The 34-Hour Laptop Is Here. Here’s Why Battery Life Has Exploded in Recent Years

Laptop performance ticks up with each new generation of processor. Generally speaking, you can expect this year’s laptops to be incrementally faster than those of the year before. With a new laptop, that might mean apps open a hair quicker, and multitasking feels a little snappier. Creators might see render times decrease by a few seconds, while gamers might eke out a few more frames per second. 

These performance gains are generally small year to year, which is why the jumps we’ve seen in laptop battery life over the past few years are so jarring. It hasn’t just increased by a few minutes here and there. No, our proprietary CNET Lab data resulting from quantitative product testing shows that laptop battery life has increased by leaps and bounds over the past six years — and especially this year.

As you’ll see in the battery life charts below, the first big jump in battery life occurred when Apple’s M1 MacBook Air made its debut at the start of the decade. And over the first half of this year, we’ve seen the biggest spike in battery life yet.

Key takeaways:

• Average battery life has increased by more than 5 hours this year and nearly doubled since the start of the decade.
• We’ve tested 22 laptops with more than 20 hours of battery life and nine that lasted more than 24 hours.
• The laptop with the best battery life lasted more than 34 hours in our battery drain test.
• The longest-lasting MacBook we tested ran for 24.5 hours.
• Apple and HP are the best laptop brands for the longest battery life.
• Mobile processors from Apple, Qualcomm and Intel power the laptops with the best battery endurance.

Not to conjure up images of bursting batteries, but there’s no other way to say it: Laptop battery life has exploded in recent years. 

What’s behind this explosion in laptop battery life? In this Labs Exclusive, I’ll explain why laptop battery life has improved so much in recent years, how CNET tests a laptop’s battery and which current laptops offer the best battery life.

Big gains in laptop battery life

Starting with that first MacBook Air with Apple’s own M-series silicon through the M3 MacBook Pro in 2023, Apple’s MacBooks were the longest-lasting laptops we tested. However, with the arrival of Microsoft Copilot Plus PCs, powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X-series processors, in 2024, Windows laptops have wrested back the battery-life crown. 

For the past three years, an HP OmniBook with a Snapdragon X series processor has had the longest battery life. In 2024, the longest-lasting laptop we tested ran for more hours than there are in a day: The OmniBook X 14 lasted over 25 hours. That number jumped to more than 28 hours in 2025. And earlier this year, an HP OmniBook lasted more than 34 hours on a single charge on our battery drain test. 

And it’s not just Qualcomm Snapdragon X-based laptops delivering astounding battery life. The last two generations of Intel processors have shown huge gains in efficiency. We’ve tested laptops with Intel Lunar Lake and Panther Lake processors that offer all-day battery life, lasting more than 24 hours on our battery drain test.

Simply put, today’s laptops last longer. The average laptop battery life so far this year is nearly 17.5 hours. That’s five hours longer than last year’s average and nearly double the roughly 8 to 9 hours we saw from 2020 to 2023. If you go back further, to the last three years of the last decade, the average laptop we tested failed to last 8 hours on a single charge. Laptop battery life has more than doubled in the past 10 years and has really accelerated this year.

More efficient mobile processors

Laptop batteries haven’t gotten any bigger (they actually can’t because of airline regulations), and battery technology hasn’t changed much in recent years. What has changed are laptop processors. They’ve gotten smaller and more efficient, and in the case of Apple’s and Qualcomm’s chips, they’re based on an architecture other than the traditional x86 instruction set that’s been at the heart of Intel processors since the dawn of the PC era.

Apple’s run of battery-life winners started when it shifted from Intel processors to its own M-series chips. Apple’s M-series processors are based on the Arm architecture, a power-efficient chip architecture found in phones and tablets. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series processors are also Arm-based, and they can be found in the two longest-running laptops we’ve tested.

The fundamental difference between Arm and x86 is their instruction set architectures. The x86 chips from Intel and AMD rely on complex instruction set computing to perform calculations. CISC is capable of performing multiple tasks in one cycle by issuing complex instructions, but these instructions are intricate and difficult to decode and execute. 

