How long a laptop lasts on its internal battery is one of the most important considerations for PC shoppers. Business travelers and students are often at the mercy of their computer’s remaining juice, since so many conference rooms, aircraft, and lecture halls are woefully short on accessible power outlets. Just a few years ago, it was necessary to buy and charge an external battery pack to get long battery life, or to insist on a machine with a removable, swappable battery. But today, even many thin ultraportables with sealed-shut chassis show impressive endurance away from an AC outlet.
These recent improvements in laptop battery life are thanks to CPUs and other components that are more power-efficient than ever. (It’s not just battery technology that deserves the credit.) That’s especially true of Intel’s newest Core processors, which power many of the longest-lasting models currently on our list. Some of the systems here use the chip maker’s previous 10th Generation CPUs, but 11th Generation chips are starting to take over in laptops released through 2021. Alternatives from Apple (the Apple M1) and Qualcomm’s Snapdragons are starting to make a showing, too.
A laptop that can last for more than eight hours without a trip to a power plug should be enough to get you through a day’s work, but that’s not good enough to make it to the upper echelons today. Each of the laptops and 2-in-1s we’ve selected lasted for more than 19 hours on our tests, which means that they can survive a full day of work (whether that’s at home or in an office) and still offer plenty of juice for your commute or for watching videos on the couch. (Maybe both.)
In addition to being a critical specification, battery life is one of the toughest to measure. If you’re watching movies all day long, you’ll get far more unplugged time than someone who’s editing images nonstop in Photoshop. We test battery life based on a very specific scenario: watching movies stored locally at 50% screen brightness and with airplane mode turned on. If you’re frequently performing more CPU-intensive or graphics-hammering tasks, you’ll want to shave an hour or two off of our results.