Topic: Consumer Reports
★ Consumer Reports Withdraws Surface Recommendations over Reliability Issues (Aug 10, 2017)
In the second somewhat controversial decision by Consumer Reports in the past year, it has withdrawn its recommendations from several of the Microsoft Surface hardware products for reasons of projected reliability. Though it rated those products highly in its reviews and recommended both a couple of Surface Laptop and a couple of Surface Book models, a recent survey among owners of older Surface products suggested a 25% hardware fault rate within two years of purchase and that’s what led to the yanked recommendations. Last year, Consumer Reports somewhat controversially failed to recommend Apple’s new MacBook Pros over battery life issues that turned out to be caused by somewhat unusual testing conditions combined with a rogue script, something that it eventually reversed itself on, but there’s little prospect of a similar reversal here.
Though Consumer Reports has long used reliability of past car models in projecting the same for newer models on the basis that they often share platforms and components, that approach feels flimsy when applied to consumer electronics, and especially different models from the same company, given the frequent changes in components. If past reliability took a hit from a single component and that component isn’t present in the new devices, it would be completely irrelevant, but the lack of transparency here from Consumer Reports makes it impossible to know what’s really going on. Given the small share of the total PC market Surface captures, I also wonder just how much data CR has and how representative it really is. Overall, this feels rather like Consumer Reports trying to get attention for itself much as it did with the MacBook Pro issue, where it failed to provide adequate insight into its testing process until pressed by Apple. It’s clearly bad news for Microsoft, whose Surface hardware has generally been very well reviewed in the last couple of years, though most corporate buyers won’t be checking Consumer Reports for reliability ratings and will instead go by their own experiences, which as far as I can tell have generally been fine. Consumers, on the other hand, might lean more heavily on these ratings.
Update: Also worth noting are the overall reliability numbers for PCs, which are available within CR’s laptop ratings section: there, Microsoft comes last of all, but only by one percentage point, while it says differences of five points or less are not meaningful, and that spread covers six PC vendors including market leaders HP, Lenovo, and Dell. So it’s not that Microsoft’s reliability is massively worse than other PCs, but that there’s now enough evidence (by CR’s reckoning) to indicate it isn’t as good as it appeared to be.
via USA Today
MacBook Pro Ratings Changed – Consumer Reports (Jan 10, 2017)
I changed the headline on this piece, which is a bit of amazing spin. Following serious pushback from Apple on its MacBook Pro battery tests, Consumer Reports provided more information to Apple on its testing process, and it emerged that it had turned off the cache (which consumers never would) and this in turn triggered an obscure bug which drained battery life. Had CR simply given Apple the opportunity to provide feedback on the testing process, this whole thing could have ended a lot earlier and without the unjust criticism. To the extent that anyone saw this story as evidence of slipping standards at Apple, that should now be laid to rest. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen excellent battery life on the MBP the last two weeks while traveling, especially with the screen dimmed somewhat. (See also Apple’s full statement.)
via MacBook Pro Ratings Changed – Consumer Reports