Best investment I ever made. Especially when buying new appliances. Ha.. It's kind of pathetic that I flinched at spending a few bucks a month for good content.I have an entirely different perspective of Consumer Reports (the online variant which has external site ads on it).
Understand that they are entirely biased (as we all are): They take home the lucre by keeping you thinking that you need them, and that they're doing an important service. Hence why the big noise about things like not recommending the iPhone -- all just noise to keep the subscription dollars coming and to create a sense of utility. They're also prone to taking complex products and then trying to distill it into easily quantified values that they can put in a chart and categorize, leading to a detachment from real-world value and "need to fill this issue". I was a subscriber for several years and eventually came to realize that their top picks were usually not really top picks, and they were often in areas where they were entirely out of their depth (I discovered that particularly after buying a set of their top pick speakers).
After that print subscription ended, years later I was looking at getting a new furnace and saw that the online site listed furnace reviews, though they were hidden behind a paywall. Okay, bought a subscription to find that there were no reviews at all, but some useless summary about basic efficiency levels. Well that's useless. Oh well, a year subscription wasted. A year later I discovered that they auto-renewed (never signed up for that, but whatever), and put it on my todo list to jump through hoops to cancel at some point, wasting my time (as they give NO clear way to cancel, despite subscribing being a trivial painless step). The next year they sent me notice that my credit card had expired -- awesome, easy way to finally unsubscribe from an auto-renew that I didn't opt into without sitting on hold for half an hour! Imagine how funny I thought it was when they guessed my next expiry and just used that, continuing the subscription.
I have an extremely poor opinion of CU, and I think the belief that they're more pure or their opinion more useful is a bit naive.