In contrast, Arm chips use reduced instruction set computing architecture. Compared with x86, they use much simpler instructions that are easier and faster to decode, which allows Arm chips to be more power-efficient. The trade-off is that more instructions are often required for the same task, which has traditionally limited performance.

But with Apple now in its fifth generation with its M5-based MacBooks and Qualcomm in its second generation with its Snapdragon X2 series, Arm chips are closing the performance gap with their x86 competition. At the same time, with Intel’s second-generation Lunar Lake and third-generation Panther Lake chips, x86-based laptops have made big strides in power efficiency and offer all-day battery life that’s near what you can expect from an Arm-based laptop. 

Whether Arm or x86, there are two more reasons behind greater processor efficiency and longer laptop battery life. For one, the size of a processor shrinks with every generation. Measured in nanometers, the smaller the number means the more tightly packed a processor’s components can be, which usually results in greater power efficiency. In short, the smaller a processor is, the less power is required to flip its tinier transistors on and off. 

To put some numbers on it, Intel’s previous-generation Lunar Lake chips were manufactured on a 3-nanometer process, and its current Panther Lake chips are 1.8nm. Intel was the first to move to a sub-2nm fabrication process. Qualcomm’s first-gen Snapdragon X series are 4nm chips, and its Snapdragon X2 series are 3nm chips. Apple has been on a 3nm process since the M3, and AMD’s latest Ryzen 400 series are 4nm chips.

In addition to getting smaller and more efficient, today’s mobile processors feature more flexible designs with a mix of performance and efficiency cores. A processor engages its higher-performance cores only when needed, using the efficiency cores for as many general, everyday tasks as possible, so your laptop stays cool and quiet and runs longer. Mobile CPUs also employ neural processing units, which are low-power processors designed to handle AI tasks to lessen the load on a laptop’s higher-powered CPU.

Laptops with the longest battery life

It wasn’t too long ago that getting half a day of battery life was cause for celebration. In 2021, the longest-lasting Windows laptop we tested was the HP Spectre x360 14 at 14 hours and 22 minutes. The time actually dipped the following year, with the LG Gram 16 2-in-1 lasting the longest at 12 hours and 47 minutes before rebounding in 2023 to 14.5 hours with the HP Dragonfly G4. 

None of these Windows laptops in the early part of the decade could match the first MacBook with an Apple M-series processor. Released in 2020, the MacBook Air set the laptop battery life mark at 15 hours and 33 minutes. 

Then in 2022, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Apple’s M2 chip became the first laptop we’ve tested to eclipse the 20-hour mark, lasting 20 hours and 53 minutes. The next year, the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Max processor extended Apple’s lead in laptop battery life by running for more than 21 hours on a single charge.

In the summer of 2024, Qualcomm released its Snapdragon X series of laptop processors, and Windows laptops surged ahead of MacBooks to claim the title of longest-lasting laptop. We’ve seen a run of HP laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processors continue to set records, starting in 2024 with the HP OmniBook X 14. It was the first laptop to last longer than a day on battery power, lasting more than 25 hours.

The next year, the HP OmniBook 5 14 ran for more than 28 hours. And earlier this year, the HP OmniBook 3 16 shattered the record by running and running and running and not stopping until it had run for more than 34 hours.

Saying it has all-day battery life is an insult! It can run for nearly a day and a half on a single charge. No one needs to use a laptop on battery power for 34 straight hours — if you do, you might think about changing jobs — but having such lengthy battery life gives the luxury of leaving the power cord at home, taking the laptop with you for an entire day and into the night and not needing to worry about opening a dead laptop.

Intel has made huge strides in processor efficiency with its last two generations of chips, the Core Ultra 200 series developed under the name Lunar Lake and the Core Ultra 300 series, also known as Panther Lake. In 2024, the Acer Swift 14 AI got Intel in the ballpark of all-day battery life when it lasted more than 22 hours. 

Last year, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition became the first Intel laptop to last longer than a day, running for 25 hours and 45 minutes in testing. It’s still the longest-running Intel laptop we’ve tested, but the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Plus with Intel’s next-gen Core Ultra X7 358H processor came close with a time of 25 hours and 18 minutes.

