Two weeks after our colleagues at Consumer Reports said they couldn’t recommend Apple’s new MacBook Pro after testing its battery and finding it wildly inconsistent, the company has released a fix designed to address the issue.
Although the new computers did well in other tests — like display quality, performance, for example — battery life results ranged from as long as 19.5 hours to as short as 3.75 hours.
Consumer Reports says it has downloaded the fix and will be rerunning its tests on the same three MacBook Pro models it used previously.
“If the battery life results are consistently high, the ratings score for MacBook Pros would rise, and those laptops will then receive Consumer Reports’ Recommended rating given their performance in all our other evaluations,” Consumer Reports notes.
Apple asked Consumer Reports to send over diagnostic data from the tests in order to investigate the issue. Apple says the variable battery performance displayed in the tests is a result of a software bug in the Safari web browser that was triggered by test conditions.
“We appreciate the opportunity to work with Consumer Reports over the holidays to understand their battery test results,” Apple said in a statement. “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…. We have also fixed the bug uncovered in this test.”
Head over to Consumer Reports’ site for more on its standard laptop testing protocol, including why it turns off caching in laptop tests.
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist