After not giving a recommendation to Apple’s 2016 MacBook Pro family due to inaccurate battery tests, the group of reviewers decided to work closely with Apple in order to figure out what caused these problems in the first place. It looks like the inaccuracy had nothing to do with the testing methodology of Consumer Reports, but the element that was interfering with those tests was a bug found in Safari. After getting that out of the way and conducting the tests one more time, these reviewers have finally given a recommendation for the 2016 MacBook Pro family.

Software Update Released by Apple Fixed the Issue That Was Interfering With the Consumer Reports Tests

The complete report given by Consumer Reports has been detailed below:

“Consumer Reports has now finished retesting the battery life on Apple's new MacBook Pro laptops, and our results show that a software update released by Apple on January 9 fixed problems we’d encountered in earlier testing.

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.

We first evaluated the MacBook Pro laptops in December, and found that battery life results were highly inconsistent from one test to the next. (They ran anywhere from a low of 3.75 hours up to 19.5 hours between charges.) That led the laptops to receive low overall scores, despite strong showings in areas such as display quality and performance.

The process we followed with Apple is the same process we follow with any manufacturer when we discover a significant problem. We shared our test results with the company so it could better understand our findings and deliver a fix to consumers. Since Apple made a fix, we retested the laptops.

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.”

This shows that a small software update was only required in order to rid the problems that these users were experiencing. However, while the battery issues have now been buried six-feet under, the MacBook Pro will still get the hammer because it doesn’t provide the flexibility that other notebooks provide when its I/O is the main subject. While Thunderbolt 3 is definitely the future, you will still have to stick to dongles for now.

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