Apple Working With Consumer Reports to Understand Its MacBook Pro Battery Tests Performed

Consumer Reports shocked the tech world last week as the product testing firm decided to not give its recommendation to Apple's MacBook Pro 2016 due to battery issues. As this was first such occurrence when a MacBook failed to receive recommendation from the firm, Apple has decided to take the matter seriously. The company is now working with Consumer Reports to understand the battery tests that were performed by the latter.

"Working with CR to understand their battery tests. Results do not match our extensive lab tests or field data," Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Apple, said in a Twitter post on Friday. Interestingly, the company has not acknowledged that the laptops have a battery life related issue but rather said that they are working with Consumer Reports to understand their tests.

As per Schiller, the data collected by Consumer Reports through their series of tests does not meet the data obtained by the Cupertino-based giant through internal testing as well as field data. Consumer Reports performed its tests at the three variants of MacBook Pro 2016, which were all bought at retail. The product testing firm does this to ensure that testing units are similar to the ones purchased by customers.

The report from Consumer Reports said that the company found that even though the MacBook Pro 2016 laptops fare well in terms of the display quality and performance, the battery life varied "dramatically" over the trial. The echoed some complaints made by consumers since the launch.

"In a series of three consecutive tests, the 13-inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third. The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours," the report said.

It will be interesting to see if Apple is able to resolve the much-reported MacBook Pro 2016 battery issue going ahead with a software update or it turns out to be a hardware problem. It is, however, good to see that the company is taking the tests performed on its product seriously and is willing to look into the situation.