26 hours of laptop battery life? Show me the receipt! “Uh-huh, of course!” we say sarcastically when laptop brands brag about their products’ “amazing” battery life. Forgive us here at Laptop Magazine for being skeptical—if you ‘ve been testing a bunch of laptops with minimal battery life, you’d be cynical, too.
Many laptops we’ve reviewed claim to have astronomical battery life. Unfortunately, most of the time our lab tests show these laptops running for a fraction of their advertised runtimes. For example, Lenovo claims the ThinkPad P72 has up to 18 hours of Lenovo ThinkPad P72 battery life . But our real-world testing found that the laptop failed after just 4 hours. Shh!
Top 2 laptop brands with advertised laptop battery life that matches our real-world testing
The only product that didn’t live up to the tech giant’s claims for MacBook Air battery life was the MacBook Air (2019) – in our testing, the device died after 8 hours and 51 minutes, while Apple claims it Can last for 12 hours Still, this small flaw doesn’t hide the fact that Apple’s battery life ads are the closest to our results — the Cupertino-based company ranked No. 1 in terms of how long its laptops lasted one. Can survive without life support.
On average, there was only a 48-minute difference between Apple’s advertised A pple’s laptops battery life and the battery life we actually tested. Let’s also give a round of applause to those Apple’s laptops that surprised us by exceeding our lab’s claimed battery life. Three Apple products — the 13-inch MacBook Pro (2019) and the 2018 and 2019 15-inch MacBook Pro — exceeded their advertised battery life of 10 hours.
The Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 also got 7 minutes more Dell XPS 13 2-in-1battery life than its claim (10 hours, 50 minutes) in our real-world battery life test.
As for Microsoft, the best way to describe my analysis of this Microsoft laptop brand’s battery life ads is “almost never enough.” Many Microsoft laptops come close to the 2.5-hour window, but not close enough.
For example, Microsoft claims its Surface Pro 7 can last 10.5 hours, but our lab results found the device only lasted 7 hours and 52 minutes. The product ran 8 minutes behind our allowed 2.5-hour window, so we had to flag it as not matching our actual battery test results. All six laptops we reviewed had several close calls similar to this one.
Microsoft came in second, but was definitely nowhere near Apple’s 48-minute average. The average difference between Microsoft and our lab results was 194 minutes, or 3 hours and 14 minutes.
Only one laptop logs in s Our Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 battery test used the 15-inch Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 for Business (Intel-equipped). The device claims to be able to stay powered for up to 11.5 hours, which is within our 2.5 -hour range, as our Microsoft Surface Laptop battery life result was 9 hours and 32 minutes.
suggest, Apple and Microsoft don’t use the MobileMark 2014 metric; both companies use their own internal testing benchmarks to estimate Laptop battery runtime. For HP, only two of the nine reviewed laptops matched our battery life test results: the HP Chromebook 14 ( advertised battery life of 10 hours and 15 minutes, test time of 9 hours and 18 minutes ) and HP 14 DF0023CL (advertised battery life of 14 minutes, tested at 6 hours and 12 minutes).
The remaining products are all labeled as such, but one has a battery life claim so weird we have to point it out. HP offers a ridiculous 22.5 hours of estimated HP Specter x360 battery life for the 13-inch HP Specter x360, and our real -world test results showed the laptop lasting 12 hours and 7 minutes. This is still very, very good; it’s nowhere near what’s advertised.
As for Lenovo, only 6 of the 18 laptops we reviewed (33%) fell within the 2.5-hour window we allowed to match our actual test results, while the other 12 were flagged. ThinkPad P72 takes the throne of longest battery life among Lenovo ThinkPad P72. It was advertised as having 18 hours of battery life, but it died after only 4 hours and 19 minutes!
Sure, you’ll initially attract a wave of buyers with exaggerated battery life claims, but that frenzy will gradually wane as disappointing feedback about laptops’ poor tlaptops’ battery life clouds the offending brand’s reputation.