Only the laptops with the best battery life can crush the most premium machines no matter how stacked their specs are because laptops are useless if they can’t hold a charge.
Fortunately, there are plenty of notebooks that go the distance. Using our Laptop Mag Battery Test 2.0, which involves continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness, we’ve identified the laptops with best battery life on the market.
We’re talking more than 14 hours of endurance, which should more than suffice for that cross-country flight, a long day of meetings or multiple, back-to-back classes. These laptops can be anything, from premium consumer laptops to business laptops to even gaming laptops, yes, gaming laptops, like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, which achieved more battery life than the 16-inch MacBook Pro thanks to its AMD Ryzen CPU. With AMD pushing battery life as one of its key features, Intel has a ton of work cut out for it. Looking for something on the creative front? — Check out our Asus ProArt Studiobook 16 review. If you’re looking for something portable and affordable, check out our HP Chromebook x2 11 review.
Note that, in February 2018, we switched from Laptop Battery Test 1.0, which surfed the web at a lower, 100 nits of brightness, so scores have gone down to reflect the more aggressive (and realistic) test.
What are the laptops with best battery life?
It’s all a numbers game, so deciding which are the laptops with best battery life is objective. Right now, the laptop with best battery life you can buy is the Dell Latitude 9510, which comes in at a ridiculous 18 hours and 17 minutes. This is one of the best business laptops that you can buy. Along with its epic endurance, this ultraportable enterprise machine has a slim yet durable chassis, a solid 1080p display and plenty of security features, including a fingerprint sensor and IR camera.
If you’re looking for a portable 2-in-1 laptop, the HP Spectre x360 is perfect for you. It lasted 13 hours and 20 minutes. Updated with Intel’s 10th Gen processors and a modernized chassis, the Spectre x360 takes everything we loved about its predecessor and ramps it up. It starts with the laptop’s design, which is more stunning than ever thanks to thinner display bezels and smaller footprint. Other highlights include a bright, vivid display, a comfortable keyboard, fast performance and an included stylus.
However, if you’re looking for a MacBook that matches up with the laptops with best battery life, then you’ll have to spring for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, which lasted exactly 11 hours on our test. The new 16-inch MacBook Pro is a beast, packing a totally new keyboard, a bigger display with thinner bezels, and gobs of power with up to an 8-core Core i9 CPU, 8GB of VRAM and 8TB of storage. On top of that, the audio from the 16-inch MacBook Pro is even more impressive than the visuals.
The laptops with best battery life you can buy today
Willing to sell your soul to the devil for the longest-lasting laptop ever? Forget about it, this product is real and purchasable. The Dell Latitude 9510 comes with battery life that’ll last you two work days, a bright 15-inch screen and solid performance packed in a super slim design.
The Latitude 9510 continuously surfed the web over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness for a whopping 18 hours and 17 before it inevitably tapped out. That is almost double the 9:37 premium laptop average.
If you have money to blow and don’t care about display resolution or discrete graphics, the Latitude 9510 is for you, and certainly makes its mark as one of the best business laptops and laptops with best battery life.
See our full Dell Latitude 9510 review.
It’s not easy to stand out in the crowded business laptop category. Competitors like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon and HP’s Elite Dragonfly have raised the bar, making it difficult for others to make their case. But Dell is proving that it’s up to the task with the Latitude 9410 2-in-1, a sleek and sturdy business notebook with unmatched battery life.
It might not attract as much attention as those aforementioned models, but the Latitude 9410’s all-aluminum chassis is thin and durable. Housed within are powerful components, including a 10th Gen Intel Core CPU capable of running demanding workloads. And when you’re off the clock, the Latitude 14-inch, 1080p display captures rich colors, although it could get brighter.
But what makes the Latitude 9410 2-in-1 a true contender to the other best business laptops is its nearly 17 hours of battery life, which distracts from some minor pitfalls, like a high price and comparatively hefty weight.
See our full Dell Latitude 9410 2-in-1 review.
