HP’s first Copilot+ PC smashes MacBook Air battery life — here’s the results

Battery life is one of the main selling points with Windows on ARM laptops like the new Copilot+ PCs. After days of testing in our labs, we can confirm the HP EliteBook Ultra with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chipset delivers on those expectations.

Apple dominates our list of laptops with the best battery life since its transition to ARM-based Apple Silicon chips in 2020, with the entire lineup offering over 15 hours of battery life in 2024. Recent Windows laptops like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425M) have closed that gap. But while the Zenbook has over 15 hours of battery life, many Intel Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) laptops can't say the same. This is where the Snapdragon platform comes into play.

Qualcomm and Microsoft have made many claims about the new Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs, but the battery life claims were the most attention-grabbing. According to Qualcomm, the chipset's efficiency will lead to long battery life across the entire laptop lineup. HP claimed up to 26 hours of battery life for the HP EliteBook and HP OmniBook. 

So, naturally, we had to put that claim to the test in our lab. 

How long does the HP EliteBook Ultra last on a charge?

While a handful of specific benchmarks are part of how we test AI PCs, I was more interested in getting results for our battery test over anything NPU-specific on these new Qualcomm-powered laptops. 

Everyone is still figuring out how to leverage AI in laptops, but battery life is universally applicable. And, at least as far as HP's EliteBook Ultra goes, it seems Qualcomm was correct about the increased battery life of ARM processors.

While the Apple MacBook Air 13 M3 doesn't have the longest battery life of any Apple machine, its 15 hours and 13 minutes in our test is nothing to scoff at. And the HP EliteBook Ultra easily eclipsed that mark. 

The Laptop Mag proprietary battery test involves setting the laptop to 150 nits of brightness. At that point, the test cycles through a series of dynamic, static, and video pages with standby periods in between, until the battery completely runs down.

We've only run two battery tests on the HP EliteBook Ultra so far, but coming in at 16:22 and 15:39, this HP business laptop could easily take over as the best business laptop for battery life. After all, an average of 16:01 is almost an hour above the MacBook Air 13's battery life and nearly 90 minutes longer than the 14:38 battery life of the Lenovo ThinkPad Z16, which currently holds rank as the best business laptop for battery life. That's before we even get into the superior performance of the HP Elitebook Ultra, but we've got more benchmarks and hands-on tests to run before we can give you our full review.

The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M3's 17:16 battery life still hangs on to the crown at this size, but it's an exciting showing from HP that bodes well for the battery life of this first generation of Copilot+ PCs.

More from Laptop Mag

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• Copilot+ PCs: Release date, reviews, price — and what Reddit thinks
• New Snapdragon X chips leak just as the first Copilot+ PCs arrive — should you wait?