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.
Disclosure: CNET may get a share of revenue from the sale of products featured on this page.
LG Gram 15: 13 hours, 58 minutes
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.
Asus NovaGo: 13 hours, 12 minutes
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.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (sixth-gen): 13 hours, 7 minutes
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.
Lenovo Yoga C930: 12 hours, 26 minutes
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.
Dell XPS 13 9370: 12 hours, 18 minutes
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.