> After working with Apple over the holidays, Consumer Reports now says that the problem was caused by an "obscure" Safari bug specific to page caching, which the publication disables when it runs its battery tests. To test battery life, Consumer Reports sets laptop screens to a specific brightness level and then loads a series of webpages in the laptop's default browser (Safari in this case) in a loop until the battery dies. Apple suggests that disabling browser caching for a test like this doesn't reflect real-world use, but it does make sense for a synthetic test—users will continually read new pages rather than visiting the same static pages over and over again, so Consumer Reports wants to make sure that its test is actually downloading data over the network rather than simply reading cached data from the disk.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/consumer-reports-will-r...
My Dell precision 5510 (optionally ships from Dell with Ubuntu) takes an hour or two of work from a competent Linux nerd to be on par with a Macbook. In the past I owned a System76 Galago Ultra Pro which prides itself on being Linux ready. Instead it shipped with impressively miserable battery life, "meh" keyboard, and no UEFI (what year is it@!?).
If Consumer Reports were to review either of those laptops, they would give it a failing grade relative to a Macbook Pro.
Yet Linux still thrives fueled by the DIY or open source communities. These communities look for different thing out of the box. Furthermore, the person who consider Linux would have probably discovered the Safari bug LONG before it took Apple + Consumer Reports to find the real cause. This person would probably run Chrome or Firefox until the inevitable fix rolled out from Apple.