GRiDCASE 1520.
Mine had a battery life of up to 25 minutes if you flicked the gas plasma display brightness switch to “low.”
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You realize Apple uses the same contract manufacturers as every other electronics company, right?
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This feels like a software issue to me, thinking in the next couple of weeks they’ll find a driver/library/something that’s wonky, patch it and life goes on. Doubt its unfixable but a shame they released the product it without finding it first.
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On the one hand, results like this call your tests into question. OTOH, the difference with known energy hog Chrome suggest software issues. On the grasping hand, most users see no difference between Safari and the hardware. Vertical integration is unkind.
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Yup. Foxconn manufactures for Dell, HP, all vendors.
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And the post-Jobs decline continues.
I have been blown away with the battery life of my mid 2015 Macbook pro. With my old Dell XPS, I used to go to sleep after surfing in bed for 45 minues when the battery died. These days I sometimes see the sun come up before the battery dies. It’s strange to think that people would complain about 3-4 hours of battery life but I get it.
And what paragon of corporate virtue do you suggest one purchase electronics from?
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Don’t worry, Trump promises to bring those grueling, sub-minimum jobs back to the USA!
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Which says to me that Consumer Reports fucked up. The one thing you can generally rely on a computer to do is behave the same way repeatedly in the same situation. That they weren’t able to get consistent battery life says to me that something was badly wrong with their testing regimen.
I’m sure this can be fixed through firmware updates.
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Not necessarily. It absolutely could be an implementation issue in Safari itself. If Safari was failing to sleep properly in some situations and instead gets stuck in a spinloop, this result could entirely be a fault of the software itself.
Consumer Reports says that their battery ratings are based upon usage of the first-party browser. So that’s Safari on Macs, and Edge on modern Windows PCs. And a simple software bug like not falling asleep properly could easily result in drastically reduced battery life.
They do go out of the way to note that the picture is different when running Chrome, which tells us that the problem isn’t in the hardware; it’s presumably somewhere in the software, or potentially (as you say) in the testing procedure itself. But Consumer Reports does a lot of computer tests; I’d assume that they’ve worked out how to do them rigorously. Some subtle (but important) power management bug affecting Safari actually sounds more likely to me.
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I’m inclined to agree. The fact that the test requires interface with their server over wifi introduces variables that aren’t specific to the MPB. A proper suite of test should include fully internal tasks such as video editing or rendering. The battery drain of wifi-based use is also important to the user, of course, but they should try to find a test that is subject to fewer significant externalities.
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People who say this are clearly not remembering all of the crappy Apple stuff from the Jobs era – which was plentiful. “You’re holding it wrong,” remember that? I like Apple (relatively) but they’ve had flubs since the day they were incorporated.
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If for no other reason than Oracle are huge assholes, I feel much the same way about Java. I wonder if the consumer OS landscape would have been different if Sun hadn’t been bought out by them.
I have a 2013 MBPr that I just “replaced” with a desktop I built running Ubuntu 16.10. The new Apple is just not for me, and each subsequent software update seems to make things more buggy. The last genuinely useful “feature” to me was when they finally fixed fullscreen multi display support a few years back, so it didn’t just show a linen texture on all the other displays.
I’ll keep my MBP to use when I’m away from my desk, but Apple is just not for me anymore. For what it’s worth, I’m a software developer, and an ex-Apple Genius. Besides my MBPr, I no longer own any Apple products.
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I’m in exactly the same boat (apart from the ‘ex-Apple Genius’ thing). I went to Apple when my beloved old Linux-running laptop died, and I couldn’t face doing another Linux laptop install. OSX was sleek, nice, and had a proper terminal running under it. Was a big fan for a long time. But it’s been moving away from what I look for in a computer for several years now, and I’m back to Linux as my primary OS again, now.
I still use an iPhone, but it’s about four generations old. I don’t know what I’m going to do when it finally dies; its battery is already becoming a little problematic. I haven’t yet bought into the modern “big phones” thing. People tell me that you get used to them pretty quickly, but I’d actually be happier with an even smaller phone, if such a thing was available.
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There are guides for that sort of thing too:
You can even adjust the score based on what you consider the most important ethical concerns.
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Worth noting explicitly that Apple’s tied for the highest score on that site’s default set of ethics weightings on that site. (Or perhaps “tied for the least worst score” would be a more appropriate description, since nobody scores very highly).
Not tremendously useful for finding someone “better”, when Apple’s already at the top of the list. 
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I’m writing this from a linux laptop. I love linux but we have to get the desktop right. We have to be willing to sacrifice the whole thing, from display server, compositor, the desktop, and the apps. It will take more effort than the kernel and we would dumping so much code. It would be an opensource Manhattan project.
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I definitely drank the kool aid, and even though I left for a developer job, I still didn’t want to leave. Further proving how frustrated I have been with their last few years.
I Despise the big phones too, but switched to Project Fi and Android last year and bought a Nexus 6p. Liked the os, hated the size. Couldn’t stand to take it hiking, running, or anything active. I broke my skip a cycle upgrade rule and switched to the smaller Pixel in October only because of how big it was. Couldn’t be happier and still have a headphone jack.
Thin and giant is worse in every way than thicker and smaller. All I want is for my phone to be thin enough to easily fit in my pocket. Pretty much every phone since the original iPhone has been thin enough.
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