Having said that, it's important to note that CR did not give the Macbook Pro a Recommended badge (think of it as the equivalent to "Editor's Choice"), it doesn't mean they're telling people not to buy them either. The headlines are somewhat misleading about this.

Personally, even though I've left Macs because I don't like the direction Apple has taken, I'm still hard pressed to say that the current crop of Macs are horrible just because they don't cater to my specific needs. For the vast majority of people looking for a higher end laptop, they're perfectly fine (albeit pricy). I've gotten over the fact that "Pro" in Apple speak no longer means "Workstation Class" (or something close to it).

It's the Peter Principle for laptops. Laptops are made thinner and thinner, which is always an improvement, until the point when they no longer function properly.

Fundamentally, people expect a certain amount of travel in their keyboard for comfort, and long enough battery life. Apple made a big mistake thinking these were mere "nice things to have".

In terms of battery life, I'm with you, I'd rather see Apple get as much life out of the maximum sized battery that the TSA will allow on a flight (100Wh), but I don't know that I would call it a big mistake, since it hasn't hurt the sales of the new MBPs. I think they could do that in a chassis the size of the 2012 and earlier 15" unibodies. They'd also have plenty of room for legacy ports too. Those 15" unibodies were the sweet spot for me in terms of size and user upgradability.

I tried it, the keyboard was uncomfortable, and I decided not to buy it.

It would be nice if Apple would make an international version of the 15" that has more than 100Wh!

Is this actually true? Like...is there a material population of customers who really care about this? Not joking. I know zero people who care about that, at least for laptops. (I don't use an iPhone, so I don't pay attention to that side of things.)

Based on my memory of mac-related laptop threads I've seen on HN, I believe it is. It sorta begs the question - if it wasn't worth some marketing appeal, why would Apple keep making devices thinner?

Personally I prefer a bigger laptop for a Macbook Pro (think 2012 and earlier unibodies), but I tend to think I'm in the minority.

Almost everybody would rather have thinness, all else being equal. The new 15" MBP is a pound lighter than the 13" Macbook I had ten years ago, and barely bigger in footprint. The new machine also packs a larger battery and quad-core CPU. There is now way I'd go back to the old form factor just to get back say the optical disk or MiniDVI port.

Absolutely. But, as you say, all else has to be equal.

I guess the contentious part will be that "all else" means different things to different people.

If you can give me a thinner, modern version of the 2012 15" unibody Macbook Pro, I'd be super happy.

But my "all else" definitions includes a big battery, user serviceable RAM and Storage, gigabit ethernet, USB, displayport, Magsafe and an SD card reader -- all of which were a huge selling point to me about the <= 2012 unibodies. The only thing I am willing to lose from the unibody is the optical. You could replace one or two of the USB ports with USB-C/TB3, but I pretty much want all of the other stuff to stay the same.

Because the rMBP was not "all else being equal", I pretty much started planning a switch away from Macs when the unibodies were effectively discontinued for the 2013 model year.

Intel has been working on more power efficient CPU's more than faster CPU's the last years. Same goes for RAM. I guess Apple did the same on the software side.

I still think something isn't completely like the engineers wanted it to be if I look at the way the batteries are fitted inside the chassis. And I am happy I am in a position to skip this year's version because I expect there will be an improved model that will deal with a lot of these smaller issues that weren't fixed in time before Christmas.

But I don't think there's a dramatic decrease in real world performance at all. Just that with a better battery design it would clearly improve instead.

But the trouble with trying the same thing for the Mac is the wider variety of software people run on macOS. Third-party software may not have got any more efficient, meaning the battery doesn't last as long.

But if you stick to Mail.app and Safari then, in theory, you'll get the expected battery life.

"For the battery test, we download a series of 10 web pages sequentially, starting with the battery fully charged, and ending when the laptop shuts down. The web pages are stored on a server in our lab, and transmitted over a WiFi network set up specifically for this purpose. We conduct our battery tests using the computer’s default browser—Safari, in the case of the MacBook Pro laptops."

CR goes into great detail about their methodology and reasoning for their results.

Is it apples to apples?

iTunes test is less controversial.

But "the 13-inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third" seems to dramatic to be due to hardware -- here it seems something kept some CPU's at 100% in the last case or something like that?