2017 Guide: Top 12 Notebooks With the Best Battery Life
What is the most important aspect of notebook computers? Typists can pick up keyboards and keep looking for desktop travel and haptic feedback. Multimedia enthusiasts like large color monitors and symphonic speakers. Hardcore players value the original performance, measure at a fast frame rate, and most importantly.
But for most of us, the best thing about a portable PC is, well, its portability—the time it can spend away from an electrical outlet. That’s why, big or small, the most desirable laptops are the those with the best battery life. This guide will clue you in to notebook battery technology, capacity, and smart usage, and link to reviews of 12 overachievers in Computer Shopper’s tests.
The Basics
The goal for laptop manufacturers and buyers alike is “all-day” battery life, defined not as 24 hours of running time but as lasting through an eight-hour workday or longer.
We don’t count systems that can reach that mark by swapping batteries—removing a spent one and snapping a spare into place. Still, as you shop, it’s worth looking for laptops with removable batteries that at least give you the option of buying a spare, as virtually all notebooks used to. Having inaccessible internal batteries is the trend with more and more laptops nowadays. (The few that still offer removable batteries tend to be business-centric machines.)
At this writing in mid-2017, our single-battery record holder was the Lenovo ThinkPad X260$881.10 at Lenovo business ultraportable, when equipped with its 72-watt-hour swappable battery. It endured for over 23 hours of runtime in Computer Shopper’s standard battery test. (That consists of looping an MP4 video on constant playback with screen brightness at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the battery dies.) Another seminal Lenovo ThinkPad business machine, was the second-place model, also tested when using a specific oversize swappable battery (Lenovo’s “extended battery”). The ThinkPad T460 cranked out a whopping 21 hours and 30 minutes of runtime when we tested the latest version with its biggest Lenovo thinkpad t60 laptop battery in late 2016.
Note, though, that the above models have recently been supplanted by the ThinkPad X270$881.10 at Lenovo and ThinkPad T470$1,231.65 at Lenovo. These newer models also posted epic run times, if not as long as the models they are replacing. But because the newer models are the ones you’ll increasingly find in stock online and in stores, and stock of the previous models will dwindle, we’re listing the newer ones below.
Other recent long-enduring machines include the Microsoft Surface Book (2016)$1,899.00 at Amazon, which is a detachable 2-in-1 model that we tested in Core i7 trim. It hauled along for a bit more than 19 hours in our video-playback test, thanks to its two integral batteries, one behind the detachable screen portion and one in the keyboard base. Just a few minutes shy of that machine, and still above 19 hours, was Lenovo’s 360-degree-rotating flagship 2-in-1.
Now, these are extreme endurance machines. We’re starting to see, however, a bunch of premium mainstream machines clustering in the 14-to-16-hour range. These include the most recent versions we’ve tested of the HP EliteBook x360 1030 G2, the Dell XPS 13$949.55 at Amazon (the “Kaby Lake” Core i5 model we tested in late 2016), and the Apple MacBook (2017). Also in the same range, we’ve recorded some lusty Dell Xps m1330 Battery numbers from a few “Cherry Trail” Intel Atom-based detachable 2-in-1s, like the Asus Transformer Mini T102H$384.00 at Amazon.
Because the Transformer is primarily a Windows tablet, not a true laptop, we’ve left it out of the list below. There are so many extremely long-lasting laptops these days that we’re being increasingly strict about what makes the cut, lest this list turn into an unwieldy top 25.
Battery Types & Tech
Two main types of laptop batteries are in use today. The more common lithium-ion batteries tend to come in traditional cylindrical or rectangular cell shapes; lithium-polymer, in contrast, is more expensive and can be shaped freely to fit into smaller spaces inside a notebook. Bigger laptops tend to rely on big, heavy blocks of lithium-ion. The 2-pound Apple MacBook was an early pioneer (in the original 2015 MacBook) in packing its frame with thin sheets of lithium-polymer, filling every nook and cranny and yielding, in that laptop’s case, over 15.5 hours in its 2017 “Kaby Lake” Core m3 iteration$1,149.00 at Amazon we tested most recently.
