Consumer Reports retests 2016 MacBook Pro, now recommends the notebooks

Following a retest, Consumer Reports has given the 2016 MacBook Pro its recommendation.

The change comes after retests wherein the publication and Apple worked together. fter becoming aware of a Safari bug that may have impacted results, Consumer Reports recently started retesting on a newer build of macOS Sierra in which the bug was supposedly fixed.

Following the original tests, Consumer Reports cited that the notebook’s battery life was too varied to recommend the machines. Apple argued the point as well as the fact that the specific tests CR had run they uncovered an “obscure and intermittent” bug within Safari.

Today’s recommendation change is a result of a macOS Sierra software update. Consumer Reports found that the update did in fact fix the problems they incurred in earlier testing.

Consumer Reports offered the following comments:

With the updated software, the three MacBook Pros in our labs all performed well, with one model running 18.75 hours on a charge. We tested each model multiple times using the new software, following the same protocol we apply to hundreds of laptops every year.

Now that we’ve factored in the new battery-life measurements, the laptops’ overall scores have risen, and all three machines now fall well within the recommended range in Consumer Reports ratings.

The publication noted battery life of 15.75 hours on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar and 18.75 hours of battery life for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. For the 15-inch MacBook Pro they saw 17.25 hours of battery life.

That intermittent bug had supposedly been fixed in the recently released macOS Sierra 10.12.3 beta. Once installing the fix, Consumer Reports ran their disabled cache browser test again. In testing, Consumer Reports disables browser cache to have the MacBook Pro load each site fresh every time it is reloaded. The idea according to CR is to “collect consistent results across the testing of many laptops, and it also puts batteries through a tougher workout.”

Via 9to5Mac and Consumer Reports