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Tech News Today for January 10, 2017

Tech News for Tuesday January 10, 2017

Last month Consumer Reports tested the new MacBook Pros and for the first time a MacBook failed to earn the Recommended rating from the magazine, due to wildly fluctuating battery life. Testing showed 3.75 hours of battery life and 19.5 hours from the same laptop. Now Apple says they've fixed the bug that caused problems in Consumer Reports testing. During testing, the magazine turned off Safari's local cache for browsing which triggered a bug in Safari's developer mode that Apple has now fixed. Consumer Reports is considering retesting the laptops. Read more at macworld.com

John MacFarlane, CEO and co-founder of Sonos, has resigned from his role with the company after 15 years at the top. MacFarlane says he had been planning to step aside for a while but delayed the move when Amazon’s Echo became such a surprise success. Patrick Spense, current Sonos President, will take over in the lead role. MacFarlane says he didn’t want Spense to always feel like a founder was looking over his shoulder. Read more at nytimes.com.

Greenpeace released its renewable energy report and says that Google, Apple, and Facebook get good marks in reneweable energy efforts, but Amazon lags behind. While the company promises to one day rely soley on renewable engergy, right now the carbon impact of cloud computing is susbstantial. HBO, Netflix and Hulu all received Fs for the amount of energy they're using. When dolling out grades, Greenpeace takes the following into consideration: transparency about the amount of energy a company uses, renewable energy commitments, energy efficiency, increased demand for dirty energy, renewable energy investments, and more. Read more at qz.com.

LG has had a bad year. Its flagship LG G5 didn’t move the needle throughout 2016, and part of the reason could have been its bold but ultimately unsuccessful trial of modular functionality with LG Friends. 2017 will be different. LG announced the G6 which will have a larger 5.7” QHD display with an unprecedented 18:9 aspect ratio. LG says consumers want larger displays, so this is one way that LG is attempting to right the wrongs of its last flagship device. Read more at 9to5google.com.

There's good reason why you shouldn't post your boarding pass to Instagram. It all comes down to a six digit number that's encoded in a barcode that airlines use to verify the identity of passengers. Social media makes it easy for others to find that code, and someone else could log in and reschedule booked flights. It also would be possible to get the customer's credit card number. Read more at theverge.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Molly McHugh from The Ringer to discuss being a parent in today's technology-obsessed age. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. Subscribe to the show and download it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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