The battery woes that had dented the image of the latest MacBook Pro devices seem to be a thing of the past if the latest Apple announcement on this is to be believed. The Cupertino company also explained the inconsistent battery rating has been the result of a bug in Safari that has since been rectified with the latest beta 3 of macOS Sierra version 10.12.3.
Worth mentioning, the MacBook Pro had received a ‘not recommended’ rating from Consumer Reports, which also happens to be a first ever for any MacBook Pro device. Apple, however, worked with Consumer Reports over the holidays and had identified the issue in the Safari browser setting that the company said led to grossly inconsistent battery ratings.
Explaining further, Apple said the demon lies in the ‘browser cache’ setting in Safari which Consumer Reports turns off while making its battery tests. The company also stated the setting is rarely likely to be turned off in real world conditions and is actually designed to allow for faster page load times.
Consumer Reports does its battery tests by setting the brightness to a specific level and loading a set of websites over and over again till the battery has lost all its charge. Also, it turns off the browser cache setting to ensure data is actually downloaded over the net instead of the page getting loaded from the cache each time.
This way, the battery life was found to wary as widely as 19.5 hours to even just about 3.75 hours as well in some cases.
Consumer Reports stated they would be conducting the tests again with the software update installed before it makes any changes to its recommendations.
Apple, however, said the disabling cache is never likely to be practiced by general users and hence battery life is never going to be affected adversely.
Unfortunately, that still fails to explain the numerous instances where the MacBook Pro has been found to vary widely with the battery times even when the Safari cache setting has remain unchanged. Maybe Apple has some more explaining to do in future on this.
