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When searching for the best laptops for battery life in your price range, you can't count on manufacturer claims about battery life: you need real data. That's why we put every laptop we review to the test and run them through multiple instances of our battery test, which tasks the laptop with endlessly surfing the web via Wi-Fi with its screen set to 150 nits of brightness, then timing how long it takes to run out of power.
This test gives us a decent idea of how long you can expect a laptop to last on a single charge while browsing the web. More importantly, it gives us a standard metric we can use to see how laptops stack up against each other in terms of power efficiency.
The quick list
Here's a brief overview of the laptops on this list, along with quick links that let you jump down the page directly to a review of whichever laptop catches your eye.
The Dell XPS 13 (2024) might be old, but it's our top recommendation for the best laptop for battery life, thanks to the power of Snapdragon X chips inside, which gives this portable powerhouse killer speed and nearly 21 hours of battery life in our testing.
The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x is a remarkably cheap laptop, yet it delivers good performance and amazing battery life in a slim, elegant chassis with a comfy keyboard. In our testing, it lasted for an astonishing 16 hours and 29 minutes.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro M4 Pro lasted nearly 21 hours in our testing. Plus, it's got plenty of ports and a lovely mini-LED display. And thanks to M4 Pro, it delivers astonishing performance. Truly an all-arounder.
The old MacBook Air M1 is showing its age, and it's not good for much besides work, browsing the web and light video editing. But it's the lightest laptop on this list, and it lasted over 14 hours in our battery test. Certainly worth considering.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 is a more portable version of its 16-inch sibling that lasted 18 hours in our battery tests. This is the long-lived laptop for anyone intimidated by the size of the 16-inch Pro.
The HP Omnibook X with its Snapdragon X chip lasted over 16 hours in our battery test. It's a fast Windows 11 ultraportable that can't match the XPS 13's OLED upgrade, but does come cheaper with a higher-res display. It's a great XPS alternative.
The best laptops for battery life you can buy today
Why you can trust Tom's Guide Our writers and editors spend hours analyzing and reviewing products, services, and apps to help find what's best for you. Find out more about how we test, analyze, and rate.
The longest-lasting laptop
The Dell XPS 13 (2024) looks identical to the Dell XPS 13 Plus but it sports a Snapdragon X Elite chip that gives it excellent performance and an incredible 20-hour (well, technically 19 hours 41 minutes in our testing) battery life. It's one of the longest-lasting consumer laptops we've ever tested at Tom's Guide and one of the best Windows laptops you can buy right now.
If you can get past this laptop's controversial design, which features a function row of capacitive LED-lit keys and no visible touchpad, you'll find a reliable ultraportable that can handle almost anything you throw at it. Its 13.4-inch display delivers good picture quality, and once you get used to the tightly packed keys, you'll find a pleasant typing experience. Best of all, this laptop starts at $1,299, which is an excellent value for what you get.
Read our full Dell XPS 13 (2024).
The best budget
While it isn't a perfect laptop, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x offers fantastic battery life and solid performance at a price that's tough to beat. If you can find it on sale, it's a serious bargain. This laptop would be an especially good pick for students and casual users, but it probably isn't the right choice for power users and gamers.
If you're looking for a sub-$1,000 laptop that will easily last all day on a single charge, the IdeaPad Slim 3x could be perfect for you. Its battery life is impressive enough that it outweighs less significant drawbacks like a lackluster display and quiet speakers. It's hard to find battery life this long at such a low price, so that alone makes the IdeaPad Slim 3x stand out.
While its drawbacks might be deal-breakers for some, if battery life and price are your top concerns, the IdeaPad Slim 3x could be the perfect choice.
Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x review.
The longest-lasting MacBook
The MacBook Pro 16-inch (M4 Pro, 2024) delivers some of the best performance we've seen in a laptop of this size thanks to Apple's new M4 Pro chip. Design-wise, things remain relatively similar, including the Space Black finish that's designed to prevent fingerprints. Most importantly for our purposes though, the M4 Pro chip allowed the new MacBook Pro 16-inch to last for 20 hours and 46 minutes in our battery life test.
This MacBook Pro also impressed us with its 16.2-inch Liquid Retina Display that remains as gorgeous as ever, while its 120Hz ProMotion refresh rate made everything run smoothly including games.
In terms of ports, there are two Thunderbolt 5/USB-C ports and a headphone jack on the left as well as another Thunderbolt 5/USB-C port, an HDMI port and an SD card slot on the right. While its M4 Max counterpart offers more raw computational power, this M4 Pro model is a more affordable option, though it's still pretty expensive.
Read our full MacBook Pro 16-inch (M4 Pro, 2024) review.
The best value
The MacBook Air was always the best MacBook for most people, and even though it's getting on in years it's still a great little laptop that offers 14+ hours of tested battery life.
The reason is the enduring strength of the M1 chip, which gives this plucky ultraportable enough power to tackle whatever day-to-day tasks you throw at it.
