[azr79]

Excuse me?!

That's how it worked for years and everyone knew that, and still it was useful to estimate the current workload of your machine.

Why all of the sudden something that worked for years isn't viable anymore coincidentally when people started complaining about new MBP's shitty battery life? Nobody's buying it.

[riprowan]

Also the news today reports "Apple Working with Consumer Reports on Macbook Pro Battery Issue" [1]

Reading between the lines:

"Apple Pressures Consumer Reports to Change its Story"

You don't need to "work with" Consumer Reports to fix the issue. Just fix it.

Why "work with"? Does Consumer Reports have engineers that will help Apple understand the problem? Is Consumer Reports an isolated incident that just needs some tech support to help them understand the computer? Smacks of whitewashing to me.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer-report...

[crisfine]

Imagine for a moment that you thought you'd made a good device. Now imagine that a respected organization did their own testing and said they couldn't recommend it.

Would you want to work with them to understand why you came to opposing conclusions?

There's no real chance of bullying, as CR buys the products they test, and has decades of experience with huge companies not loving their reviews.

[canuckintime]

Consumer Reports already sent Apple their logs on the test machines before the review. CR had already made a good faith effort to find the source of the opposing conclusions. However:

> In his tweet, Schiller linked to a story from iMore that says Consumer Reports was just going for a pre-Christmas headline and should have done more testing.

Apple is trying to bully/influence the public reception to CR's review. Gruber has spent more time dissing the CR review (and distracting from Gurman's expose on the Mac troubles which he hasn't linked to on DF)

[eli]

Don't know how much you know about Consumer Reports, but I don't think they can't be pressured.

[jws]

What if Safari attracted a heavy WebGL ad in their web browsing test? What if Chrome had an ad blocker in place? What if they used an automation system to drive the test which wired on the discrete gpu?

I see a lot of questions an engineer could answer to help Consumer Reports better understand why their test showed such large variances and then they can decide if it is a testing artifact or indicative of a real variance.

[FireBeyond]

And yet none of these issues seemed to plague CR in the past, when they've reviewed every single MBP release of the last several years (in addition to hundreds of other laptops)...

[whywhywhywhy]

Getting tired of people pointing out that "it was never accurate, it doesn't know if you're going to open a game in 20 minutes" as if it's some sort of massive revelation and justifies this move just to make up for their design problems with their latest laptop because the shaped battery didn't work out in time to ship.

[jws]

As I see it, as the difference between high power and low power states increases, the accuracy of a "time left" predictor decreases.

Back in the day, "active" was one power draw, with a somewhat lower one for idle. And people intuitively understood that idle was not part of a timed test.

Now idle is significantly less power. Discrete GPU is vastly more. Ill behaved app waking from idle only to sleep again is a huge hit. Most of these behaviors are invisible to the user.

You can't just say "at last minute's usage rate, each percent of battery is 6 minutes" and multiply it out. The wildly varying input gives a wildly varying output.

The old algorithm with the new inputs was confusing people.

It's not like they are stopping anyone from watching movies or surfing the web and timing how long a computer runs. The truth is still out there.