How to Choose the Right Notebook
Get the Most Battery Life for Your Buck
How long a laptop is used on its internal battery is one of the most important considerations for PC shoppers. Business travelers and students are often constrained by the remaining energy of their computers because so many conference rooms, planes and classrooms sadly lack accessible power outlets. Just a few years ago, it was necessary to purchase and charge an external battery pack to gain long battery life, or stick to a machine with removable, replaceable batteries. But today, even many ultra-thin ultra-portable machines with sealed cases show impressive endurance away from AC sockets .
These recent improvements in laptop battery life are thanks to CPUs and other components that are more power-efficient than ever. (It’s not just new battery technology that deserves the credit.) That’s especially true of Intel’s 8th and 9th Generation Core processors, which power most of the longest-lasting models currently on our list.
A laptop that can last for more than eight hours without a trip to a power plug should be enough to get you through a day’s work, but that’s not good enough to make it to the upper echelons today. Each of the laptops and 2-in-1s we’ve selected lasted for more than 14 hours on our tests, which means that they can survive a full day at the office and still offer plenty of juice for your commute or for watching videos on the couch. (Maybe both.)
In addition to being a critical specification, battery life is one of the toughest to measure. If you’re watching movies all day long, you’ll get far more unplugged time than someone who’s editing images nonstop in Photoshop. We test Dell latitude d610 battery life based on a very specific scenario: watching movies stored locally at 50 percent 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 an hour or two off of our results.
Know Your Form Factor
Our top 10 list is stacked with traditional laptops and convertible designs with 360-degree display hinges. Detachable Windows tablets tend to be underrepresented, and for good reason: There’s simply no room for a large battery in such a small enclosure. One notable exception is the Microsoft Surface Book 2, which includes two separate batteries, one in the tablet and one in the keyboard base. Together, they eked out an impressive 17 hours of battery life in our testing, but you’ll get far less than that if you’re using the tablet by itself.
Want the Best Battery Life? Consider a Mac
Apple’s MacBook and MacBook Pro lineups have a reputation for excellent battery endurance, and Cupertino’s current offerings are no exception. Most of the portable Macs we’ve tested recently can manage more than 14 hours away from an outlet. Which one you should choose depends on your budget, your portability needs, and your usage patterns, but you can’t go wrong on the battery-life front with any Apple ultraportable. (And remember, Macs can run Windows, too.)
Other manufacturers are more hit-and-miss. The top honors for battery life among Intel-based Windows laptops of the moment go the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 (21 hours!), but many competing machines run down much more quickly. We’re also seeing an emerging class of “always on” machines based on low-power Qualcomm Snapdragon processors that have outlasted most Intel-based Windows and macOS laptops we have tested. But know that these laptops are meant more for lightweight mobile computing with a continuous internet connection, and are far from power models meant for CPU musclework.
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