The MacBook Air's webcam is also quite good, as the M1 chip provides signal processing tricks to improve clarity and color accuracy. And, of course, the Magic Keyboard ensures you enjoy a comfy typing experience. #section-a-more-portable-pro-with great-battery-life
Read our full MacBook Air with M1 review.
A more portable Pro with great battery life
It couldn't last quite as long in our battery tests as its 16-inch sibling, but the new 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 is still an all-star performer that lasted 18 hours in our testing lab. It looks good doing it too, thanks to the 14-inch mini-LED Liquid Retina XDR display, and in our lab tests, we saw that its display is even brighter than its predecessor.
This latest model sports three Thunderbolt 4 ports. And as before, this laptop has MagSafe charging, an SD card slot, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack.
During the Tom's Guide battery test, the MacBook Pro M4 lasted an epic 18 hours while continually surfing the web at 150 nits of screen brightness. Its keyboard remains unchanged, and its power button continues to integrate a Touch ID button for easy logins.
Read our full MacBook Pro 14-inch (M5, 2025) review.
The best XPS alternative
The HP OmniBook X is a no-nonsense Windows 11 productivity ultraportable that's powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chips, ensuring it delivers great performance and lasted over 18 hours in our battery life test.
That's incredible endurance that, alongside the 19+ hours earned by the Dell XPS 13 atop this list, prove Windows laptops can once again compete with MacBooks in terms of battery life.
But the list of Windows laptops that can last this long on a full charge is still short, so I recommend the OmniBook X here mostly as an alternative to the XPS 13 for Windows fans. The XPS 13 lasts longer on a full charge and can be upgraded with an OLED display, while the OmniBook X cannot.
However, the OmniBook X is a bit cheaper than the XPS 13 and comes with a larger, higher-res screen by default. Also, it doesn't have the smooshed-together keyboard that you find on the XPS 13. During our review we liked it less than the OLED option on the XPS 13, but if you're buying entry-level screens I think the OmniBook X still has the edge.
Read our full HP OmniBook X review.
Battery life test results
If you made it this far, you know battery life is one of the key things to look at when deciding which laptop to buy, which is why we run every laptop we review through a series of battery tests to see how long it lasts on a full charge.
These tests do not reflect real-world use patterns since we have to set every laptop to the same settings in order to do fair comparisons. Thus, while the times listed here are accurate and useful as a comparison point, your own experience with a laptop's battery life will likely vary.
This is because when we run our battery test, we set the laptop's display to 150 nits of brightness and have it endlessly browse the web via Wi-Fi until it dies. However, when you use your laptop, you're likely adjusting brightness on the fly, doing all sorts of different tasks while perhaps listening to music or watching a video at the same time, and generally putting the machine through more of a workout than it gets in our test.
So while I stand by our testing and the battery life results we compare in the chart below, I want to be clear that your own experience will vary!
Laptop | Battery life (hh:mm) |
MacBook Pro 16-inch M4 Pro | 20:46 |
Dell XPS 13 (2024) | 19:41 |
MacBook Pro 14-inch M5 | 18:00 |
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x | 16:29 |
HP OmniBook X | 16:22 |
MacBook Air M1 | 14:41 |
Also tested
How to choose the right long-lasting laptop for you
What kind of power do you need? Forget about battery power for a minute — what kind of performance do you need from your new laptop? If you only need something basic for surfing the web, consider the MacBook Air M1: it's not fancy or new, but you can get one for cheap, and they're still plenty good enough for surfing the web. But if you want to get work done, something nicer like the XPS 13 or MacBook Pro M5 might be easier on you. And if you need raw power, the MacBook Pro M4 Pro is the way to go.
What kind of games do you want to play? Most mainstream laptops (including nearly everything on this list) feature integrated graphics, which can handle lightweight titles such as Minecraft and Fortnite but aren't ideal for graphically demanding games or heavy visual work. For that, you'll want a laptop with a discrete graphics card (which typically have terrible battery life) or a MacBook Pro, which doesn't support as many games as a Windows machine but has more than enough power to run many at great framerates.
Do you want macOS or Windows? Once upon a time, Chromebooks were the industry leaders in battery life, but nowadays it's Macs and Windows machines leading the pack. So the main thing to decide if you want the best battery life is, Mac or Windows?
The Windows laptops with the best battery life are currently Snapdragon laptops, which means they're powered by Qualcomm's ARM chips and thus have some compatibility issues with select software. The top MacBooks all run on Apple silicon and have good software support for everything except games, which are more hit-and-miss on Apple's laptops.
Whichever system you decide on, you may also want to consider investing in the best mouse and best keyboard for your needs so you can have some more ergonomic options for working on your new laptop.
How we test the best laptops for battery life
To find the best laptop, we run every machine through a rigorous suite of benchmarks and real-world tests to gauge how it will perform during everyday use.
We measure the average brightness and color quality of each laptop's display using our in-house light meter and colorimeter. For general performance, we run our machines through tests that include Geekbench 6 (CPU performance), as well as various 3DMark tests to measure graphics capabilities.
We also run a file transfer test to measure how fast a machine's hard drive is, and our custom battery test that has the machine browse the internet over Wi-Fi until it runs out of juice.