Battery capacity is typically measured in watt-hours (Wh). If you find one laptop advertised as having a 45Wh battery and another with a 37Wh, you can assume the former will last longer—if they have similar specs, including processor, screen size, screen type, maximum brightness, native resolution, and type of storage. However, it’s rarely the case that all those things (or even most of them) line up across devices. It’s almost impossible to make an apples-to-apples battery-life comparison of, say, a 13.3-inch, 1,366×768-resolution Core i3 laptop and a 15.6-inch, 4K-resolution Core i7 system. That’s why lab-based, authoritative testing and reviews like ours are crucial when assessing battery claims. There are just too many slippery factors.
Even there, sometimes similar systems will surprise you. As an example, back in 2015, the HP Stream 11 and Asus EeeBook X205TA were both Windows compacts meant to compete with Chromebooks, with 11.6-inch screens, small solid-state drives, and nearly matching HP pavilion dv2000 batteries(37Wh and 38Wh, respectively). But the EeeBook’s Intel Atom tablet-grade CPU was more battery-friendly than the Stream’s Celeron processor, so the Asus lasted 12:21 to the HP’s 9:23 in our tests. That’s not always a reliable yardstick, though: In contrast, the also-similar, Celeron-based Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 surprised us by lasting just shy of 14 hours, and that with a much larger (though fairly dim) 14-inch screen. So: testing, testing, and testing.
Indeed, processor differences can have a large effect in otherwise similar systems. (So can screen resolutions; more on that in a bit.) That’s why units with low-power-consumption, less muscular CPUs like Atoms and Celerons can deliver very good battery life even while the system is inexpensive. Likewise, Intel’s Core M processor line (which has been partly subsumed into the Core i5 and Core i7 line, in chips with “7Y” in the name, starting late 2016) is built to eke out extra battery life compared to fuller-fat Core i3, i5, and i7 chips. We’ve seen some impressive results from Core M—more than 12 hours, for example, out of the Core m5-based Yoga 900S$949.00 at Lenovo.
To reiterate: It’s worth checking individual reviews for any model you are considering. The power-draining interplay of battery size, hard drive, processor, and display make it hard to predict actual battery life without formal testing.
Tips: Extending Battery Life
So, how can you squeeze more minutes from a battery that’s running low, or buy a machine whose options keep battery life in mind? Checking out formal reviews that feature defensible battery-life testing is key, but these usage and shopping tips will help, too.
BE SELECTIVE. When they are not in use, switch off power-sapping features you don’t need, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and keyboard backlighting. Activating a laptop’s “power save” or “eco” mode may automate some of these settings. All of these draw energy to some degree, sometimes even if you think they’re not; for example, if the Wi-Fi is not connected to a network, it’ll likely be polling constantly for a connection, which still takes juice.
TAKE IT EASY ON THE BRIGHTNESS AND AUDIO. Dial down the screen backlighting—something between 50 and 60 percent is usually perfectly legible indoors, but offers considerable savings over full brightness—and reduce or mute the sound, especially if your laptop has loud speakers.
ONE THING AT A TIME. Reduce the number of apps or processes running in the background; multitasking is a strain on your battery.
OPT FOR A LOWER-RES SCREEN. Sure, that 4K (3,840×2,160 resolution) display on a recent-model laptop looks great, especially with the brightness cranked all the way up. But unless you have eagle-like vision or you’re watching movies with your face just a few inches from your screen, you won’t actually see all the detail those tiny pixels are pushing. And a 4K panel has four times as many pixels as a 1080p (1,920×1,080) panel; those extra pixels are a serious drain on battery life. Sticking to 1080p (or even 1,366×768) will let you go much longer between pit stops at the power plug, all else being equal.
SKIP THE TOUCH SCREEN. Of course, if you opt for a 2-in-1 convertible, you can’t ditch the touch screen; touch is in these machines’ very nature. But if you’re in the market for a traditional laptop that offers both touch and non-touch displays (like the Dell XPS 13), going with a non-touch model may add significantly to battery life. As convenient as it can be to reach out and tap a dialog button or scroll down a Web page with your finger on a screen, adding touch to a screen means a whole other layer of always-on electronics that are constantly waiting for your finger to tap or swipe the glass. If you use touch only occasionally, it’s not worth the drain on battery life—especially if battery longevity is one of your main priorities.
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