Wondering where AMD laptops are in this discussion? With Windows laptop manufacturers favoring Intel and Qualcomm processors, the number of AMD laptops we’ve tested in the past few years is minuscule by comparison. And the few AMD laptops we’ve tested in recent years haven’t been competitive with the luxuriously long battery life we’ve seen from other Windows laptops based on Intel and Qualcomm chips, or MacBooks with Apple’s M-series chips.

How we test laptop battery life

Many factors can affect a laptop’s battery life, from the type of its processor and the size of its battery to the type and resolution of its display and most definitely the brightness you’re using. It may seem counterintuitive that larger laptops generally last longer than smaller models, but they have room for a larger battery. 

That’s the biggest reason why the 16-inch HP OmniBook 3 16 is the longest-running laptop we’ve ever tested, and Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro is the longest-running MacBook. Having the room to house a larger battery outweighs the hit of having to power a larger display.

A laptop’s display is the single biggest consumer of battery resources, but screen resolution plays a larger role than display size. The more pixels a laptop must power, the quicker the battery will drain. And the brighter you set those pixels, the faster you’ll drain the battery. 

To test a laptop’s battery, we stream a YouTube video until the battery dies. We set up each laptop the same for the test, disabling notifications and screen/sleep timeouts that might interfere with the test. We set the screen brightness to 50%, connect a pair of headphones to the laptop and set the volume to 50%. We also make sure the keyboard backlighting is turned off.

With the laptop set for the test, we start streaming a looped YouTube video over Wi-Fi in Chrome, unplug the laptop and let it run until it dies. We run this test twice, and if the two scores are within a reasonable distance from one another, we record the longer of the two runs. We use the built-in battery report tool in Windows to see how long the laptop lasted. For Macs, we use a third-party Battery Logger utility to record the battery life.

CNET uses this test because it more accurately represents current real-world laptop use than the other commonly used test, local video playback. Instead of streaming content over Wi-Fi, a video plays from the internal storage until the battery is drained. This typically results in a far longer battery life than you’re likely to get with regular use. Even our test isn’t perfect, though, because everyone uses a laptop differently. 

Long battery life doesn’t necessarily cost more

According to CNET’s laptop survey, speedier performance and longer battery life are the top two motivating factors for buying a new laptop. The good news for laptop shoppers seeking a lengthy battery life is that, unlike performance, you don’t necessarily need to spend more to get better battery life.

Generally speaking, higher performance comes at a higher price because you need to spend more for a more advanced processor, more memory and perhaps a dedicated graphics processor, and these components have never been more expensive. With battery life, however, an all-day life can be found just as easily in a budget laptop as a premium model.

Take the HP OmniBook 3 16, for example, which is the reigning battery life champ. The OmniBook 3 line is HP’s budget line of consumer laptops, below the mainstream OmniBook 5 series, premium OmniBook X and flagship OmniBook Ultra. And the HP OmniBook 3 16’s Snapdragon X X1-26-100 is Qualcomm’s entry-level CPU, below the mainstream Snapdragon X Plus and premium Snapdragon X Elite series.

The budget HP OmniBook 3 16, with its entry-level Snapdragon X processor, lasted nearly 6 hours longer than the mainstream HP OmniBook 5 14, with its Snapdragon X Plus, simply because the 16-inch OmniBook 3 has room for a larger battery than the 14-inch OmniBook 5. It uses a four-cell, 68-watt-hour battery compared with the smaller laptop’s three-cell, 59-watt-hour battery.

The story is a bit different with Apple’s MacBooks, where MacBook Pros have larger batteries than MacBook Airs. The 14-inch MacBook Pro has a 72.4-watt-hour battery, and the 15-inch MacBook Air has a  66.5-watt‑hour battery despite having the larger screen of the two. Meanwhile, the 16-inch MacBook Pro has the luxury of accommodating a 100-watt-hour battery. 

So, the more you spend on a MacBook, the larger the battery and the longer the battery life. Still, even the 13-inch MacBook Neo and its tiny-by-comparison 36.5-watt‑hour battery lasted roughly 13.5 hours in testing, which should get you through most days on a single charge.