It's a real test result. It's just that the test setup is not indicative of real life.

Brightness is set to 100 nits. That's very, very low, at about 20% of the maximum brightness of the new MBP. I use mine at at least 75% when I'm on the road.

The workload is simple. Consumer Reports says they have turned off caching in Safari (from the Develop menu), in an effort to simulate "real-life" browsing, but that's just not a very good way to simulate a real-life browsing workload.

Fetching pages from a server is mostly waiting for the network, using very little CPU. If anything, turning off caching might give you better battery life in a test like this. Also, who knows how much the browser is caching data internally. It may fetch pages from the web (using no CPU, mostly waiting), but may still internally reuse cached, optimized versions from the previous page views.

Also, I'm sure they don't have any background processes running, such as Time Machine (or other backups like Backblaze or Crashplan), Dropbox, Google Drive, playing music, Bluetooth headphones, etc. I'd be willing to bet that the Touch Bar is turned off during this test, too, which it wouldn't be in real life if there is real keyboard input.

Finally, to be honest… just yesterday, I spent over 9 hours total developing a Django web app on the new MBPtb without recharging. I had plenty of opportunities to plug in, but chose not to, to see how far I can go without power. Also, I had brightness set so about 30-40%; less than what I would like normally. Anyway, I'm very happy with the battery life.

This is only browsing web pages in one tab though right? Not even running multiple apps. Nobody does that anyway. I for instance have 50+ tabs open on any given day.

Normal people don't have 50+ tabs open, ever. Your idea of who represents "nobody" is upside down.

I think you have an idealistic view of the way normal people use computers, making an absolute statement like "ever".

Here's an example of a "normal" person with 1250 of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/4urdh...

It's not a unique occurrence: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/5iixe...

Don't you think the fact that it was submitted to /r/talesfromtechsupport implies that it was something of note, and that a handful of people offering of anecdotes of their own bizarre encounter with a tab hoarder support my claim that it's not the way most people use a browser?

My point is that you didn't say "it's not the way most people use a browser", you said that normal people don't "ever" use that many tabs. You made an overly absolute statement and I'm refuting it.

I concede that. But your initial use of "nobody" is also overly absolute.

That was someone else, not me.

Yes I'm obviously an extreme example but the fact is, people who own a MacBook Pro are multitasking on it. They're not running one tab in just Safari with nothing else open.

Right, I never meant to defend the CR test methodology here... it's pretty absurd.