, so we know from these entries that the app worked correctly.
Charge me up
So what really is the culprit for the poor results in battery life? We still don’t know .Consumer Reports says it’s working with Apple “ to understand the lower battery life findings and will report back to our readers if and when there is an update.”
At any rate, most [vocal] new MacBook Pro users have been seeing lower than expected battery results. That’s a bit disappointing after plonking down a hefty bit of cash and seeing less-than-advertised results. The battery issues on the MacBook Pro don’t seem to be dying down soon, either.
If battery life is important to you, you might want to hold off on buying one of the new MacBook Pros, at least until a fix is out, or until the next refresh. After all, Consumer Reports still hasn’t awarded the laptop its stamp of approval. That means a lot.
Source: 9to5Mac