APPLE WORKING WITH CUSTOMER REPORTS ON THE REPORTED MACBOOK PRO BATTERY PROBLEM

When it comes to giving reviews and opinions on products, to be precise – gadgets and devices manufactured within the realm of the tech industry – Consumer Reports is not a newbie of any kind. They’ve been in the industry for quite some time, and due to the kind of extensive tests that they perform on every unit that comes their way, they leave no stone unturned to make sure that they verify or dispute any claims that have been made by the manufacturer. Driving the units to the limit and giving opinions not based on sponsorship of any kind, it’s not farfetched why they are the go-to website for many. It is, therefore, understandable why Apple would not want ever to get into the bad books of this website.

In what is certainly a first, Customer Reports made their test and review on the latest series of the MacBook Pro series and deemed it bad for anyone that wanted to get one. To paraphrase their words, this would be a waste of money to anyone that wishes to get themselves one of the 2016 builds of the MacBook Pro, and Apple doesn’t wish to stand by on the sidelines while their product is being marred in this way. It should be noted that this cannot be a result of any personal beef or bad blood between the two companies. While Consumer Reviews has its reputation to protect, it has also always endorsed every other model of the MacBook Pro to its users.

The bone of contention on the 2016 MacBook Pro is the battery which CR has claimed is nothing compared to what Apple has promised. The battery has been described as erratic, and that was in a bid to stop them from calling it bad outright. From the trials that they also conducted on the battery, it was found out that it didn’t hold up its own at any point in time, giving off inconsistent results all through. On the report, which they made public on Thursday of last week, Customer Reports published that “The MacBook Pro battery life results were highly inconsistent from one trial to the next.”

Apparently concerned about this being the first time they wouldn’t be recommended by the review platform, Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Apple, has sent out a tweet late last week Friday. With this, he assures the general public that Apple is now collaborating with CR in a series of new tests to establish the truth of the matter on the batteries. This is so because the battery tests that CR had reportedly carried out do not match that of Apple, with the VP claiming that they made sure they were thorough and extensive with their tests. Schiller might have also made a gentle jab at Customer Reports, linking his tweet to a link from iMore that suggests that CR is just looking for some attention and traffic before the holidays. According to iMore, Customer Reports could have conducted more tests before making their findings public.

Taking the microphone to the main protagonist, Customer Reports have spoken for themselves, revealing that the variety of tests that they subjected the battery on the new MacBook Pro units to showed wide fluctuations in the battery life when left unplugged. With Apple saying that a 13-inch model (with the absence of a touch bar) should be able to work for 10 hours between charges, for example, Customer Reports have reported that the unit did between 19.5 hours of awake time and 4.5 hours, which is a truly wide gulf to live with.

It was not entirely bad, though, with the platform praising Apple on other design elements such as the display and overall performance of their newly outed desktop models. In a blog post that has since gone love, CR remarks that the laptops did very well in measures of display performance and quality, but regarding battery life, we found that the models varied dramatically from one trial to another. At the end of the tests, only the 15-inch model managed to get more than average, with a score of 56/100. The 13-inch models with and without the touch bar didn’t fare better, scoring a meager 40 and 47 points respectively, all graded against the 100-point mark.

Up until now, Apple is yet to reply or comment for more information by Schillers tweets or to give updates on where they are as regards the battery tests. Customer Reports have also been out of reach, not confirming the news that they have started to work with engineers and analysts from Apple to see where the battery problems are coming from.

Released in the fall of this year, the MacBook Pro series have already had their fair share of problems in the market, and Apple doesn’t need a bad review like this to reduce its sales potential even further.