
New MacBook Pros Fail to Earn Consumer Reports Recommendation - QUFB
http://www.consumerreports.org/laptops/macbook-pros-fail-to-earn-consumer-reports-recommendation/
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malloreon
the touch bar is simply garbage. In 2 weeks of usage including heavy xcode use
I have yet to find a single instance where having the touch bar was better
than having the function keys.

Not only that I'm pretty sure the battery issues are due to not being able to
turn off a constantly updating touch bar.

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nkoren
It may not be the hardware; it may be the the OS. Since upgrading to Sierra,
I've been plagued by various runaway kernel processes randomly eating 100% of
the CPU. Have finally managed to kill most of them through deleting .plists
and the like -- all for native MacOS apps like Contacts by the way, not in any
3rd-party apps -- but this kind of bugginess could easily produce the kind of
results that Consumer Reports saw.

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xbeta
Mind to share the list of .plists that you have deleted and disabled?

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nkoren
Oh gods, I didn't keep a list. Most had no effect, but I eventually traced it
to Contacts, and with the exception of a couple of even more mysterious rogue
issues with the windowserver, that seems to have fixed it.

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FullyFunctional
I cannot consolidate their results with my own experience and those of many
reports I've read: their results seems way too _good_! Real world annecdata: a
google hangout seems drained the battery in about two hours on my top-spec,
one-month old, MBP. I never had experiences like this on the 2013 MBP.

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jsjohnst
Google Hangouts consistently drains at minimum of 20% of my battery life per
30min meeting. It doesn't matter if I'm using my top spec previous generation
15", my top spec previous gen 13", or my 2016 12" MacBook. As such, using it
to gauge battery life is about as fair as running a Hadoop cluster in VMs to
gauge battery life. Actually, I think the active Hadoop cluster would use less
battery.

The reason why their test results are ridiculously long is how little they
stress the machine. Loading ten basic web pages (in the stock browser, so no
Flash, and something tells me no WebGL usage either), so outside an errant
background process, what's really using any watts there besides the screen?

