The Best Battery Life Laptops for 2024

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Some users depend on a laptop's battery more than others—but how long a notebook endures unplugged is a measurement no shopper should ignore. Even powerful workstations and gaming laptops, once lucky to last an hour or two away from a wall socket, can now get you through close to a workday with ordinary tasks. (Ultraportables run anywhere from 12 to 20 hours or more.) At PC Labs, we've been testing laptops for decades, running rigorous, repeatable tests on each of the 100-plus machines we review yearly. PCMag's expert laptop reviewers run a standardized battery-rundown test, a host of CPU and graphics performance benchmarks, and screen-quality trials on each machine. The aim? To craft authoritative recommendations and insights before you buy. The Acer Aspire 3 is the current best battery-life laptop for the lowest price, and the Snapdragon X-based Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 the longest-running mainstream laptop, but keep reading for other excellent, long-lasting choices, a detailed spec comparison, and key buying advice.

Modern improvements in laptop battery life are largely thanks to CPUs and other more power-efficient components; it's not just battery technology that deserves the credit. That's especially true of Intel and AMD's latest processors (especially the AI-centric Intel Core Ultra chips), which power some of the longest-lasting models on our list. Intel and AMD alternatives, like Apple's M series and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X, demonstrate lengthy battery life, too.

Battery life is a critical specification but one of the toughest to measure. If you're watching movies all day, you'll get far more unplugged time than someone editing images nonstop in Photoshop.  And how long a notebook will run without being plugged into a power outlet varies wildly depending not just on what it's doing—playing a game, browsing the web, writing emails, or whatever—but also on factors such as its screen resolution (more pixels to illuminate will drain the battery faster), brightness setting, and battery capacity.

Thus, an extremely important point: Any battery life test we do is a test of relative battery potential. We test battery life in something of a best-case scenario for battery longevity based on a particular 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 several hours off of our results. If that's all you do, it will be shorter still.

Again, look at our battery results not as absolutes but as relative measures of what a given machine can do versus other machines in an optimal, low-impact battery situation.

What Designs of Laptops Have the Longest Battery Life?

Our top laptop list is stacked with traditional laptops and convertible hybrid designs. Detachable Windows tablets tend to be underrepresented, and for good reason: You have simply no room for a large battery in such a small enclosure. The best of these, like the Snapdragon-based Microsoft Surface Pro, run around 14 hours. Some convertibles, like the HP Spectre x360 14 (2024), use a rotating hinge rather than a detachable keyboard.

"Traditional laptops" don't always mean big laptops, though: You will find plenty of these laptops and convertible picks to be relatively thin and light. Advancements in chassis design, Windows settings, and processor architecture allow thin-and-light laptops to squeeze more life out of their batteries than ever. A long-lasting battery doesn't have to mean a heavy laptop, even in those with larger screens.

Of course, no matter what laptop you're in the market for, you can always add a few minutes or hours to your unplugged time by changing your computing habits. It's a bit like driving more conservatively to save gas. For some ideas, look at our tips for improving your laptop's battery life.

Want the Best Battery Life? Consider a MacBook, or Windows on Arm

Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro lineups have a reputation for excellent battery endurance, and Cupertino's current offerings are no exception. Most portable Macs we've tested recently can manage more than 18 hours away from an outlet, but the newest releases last even longer.

The original M1 MacBook Air ran for an incredible 29 hours in our battery rundown test. Which one you should choose depends on your budget, portability needs, and usage patterns, but you can't go wrong on the battery-life front with either Apple ultraportable. The 2023 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro with M3 Pro set the bar at more than 30 hours, while the 2024 M4 and M4 Pro models came in a few hours under that mark.

Other manufacturers are more hit-and-miss, depending on the model and processor. Intel's latest Core Ultra processors consistently land around the 20-hour mark, but it depends on the category of laptop you're looking at. Qualcomm's emerging Snapdragon X processors can last even longer and can match (or beat) Apple's machines at the 30-hour-and-beyond mark. These AI-centric chips have been showing up in the first wave of what have been dubbed Copilot+ PCs, made in cooperation with Microsoft.

You won't see them in all types of laptops quite yet, though. They are mostly in premium ultraportables so far, with a few exceptions. But they (and similarly long battery running times) should become more common as time passes. Just know that, as Arm-architecture CPUs, they run on a variant of Windows 11 dubbed Windows 11 on Arm (WoA), and some Windows programs do not run natively, or at all, on WoA. Check for compatibility for your key apps before going the Snapdragon/WoA route. (We tested a bunch of apps with WoA soon after Snapdragon X's launch; some need to run in emulation.)

Ready to Buy the Right Long-Life Laptop for You?

If you have a long plane flight, a stretch 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 broader laptop landscape, check out our latest laptop reviews and our picks for the top business notebooks and the best budget laptops.