For decades, Consumer Reports (CR) has acted as a fairly respected consumer watchdog, testing the claims of countless products and offering up assessments to help the public choose in a world filled with dubious advertising. When the magazine said that Apple’s new MacBook Pro was lacking in the battery life department , there was general surprise. After some investigation, though, it appears that the testing conditions were unusual. CR’s methodology may have been flawed , though it exposed a Safari bug in the process.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Apple said that CR used a hidden setting in Safari that disabled caching completely. CR explains in an update posted yesterday that the test it ran on the new MacBook Pro is the same one it uses for every other laptop. The lab disables caching in the machine’s primary browser and then has it downloading a set of sites over and over again. These conditions were intended to more closely simulate the user going to new webpages over and over, rather than reading the same 10 sites from the cache over and over again.
