The 5 best laptops for battery life in 2024

If you tend to travel a lot or aren’t around an electrical outlet, then you might get easily frustrated with the short battery life that a lot of laptops have. While there’s still some struggle in finding the best balance between battery life and internal specs, some laptops have done an excellent job of pushing battery life as far as it will go. So, to help you get the most out of your laptop without having to be tethered to an outlet constantly, we’ve collected some of the laptops with longer-lasting battery lives. There’s a good mix below, too, whether you want something for gaming, work, or just literally the longest battery life that’s possible, so be sure to check out each laptop in detail before committing.

The Best Laptops for Battery Life in 2024

• Buy the if you want the best overall laptop for battery life.
• Buy the if you want the best powerful laptop for battery life.
• Buy the if you want the best gaming laptop for battery life.
• Buy the if you want the best large-screen laptop for battery life.
• Buy the if you want the best Chromebook for battery life.

MacBook Air 13 M2

Best overall laptop for battery life

It’s probably no surprise to see the MacBook Air 13 at the top of this list, especially given how well-known it is for having an excellent battery life. While it’s not the best in terms of battery life, that would likely go to the MacBook Pro 16; it comes pretty close, with a whopping 21 hours worth under the hood, depending on how you use it. That trumps pretty much any Windows laptop and most Chromebooks, too, so it’s an impressive thing to manage, especially in such a small body.

The smaller body and high battery life don’t have a big impact on performance either since this configuration of the MacBook Air 13 has an M2 Chip under the hood. Granted, that’s an older generation chip at this point, but the performance parity between the M2 and the M3 isn’t that high, so you’re still getting a powerful device. That said, you’re still only relegated to 8GB of RAM, which is a little bit unfortunate for such a quality laptop, and the same goes for the 256GB storage, which will likely require you to spring for one of the external hard drive deals.

As for the screen, it’s a reasonably sized 13.6-inch one, running a 2560 x 1664 resolution on a gorgeous Liquid Retina display that can hit a whopping 500 nits of peak brightness. What’s equally impressive is that this doesn’t have any internal fans, so it basically runs silent, although that also means that it gets pretty hot when you’re taking advantage of its processing power. Unfortunately, it does only support one external monitor, but that’s not the end of the world, especially with some pretty great portable monitors out there.

MacBook Pro 16 M3 Pro

Best powerful laptop for battery life

While the MacBook Air 13 is great, it doesn’t have the sort of performance that you can get with one of the latest generation chips that Apple has to offer. That’s where this MacBook Pro 16 comes in since it not only has an M3 Pro chip, one of the best Apple has, but it also has a larger body that can fit a bigger battery. Granted, it’s not a huge difference, just adding an extra hour and bringing the potential up to 22 hours, but it’s still more, and if you’re looking for one of the most powerful laptops with the longest battery life, this is it.

Of course, it does cost a pretty penny if you want one, but it is perfect if you do a lot of graphical design and rending work, as well as any video editing, since it has some excellent performance in that regard. It also has a lot more RAM with a respectable 18GB, and an upgraded 512GB of storage, although you still might need a good external hard drive for that. Also, this one does have fans inside, and while it is a bit louder, it’s not perceptibly so, and even better, it doesn’t get as worryingly hot as the MacBook 13.

As for the screen, it is, of course, bigger at 16 inches and has an improved 3456 x 2234 resolution in a lovely Retina display, so it’s perfect for creatives who need good color reproduction. Plus, the 120Hz refresh rate gives you a better overall experience. Similarly, the keyboard and touchpad are some of the best in the industry, so they’re great to use if you plan to do a lot of typing, while the speakers are pretty good for watching content without needing to spring for a set of headphones.

ASUS TUF 15

Best gaming laptop for battery life

Here’s the thing: gaming laptops aren’t really well-known for having good battery life, and that’s mostly because GPUs like to drink electricity like it’s free and coming out of a power washer. As such, it’s hard to find a good gaming laptop with solid battery life, especially when gaming, but the Asus TUF does a pretty good job of it. In normal mode, when not gaming and just watching content, you can get about 11-12 hours out of it, which is thanks to the MUX switch, which helps optimize battery life by switching from the GPU to the onboard graphics processor.

When gaming, you’re still not going to get more than 2-3 hours on the battery life, and that’s due to the fact that the included graphics card, the RTX4070, draws quite a bit of power for its performance. That’s a solid 1440p graphics card, which is good since the Asus TUF 15 only has a 1920 x 1080  resolution on its 15.6-inch screen. That’s actually not a bad thing since it means you’ll be able to hit the 144Hz refresh rate much easier, even with higher-quality graphical settings.

