If you're looking for a laptop with the best battery life this year, the 16-inch M2 Max MacBook Pro is the way to go. That bad boy has an extraordinary battery runtime of nearly 19 hours! However, not everyone is interested in getting an Apple laptop, especially consumers who are accustomed to Windows.
So the question is, what is the longest-lasting laptop in the PC space? The HP Dragonfly Pro!
We'll also be taking a look at two other laptops that closely tailed behind the Dragonfly Pro, but couldn't quite eclipse the HP notebook in the runtime race.
The longest-lasting laptop of 2023 so far
The longest-lasting laptop of 2023 so far
We test the battery life of every laptop that comes through Laptop Mag's review conveyer belt, and this year, the HP Dragonfly Pro is leading the charge when it comes to runtime. (You can snag this laptop at HP.com for $1,399.)
On the Laptop Mag battery test, which involves continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness until the laptop runs out of juice, the HP Dragonfly Pro lasted 13 hours and 42 minutes. To give you a barometer for comparison, the average runtime for mainstream laptops is 8 hours and 51 minutes, so you're getting an extra five hours.
To give you more perspective of how refreshing the HP Dragonfly Pro's battery life is, let's take a look at some other 2023 entrants and their abysmal battery runtimes:
- Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro - 6 hours and 51 minutes
- Acer Swift Edge - 7 hours and 42 minutes
- Lenovo Slim Pro 7 - 9 hours and 16 minutes
The HP Dragonfly Pro we tested is packed with an AMD Ryzen 7 7736U CPU, AMD Radeon graphics, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage, and a 14-inch, 1920 x 1200-pixel, 16:10 touch screen.
Other long-lasting Windows laptops
The LG Gram Pro, lasting 12 hours and 2 minutes on the Laptop Mag battery test, was nipping at the Dragonfly Pro's heels, but just couldn't surpass it. Although the LG Gram Pro could not beat the Dragonfly Pro in the runtime game, it's certainly more powerful with its Intel Core i7-1360P CPU.
On the Geekbench 5.5 test, which analyzes overall performance, the LG Gram Pro, delivering a multi-core score of 9,945, beat the Dragonfly Pro (9.029). The LG review unit we tested also comes with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, 16GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, and a 17-inch, 2,560 x 1,600-pixel display. It's currently on B&H Photo for $1,899.
Landing in third place on this year's best battery life list is the Lenovo ThinkPad T16 Gen 1. It survived for 11 hours and 46 minutes. However, this laptop is the priciest of the top three, commanding a price tag of $2,099 at B&H Photo. Funnily enough, despite being the most expensive, its Geekbench 5.5 score is the lowest (7,815) of the trio. The unit we tested is packed with an Intel Core i7-1270P processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD storage, Intel Iris Xe Graphics, and a 16-inch, 1920 x 1200-pixel display.
Bottom line
Keep in mind that this article specifically ranks runtimes for Windows laptops that have been released this year.
If you don't mind older laptops, you can get a Windows laptop that lasts 18 hours and 17 minutes with the Dell Latitude 9510. It's three years old. There's one on eBay for $719.
