Intel decimates Apple to take battery life crown

It’s no secret that a big reason you’ll find MacBooks among the best laptops is the insane battery life that Apple’s machines are claimed to possess. Intel may have just snatched the battery life crown with its new Lunar Lake mobile CPUs, though. According to a battery test released by Lenovo, its Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, packed with a Core Ultra 7 258V chip, lasted 23 hours and 54 minutes in a local video playback test, beating both M2 and M3 MacBooks by over five hours.

It’s a bold claim, and one that comes shockingly ahead of schedule. Laptops packing Intel’s latest chips are set to go on sale on September 24, so reviews should go live around that time. But Lenovo seems to have jumped the gun a bit with its battery test. Although Lenovo doesn’t clarify if its test was using a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, it shows a dominant lead for upcoming Lunar Lake laptops. The M2 MacBook lasted 18 hours and 19 minutes, while the M3 MacBook pushed ahead to 18 hours and 32 minutes. Still, they’re far behind the nearly 24 hours of battery life Lenovo laptop saw.

Beyond Apple, this type of performance exceeds Copilot+ PCs we’ve seen with a Snapdragon X Elite chip, such as the Asus ProArt PZ13. In our own local video playback testing, this laptop lasted 18 hours and 39 minutes, while the M3 MacBook Air lasted 19 hours and 39 minutes. The best performer in this test we’ve seen is Dell’s XPS 13 9345, which lasted 22 hours and 9 minutes. Even then, Lenovo claims its upcoming Lunar Lake laptop lasts longer.

Battery life is very important to the success of Intel’s upcoming generation. With the release of Copilot+, there was a significant bump in laptop sales, but that didn’t come on the back of new AI features — it was due to longer battery life. Lunar Lake laptops won’t have Copilot+ features at release, but Microsoft says they’ll receive support in November through free Windows updates.

Although it’s always important to wait for third-party reviews, we aren’t dealing with leaked benchmarks here. This is an official test from Lenovo, and one that seemingly had all three laptops operating under identical circumstances. Considering how closely Lenovo’s numbers align with our own, the idea of 24-hour battery life on upcoming Lunar Lake laptops might be a reality.

It’s not exactly surprising that Intel has pushed ahead in battery life. Lunar Lake is a radical redesign of Intel’s approach to CPUs, and it marks the first time the company is outsourcing manufacturing to chipmaker TSMC. The chips ditch Intel’s long-standing Hyper-Threading feature to save battery life, and they prioritize the efficient cores as the main driver of performance. Those two changes have massive implications for battery life.

The lingering question is if Intel can keep up performance while achieving this level of battery life. Lunar Lake chips top out at eight cores total, which means they could struggle in heavily threaded workloads. We’ll just have to wait until September 24 when the laptops launch to know for sure.