In terms of CPU, you get an Intel Core i7-12700H, an equally solid mid-to-high-end processor that will handle most games and productivity tasks you throw in its general direction. It also comes with 16GB of DDR4 RAM, which is both good and bad since it’s an older generation, but it is easier to upgrade if you want to (and you might), so overall, it’s a neutral outcome. As for storage, the 1TB SSD is more than enough for most folks, even with how big modern games are, although you might have to do a bit of storage management if you play a lot of games.

LG Gram 17

Best large-screen laptop for battery life

For some folks, having a large-screen laptop is very important, and so we wanted to find a pick that fits your needs, but that still has some impressive battery life. While the LG Gram 17 won’t quite beat the Apple MacBooks in terms of that, it is almost as light and thing, so it’s a good alternative to both if you’re in the market for a non-Apple device. As for how long it will last you, that will depend a lot on usage, but on the lightest load you’ll likely see it going for around 12-13 hours, which is pretty impressive for something this thin.

Interestingly enough, this configuration of the LG Gram comes with an RTX 3050, which, granted, is a very entry-level graphics card, and while your battery life will suffer when using it, it does give you access to some basic gaming. It’s also good for giving a little extra help if you plan to do graphical rendering or CAD work, so it gives it that extra bit of versatility. As for the processor, the Intel 13th Gen Core i7 Evo is solid, and can handle these sorts of productivity and creativity tasks without too much issue, which is great.

The screen is, as promised, 17 inches big and runs a 2560 x 1600 resolution, which will tax the RTX 3050, but it’s good for watching content and doing creative work, so that’s ok. The keyboard and touchpad will also give you a pretty good experience, which is great since Apple tends to have the lead on that. Also, the 16GB of DDR5 RAM is pretty solid, as is the 1TB of storage you get to work with, so you’re not going to be constantly struggling with lag or trying to find room for your files. Of course, all that and the thin and lightweight come at a hefty price.

Lenovo Chromebook Duet 5

Best Chromebook for battery life

While all the options above are quite expensive, there are some more budget-friendly options, especially if you aren’t tied to either the Apple or Windows ecosystems. In that case, you can go for a Chromebook, which is a lot more lightweight and a perfect option for long battery life at a more affordable price. As such, what we’d recommend is the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook, which can last a very respectable 15 hours or so in the best-case scenario, which is rather close to what the MacBooks can manage.

What makes this feat even more impressive is that the Duet 5 comes with a 13.3-inch OLED display, which might not mean anything if you’re not familiar with them, but OLED displays tend to like to eat up electricity. Of course, it does help that it only runs a 1920 x 1080 resolution, so it’s not pushing itself too hard in terms of that. As for performance, you get a Snapdragon 7cG2 under the hood, which is a mobile processor and will do mostly fine with productivity tasks and general day-to-day usage.

It has 8GB of RAM, which would usually be on the lower end for a laptop, but since it runs on ChromeOS, that’s a lot less resource-hungry, that’s ok, while the 128GB of storage is very much on the edge of barely workable. That said, Chromebooks are made to be used with cloud services and streaming content, so it makes sense not to bulk up by having a large internal storage. That’s especially the case given how incredibly thin the Duet 5 is; at just 0.27 inches, it’s essentially the size of your average tablet, if not even a bit smaller.

How We Chose These Laptops for Battery Life

Picking the best laptop for battery life isn’t always quite as straightforward as it seems. People tend to use laptops for various things, and each task tends to draw power from the battery in a different way, so we have to start our assumptions from somewhere. In this case, we looked at what the best case scenario for the battery life is, which is low-usage video watching, and went from there. As such, the picks above are based on the longest potential battery they can have, which gives a sense of how long they’ll last when doing more resource-intensive tasks, such as gaming or using creative editing apps.

Operating systems and other specs didn’t play as big of a role when picking laptops, except when picking laptops for specific categories, such as screen size or specific performance. That’s mostly due to the fact that optimizations and hardware can play a big part in battery life, and that varies wildly with each brand, which is why we test each laptop individually to see how it lasts rather than assume a length based on specs. The only real exception to this are gaming laptops, which are notorious for having very short battery lives when you’re actually gaming, with most not really lasting more than 1-3 hours.

This article is managed and created separately from the Digital Trends Editorial team.

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