Consumer Reports Isn’t Recommending The 2016 MacBook Pro

Lots of users have been reporting poor battery life on their 2016 MacBook Pro. Now, however, Consumer Reports is out and has put their own twist on the notebook, and it’s not looking good there either.

The firm says the 2016 MacBook Pro is the first MacBook to not reach e recommended ratings from the origination.

In the breakdown post, Consumer Reports explains that while the display held up in terms of quality and performance, battery life issues were too big of an issue to overlook.

It tested three different MacBook Pro models: a 13-inch non-Touch Bar model, a 13-inch with the Touch Bar, and a 15-inch with the Touch Bar. Consumer Reports said that “MacBook Pro battery life results were highly inconsistent from one trial to the next.”

The firm noted that the 13-inch Touch Bar model saw battery life ranging from 16 hours to 3.75 hours between various tests, while the non-Touch Bar model ranged from 19.5 hours to 4.5 hours, and the 15-inch model ranged from 18.5 hours to 8 hours.

Generally speaking, Consumer Reports expects battery life to vary by less than 5 percent between tests, saying that the battery life inconsistencies in the new MacBook Pro are very strange.

For the battery test, we download a series of 10 web pages sequentially, starting with the battery fully charged, and ending when the laptop shuts down. The web pages are stored on a server in our lab, and transmitted over a WiFi network set up specifically for this purpose. We conduct our battery tests using the computer’s default browser—Safari, in the case of the MacBook Pro laptops.

During the tests, we set each laptop screen to remain on. We use an external meter to set the display brightness to 100 nits—a typical level you might use indoors or out. And, we turn off any automatic brightness adjustment in the laptop’s settings.

One interesting tidbit was when the firm tested battery life using only Chrome, stating that it “found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs.” Consumer Reports strictly uses the first-party browser for testing, but this test can’t be left unknown.

The Chrome aspect will be a surprise to many, however. Generally speaking, Google Chrome on macOS is known for being a battery and resource hog and performs noticeably worse on than Safari.