Only the laptops with 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 13 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. A great laptop with single digit battery life is the HP Envy 14 (2021). A decent laptop with double digit battery life is the Huawei MateBook X Pro (2021). If you’re looking for a 2-in-1 business laptop, check out our Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s just something about a ZenBook. They’re beautiful, tend to be incredibly slim and lightweight, and thanks to Asus, have some ace up their digital sleeves. In the case of the Asus ZenBook 13 UX325EA ($999 reviewed, $949 starting), the secret sauce is Intel’s new Tiger Lake chips. Under Intel’s new Evo initiative, Intel Tiger Lake chips offer more powerful performance, longer battery life and the introduction of Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Plus, you get the added bonus of the ZenBook’s beautiful yet durable chassis.
Evo comes with a number of requirements for laptops to receive Intel’s certification. One of those is at least 9 hours of battery life for 1080p systems. The Asus ZenBook 13 exceeds those expectations, lasting 13 hours and 47 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness).
See our full Asus ZenBook 13 UX325EA review.
Picking the Acer Swift 5 up for the first time feels like there’s some kind of a magic trick being played on you as its weight simply does not align with the size of the object you are holding in your hand. You would almost think it’s hollow inside and yet, you have the remarkable new Intel Evo design, meaning this thin and light laptop is capable of delivering considerably more performance than before.
Paired with a vivid 1080p panel, up to 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM, all for $1,299 for the top-end model, the Acer Swift 5 is a remarkable achievement and a portable laptop that seems to avoid virtually every trade-off once associated with the thin-and-light laptop category. Depending on your usage, the Acer Swift 5 could get you through at least one and possibly two days on a single charge. It lasted 13 hours and 37 minutes in our official battery test, which involves continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness.
See our full Acer Swift 5 (Intel 11th Gen, 2020) review.
How to choose the laptops with best battery life for you
When it comes to choosing the laptops with best battery life for you, it all depends on what you’re going to use the laptop for. If you need a business laptop, then you’re in luck, the longest lasting laptop ever is the Dell Latitude 9410 2-in-1 (16:54). Need a consumer notebook or a 2-in-1 laptop? Then the HP Spectre x360 (13:20) has got you covered. Want a MacBook? Get the new 16-inch MacBook Pro (11:00).
If you’re looking for something more specific, like a gaming laptop — then, there’s only one choice you really have, and that’s the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (11:32). Need a Windows 10 video editing laptop? Easy, get the Dell XPS 15 (11:53). If you’re done with Windows and macOS, maybe try out a Chromebook. The longest lasting Chromebook is the Google Pixelbook Go (11:29). If you’re a fan of Lenovo, the longest lasting Lenovo laptop is the Yoga C630 (12:14).
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.
