Phil Schiller: Apple Working With Consumer Reports to Understand MacBook Pro Battery Test
Yesterday Consumer Reports revealed that Apple's 2016 MacBook Pro became the first MacBook to fail to achieve a recommendation due to inconsistent battery life. Apple SVP Phil Schiller today tweeted that the Cupertino company is working with Consumer Reports to understand the battery tests.
"Working with [Consumer Reports] to understand their battery tests, " Schiller tweeted. "Results do not match our extensive lab tests or field data." Apple claims its internal testing has seen the new MacBook Pro providing up to 10 hours of battery life when watching iTunes movies or browsing the web.
Consumer Reports'
test has come under scrutiny since publication of the non-recommendation. The tests were conducted by opening a series of 10 web pages sequentially on Safari. This tests' inconsistency had the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar registering 16 hours, 12.75 hours and 3.75 hours of battery life. A 15-inch MacBook Pro ranged from 18.5 hours to 8 hours of battery life.
When Consumer Reports tried the test with Chrome rather than Safari, it found consistently high battery life. "For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs," the report said. Consumer Reports did not think it was enough data to draw a conclusion, though they also point out their test results only take default browsers into consideration.
Critics, like iMore's Rene Ritchie, argue that inconsistent test results require more testing to ferret out whether the issue is easily fixable, like a Safari glitch. Consumer Reports noted in its report that if Apple issues a software update that it claims will fix battery life inconsistency, they will conduct fresh tests.
Popular Stories
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Top Rated Comments
The problem isn't that Apple's power saving features don't work. They work exceptionally well, that's where 16 hours is coming from. The problem is that they work too well and the battery is undersized. The moment you load the machine down, the battery % begins to drop through the floor because the machine quite literally was not designed for that kind of use. The "time remaining" indicator only served to highlight just how fast the % was falling (since it's far more difficult for a user to gauge the remaining time left based solely on a plummeting number), which is why they got rid of it. Apple wanted snazzy specs in a thin package, and this is the end result.
If they'd built the laptop properly with sufficient battery capacity, we'd be seeing a laptop that lasts 20-30 hours (!) under light use, and 7-8 hours under heavy use. Then I don't think anyone would be complaining. ~4 hours, however, isn't much, and is pretty inexcusable for what is being sold as a premium device.
No matter how much damage control they engage in, and no matter what they say about these devices or the users, it doesn't change the fact that the design is fundamentally flawed and Apple cannot change the laws of physics.
-SC
However, the Bloomberg piece from a few days ago says that Apple was planning on using a sculpted battery with a higher capacity as seen in the 12" MacBook, but had to revert to a traditional design due to some fault. I stand by my belief that this was a misatake, and Apple should have delayed the product rather than implementing a smaller than designed-for battery.
Even though the Mac is only 10 percent of Apples business, it is clear it is no longer getting the same amount of attention from Apple it has historically. Which is disappointing. Apple can hire the talent to dedicate to Mac if they want to.