The Asus ExpertBook B9450 wowed us with its battery life score. If you need a laptop with one of the best battery life scores of all time, the ExpertBook will keep you comfortable for an insane 16 hours and 42 minutes. You can literally get through two workdays without having to charge this beast.
On top of that, you get an incredibly lightweight yet durable design covered in an attractive midnight-blue shade. You’ll also get some useful security features like an IR camera and fingerprint sensor. Its 14-inch, 1080p display is fairly bright and colorful as well, but its biggest asset is an anti-glare coating. Asus also equipped the ExpertBook B9450 with a speedy SSD — Its 1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD duplicated 4.97GB in 6 seconds at a rate of 771.1 megabytes per second.
See our full Asus ExpertBook B9450 review.
Call it the emancipation of Apple, the company’s freedom song or just plain liberation. With the advent of the M1 chip, Apple is free –– free to be faster and stronger, free to dominate. And the company’s wasting no time in asserting its dominance. Not only does the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 have better overall and graphics performance, it has some of the longest battery life we’ve ever seen on a laptop.
Apple could have stopped there, but instead, you get faster web page loading times, a more powerful camera and seamless integration between Mac, iPad and iPhone thanks to native Universal apps. The 5nm chip even improves the camera and microphones. If you’re looking for the fastest, most powerful premium laptop in the land, say hello to the new king.
See our full Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020) review.
The HP Elite Folio is packed with innovative, solution-solving tech — not gimmicks — that substantiates its $2,000 price tag. It also gives the Energizer Bunny a run for its money; it lasted a jaw-dropping 16 hours and 21 minutes on a charge.
Not only does the Elite Folio have the endurance of an Olympic champion, but it breaks records like one, too. The Elite Folio is the world’s first business convertible with a spectacular pull-forward mechanism. The feature lets you transform the display into a digital easel so you can get your Bob Ross on. The Elite Folio comes with an awesome stylus — a plus for users who have an affinity for digital note taking and doodling.
See our full HP Elite Folio review.
It may not be as glamorous as the Elite Dragonfly, but the EliteBook 1040 G7 is every bit as capable. It flaunts an attractive metal chassis, boasts lightning-quick performance, and lasts for more than 15 hours on a charge. The 1080p display is a good one for work and play, plenty of ports mean you don’t need a dongle, and a spattering of default and optional features make your work experience more secure and efficient.
The sky-high price means the 1040 G7 is only meant for the high-rollers; execs making the six-figure salaries, invaluable researchers working long nights, and the paper pushers with a Fortune 500 company attached to their LinkedIn profiles. But if you have the cash, or your money has the budget, then this is easily one of the best business laptops on the market.
See our full HP EliteBook x360 1040 G7 review.
The Samsung Galaxy Book Flex 15 is a blue-hued, 2-in-1 head-turning laptop that will rock your world with a built-in, show-stealing S Pen that attracts all the attention.
Taking notes (pun unintended) from its successful Galaxy Note smartphone series, Samsung packed a pizazz-filled, entertaining layer of stylus fun for artistic creatives, scribble-happy students and note-taking professionals. But the pen is just the “cherry on top” of this spectacular convertible — there’s so much more that this badass ultraportable offers.
Put your shades on! The Samsung Galaxy Book 15 (along with the Galaxy Book Ion) is the first laptop in the world to feature a QLED display, an energy-saving technology that helps to output super-high brightness scores without depleting too much battery power. Speaking of its battery, it lasted a whopping 15 hours and 44 minutes on our test.
See our full Samsung Galaxy Book Flex 15 review.
Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 is a refinement of the best 2-in-1 laptop for business users. Taking a page from the X1 Carbon, the newest Yoga now flaunts a 14-inch display with a taller 16:10 aspect ratio for more vertical screen space — a boon for enterprise users. Also improving productivity are a wider touchpad and a human presence detection sensor for convenient login and enhanced security.
