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. Not too long 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. Today, though, swappable batteries are just a memory. Still, many thin ultraportables with sealed-shut chassis show impressive endurance away from an AC outlet.
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 nearly good enough to make it to the upper echelons today. With the exception of our gaming-laptop pick, each of the laptops and 2-in-1s we've selected lasted for more than 15 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.)
Below are our picks for the longest-lasting laptops. While battery life is, of course, the chief measurement here, our selections still lean toward laptops that we can recommend overall, not just those with the longest possible runtimes. Read on for a breakdown of our favorite tested models, as well as a rundown of what to look for while shopping for a high-stamina system. Side-by-side specs for each of our top picks (including their tested battery life) are in a table at the bottom of this article.
Modern 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 current 13th Generation Core processors, which power some of the longest-lasting models on our list. Some of the systems here still use the chip maker's previous 11th and 12th Generation CPUs, which steadily took over laptops released in 2021 and 2022. Intel and AMD alternatives, like Apple's M1 and M2 series as well as Qualcomm's Snapdragons, have made a noticeable showing, too.
(Credit: Molly Flores)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 a specific test movie on a loop, 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.
(Credit: Molly Flores)What Designs of Laptops Have the Longest Battery Life?
Our top-laptops list is stacked with traditional laptops and convertible designs with 360-degree display hinges. Detachable Windows tablets tend to be underrepresented, and for good reason: There's simply no room for a large battery in such a small enclosure. The best of these, like Microsoft's Intel-based Surface Pro 9, tend to run around 12 hours.
"Traditional laptops" doesn't always mean big laptops, though: You will find plenty of these laptop and convertible picks to be relatively thin and light. Advancements in chassis design, Windows settings, and processor architecture allow for thin-and-light laptops to squeeze more life out of their batteries than ever. A long-lasting battery absolutely doesn't have to mean a big laptop.
Of course, no matter what kind of laptop you're in the market for, you can always add a few minutes or a few hours to your unplugged time by changing your computing habits. It's a bit like driving more conservatively to save gas. For some ideas, take a look at our tips for improving your laptop's battery life.
Want the Best Battery Life? Also Consider a Mac
Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro lineups have a reputation for excellent battery endurance, and Cupertino's current offerings are no exception. Most of the portable Macs we've tested recently can manage more than 18 hours away from an outlet, but the newest releases last even longer.
The 2020 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, running on Apple's own M1 processor, both lasted for more than 20 hours on our video rundown test. (The M1 MacBook Air ran for an incredible 29 hours.) Which one you should choose depends on your budget, your portability needs, and your usage patterns, but you can't go wrong on the battery-life front with either Apple ultraportable. The 2021 bigger-screen M1 Pro and M1 Max models also hit similar marks, and Apple went from strength to strength. The 2022 13-inch MacBook Pro ran for 21 hours, and the 2023 16-Inch MacBook Pro with M2 Max ran for just under 27 hours.
(Credit: Molly Flores)Other manufacturers are more hit-and-miss. The top honors for battery life among Intel-based Windows laptops in the last several years went to the first generation of the Asus ExpertBook B9450 (30 hours in our video rundown!), but many competing machines expire much more quickly. We're also seeing an emerging class of "always on" machines based on low-power Qualcomm Snapdragon processors that have outlasted most Intel-based Windows and macOS laptops we have tested. (See for example our review of the Lenovo Flex 5G or the SQ3 version of the Microsoft Surface Pro 9.) But know that these laptops are meant more for lightweight mobile computing with a continuous internet connection, and are far from power-user models meant for CPU muscle work.
So, What Are the Laptops With the Longest Battery Life?
If you have a long plane flight (of course, that's been way less common for lots of folks since the pandemic upended the world) or a spate of working outdoors ahead of you, or if you're just too busy to linger around a power outlet for long enough, any of these laptops will keep you productive throughout the day and into the evening. For a look at the wider laptop landscape, check out our very latest laptop reviews, as well as our picks for the top business notebooks and the best budget laptops.
