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Best battery life laptops

See the laptops and two-in-one PCs with the longest battery life from the past year.

Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
  • Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Dan Ackerman
2 min read
Sarah Tew/CNET

One of the first things every laptop shopper should think about in a new purchase is battery life. After all, you don't want your PC shutting down in the middle of a big meeting or halfway through a cross-country flight. 

Based on the extensive battery testing conducted in the CNET Labs, these are the laptops with the longest battery-life scores that we've seen during 2018 and the beginning of 2019. Our five top scorers are highlighted below, with battery life listed in hours and minutes, and the full list of our top 25 is available here.

This list includes Windows and MacOS laptops, Windows two-in-one hybrids and Chromebooks running Google's Chrome OS . Not included are Android or iOS tablets. The specific test used here streams a private video over Wi-Fi on an endless loop. Note that these scores reflect the specific configurations we tested, and that screen resolution and CPU choice are some of the major factors that affect battery life.

Watch this: See all the best laptops of CES 2019

Disclosure: CNET may get a share of revenue from the sale of products featured on this page.  

25 best battery life laptops

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Besides being one of the lightest laptops ever, the most recent version of the LG Gram 15 has simply great battery life, beating the previous model's score by roughly 4 hours.

The Asus NovaGo makes good use of its Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 brain for long battery life and always-on cellular. The performance feels more like a phone than laptop at times, but it also claims 30 days of standby time, so you won't have to worry about finding it dead in your laptop bag. 

This 2018 version of the X1 Carbon laptop has a 14-inch display with 2,560x1,440-pixel resolution, 100 percent Adobe RGB color gamut, brightness up to 500 nits and support for Dolby Vision HDR, for greater brightness, contrast and color palette. All while bringing in big battery life numbers. 

Excellent performance and a stylish and functional design make the Lenovo Yoga C930 simply one of the best two-in-one laptops available. And its 12-plus hours of battery life is icing on the cake. 

Touted as "the world's smallest 13-inch laptop," the XPS 13 is our top choice for a premium Windows ultraportable laptop at its size, due in part to its speedy performance and 12-hour battery life. We're also very excited to check out the coming-soon 2019 version, which fixes an annoying webcam issue found on previous models. Hopefully the battery life will keep up.