The IT Nerd

Well, Apple is ending the year on a low note. After Consumers Reports decided to recommend the MacBook Pro because of it’s rather dodgy battery, and having Apple Phil Schiller say that what they saw from the battery doesn’t match what the magazine saw, Consumers Reports has put out a statement saying that they stand by what they said. Here’s a quote via Mashable:

The nonprofit organization is standing by its initial verdict in which it did not give the MacBook Pro (2016) its “recommended” rating. The organization has now said it doesn’t think re-running the tests will change anything. 

“In this case, we don’t believe re-running the tests are warranted for several reasons. First, as we point out in our original article, experiencing very high battery life on MacBooks is not unusual for us – in fact we had a model in our comparative tests that got 19 hours,” it told 9to5Mac.

“Second, we confirmed our brightness with three different meters, so we feel confident in our findings using this equipment. Finally, we monitor our tests very closely. There is an entry logged every minute, so we know from these entries that the app worked correctly,” it added. 

My take?

Consumer Reports has no incentive but to produce accurate reports when testing products. That’s what they built their brand on. If Apple wants this to go away, they need to do one of two things. They either understand why Consumers Reports got the results they did and tell the planet all of that plus what if anything they plan to do to address that. Or, take a page out of the playbook of Honda when Consumers Reports dropped the Honda Civic from their recommended list of cars back in 2011 because it was seen by them as being lackluster and cheap with poor driving dynamics. Which was to release a heavily revamped Civic for the 2013 model year that attempted to address the issues that Consumers Reports had. Or, they perhaps have to do both to restore confidence in their flagship notebook.

So, how about it Apple?

This entry was posted on December 30, 2016 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.