Swapping the engine for 11th Gen Intel chips adds considerably faster performance, but the battery life upgrade is even more enticing; the Gen 6 model lasts for nearly 15 hours on a charge. These perks are packaged in a sleek aluminum chassis with a convenient 2-in-1 design and a handy stylus slot. It may not be as lightweight as the ThinkPad X1 Carbon or as alluring as the ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga, but the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 could just be the best overall package of the trio.
See our full Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga (Gen 6) review.
It’s amazing what a new heart can do for a laptop. The latest MacBook Air ushers in a new era for Apple with its custom-made M1 chip. Yes, Apple’s long-awaited transition away from Intel and into the ARMs of custom silicon has arrived, and the new chip blows us away.
I’ll start by saying the new MacBook Air is an improvement over the previous model in every way, bringing monumental performance and battery life enhancements. Those bold claims Apple made about the M1? They weren’t exaggerations. This MacBook Air out-muscles every laptop in its class while lasting a full day on a charge. And it does so with a fanless design, meaning the Air is pin-drop silent.
Along with record-setting performance, Apple Silicon adds iOS and iPadOS apps to the Mac App Store. You also get better webcam quality, and macOS Big Sur is a gorgeous redesign of Apple’s desktop OS. The new MacBook Air may have a few faults, but it’s the closest Apple has ever been to crafting the perfect laptop.
See our full MacBook Air with M1 review.
At long last, after months of rumors and speculation, the 14-inch MacBook is here and it’s sporting a ton of goodies as befitting its $2,899 price tag. The ultraportable brings back a cadre of useful ports while ditching the novel, but impractical Touch Bar. The miniLED screen is positively breathtaking as is the new, improved speaker system with its spatial audio capabilities. Although it’s still in beta, macOS Monterey runs like a dream and the laptop lasted over 14 hours on our battery test.
Apple estimates that the 14-inch MacBook Pro can last up to 17 hours of fullscreen video playback and 11 hours of wireless web browsing. This is due to the efficiency of the M1 Pro chip. When we ran the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness, the MacBook Pro lasted an impressive 14 hours and 8 minutes with the ProRes refresh rate enabled.
See our full Apple MacBook Pro 2021 (14-inch) review.
How to choose the laptops with best battery life for you
The Gram 14 2-in-1 we reviewed last year was no fluke. After a shaky entry to the laptop market, LG has proven that it can craft a laptop as good as any. The newest Gram 14 2-in-1 is the company’s best yet, boasting epic battery life and a lightweight design with military-grade durability — a big change from the flimsy paperweights LG sold just a few years back.
LG used to tout ridiculous battery life figures for earlier models. The outdated benchmarks the company used were so misleading that our real-world battery test often showed less than half the advertised endurance. So forgive us for rolling our eyes at the Gram 14 2-in-1’s claimed 20.5 hours of battery life. No, the Gram 14 doesn’t last for 20 hours — but it comes much closer than I expected. On our Laptop Mag battery test, the Gram 14 2-in-1 lasted for 14 hours flat.
See our LG Gram 14 2-in-1 (2020) review.
How we test the laptops with best battery life
We put each laptop through extensive benchmark testing — both synthetic and real-world — before they end up in the hands of our reviewers. We evaluate each aspect of the laptop, including its performance, battery life, display, speakers and heat management.
In our benchmark testing, we use a Klein K10 colorimeter to detect the brightness and sRGB color gamut of the laptop’s display. For performance testing, we run the laptop through a gauntlet of benchmarks, including Geekbench 4.3 and 5.0 and 3DMark professional graphics tests.
To determine real-world performance, we task the laptop to convert a 4K video to 1080p resolution and to duplicate a 4.97GB multimedia file. Our real-world graphics test is the Dirt 3 benchmark with medium settings at 1080p resolution.
We also run heat tests by playing a 15-minute full-screen video and measuring temperatures in different areas of the laptop. Last but not least, our battery test consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. For MacBooks and premium Windows 10 laptops, a runtime of over 9 hours is considered a good result whereas gaming laptops and workstations that can stay powered for longer than 5 hours deserve praise.
These tests are complemented with extensive hands-on testing from our reviewers who critique everything from the laptop’s materials to the feel of its touchpad.
