Apple had held onto the battery life crown for quite some time, with the MacBook Pro 16 M1, M2, and M3 all setting new benchmarks for laptops with the best battery life. Apple lost that crown this summer to the Dell XPS 13 (9345) with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite chipset, but it's not anywhere close to giving up.
Apple unveiled the updated MacBook Pro lineup with the M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max chipsets on Wednesday during the M4 Mac Week announcements. The new Macs include several updates, including more ports, processors optimized for Apple Intelligence, and the new M4 silicon.
Because of the increased efficiency of the M4 chips, Apple claims these new MacBook Pros can get up to 24 hours of battery life. But will it be enough to claim the title?
MacBook Pro M4 battery life expectations
Apple claims up to 24 hours of battery life for the M4 Macs, based on the results of two different battery tests. Apple runs a web surfing battery test that isn't too dissimilar from the Laptop Mag battery test, though the company also runs a video streaming battery test using an Apple TV stream. As usual, the video streaming benchmark has a longer run time, as modern processors are optimized for video playback on battery power.
The Apple MacBook Pro 14 M4 and MacBook Pro 16 M4 Pro configurations are rated for up to 24 hours of battery life on the Apple video streaming test. All five different configurations of MacBook Pros get far less battery life on the web streaming test, with the MacBook Pro 14 M4 getting up to 16 hours, and the MacBook Pro 16 M4 Pro getting up to 17 hours of battery life.
- 14-inch M4: Up to 24 hours video streaming, up to 16 hours wireless web
- 14-inch M4 Pro: Up to 22 hours video streaming, up to 14 hours wireless web
- 14-inch M4 Max: Up to 18 hours video streaming, up to 13 hours wireless web
- 16-inch M4 Pro: Up to 24 hours video streaming, up to 17 hours wireless web
- 16-inch M4 Max: Up to 21 hours video streaming; up to 14 hours wireless web
According to the MacBook Pro M4 page footnotes, Apple is basing the 24-hour battery life on the following testing procedure: "Testing conducted by Apple August through October 2024 using preproduction 14-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M4, 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 24GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. Wireless web battery life tested by browsing 25 popular websites while connected to Wi-Fi. Video streaming battery life tested with 1080p content in Safari while connected to Wi-Fi. Display brightness set to 8 clicks from the bottom and keyboard backlight was off."
The Laptop Mag battery test sets a laptop to 150 nits of brightness and sets it to surf through 20 web pages until the laptop powers down. So while our test is similar to Apple's test, we do use different web pages and have different display brightness settings so our claims are often a bit different from Apple's. That said, we do expect to see an improvement in battery life with the MacBook Pro M4s compared to the MacBook Pro M3s.
How does it stack up to the Dell XPS 13 and M3 MacBook battery life?
Apple claims the M4 processors are more powerful and more efficient than previous M chipsets, so we do expect the M4 to beat the MacBook Pro 14 M3 and MacBook Pro 16 M3 Max in terms of battery life.
But how will that compare to the Snapdragon-powered Dell XPS 13 (9345) and Lunar Lake Dell XPS 13 (9350)?
The MacBook Pro 16 M3 Max is less than an hour behind the Dell XPS 13 (9345) which is the current battery life champ. So as long as the MacBook Pro 16 M4 lasts an hour longer on the battery test, the battery life crown will revert back to Apple.
Granted, the XPS 13s have smaller 13-inch FHD IPS displays compared to the MacBook Pro 16's 16-inch Liquid Retina panels, which means the XPS 13 needs less power to run the display. However, the MacBook Pro 16 does have a larger lithium-ion battery than the Dell XPS 13. So while this comparison is perhaps not the most fair, there are advantages to both the Dell and Apple variants.
That said, our laptops with the best battery life rankings don't discriminate on screen size.
Outlook
Obviously this is just speculation based on Apple's testing data and our own testing history. I've run battery tests on quite a few MacBooks in my time as a Laptop Mag lab tech, so I've got some real insight.
The final call on whether or not the MacBook Pro M4 can reclaim the battery life crown for Apple will have to wait until we can get these laptops in our lab and run through our own benchmarking process. But, based on how Apple's laptops have done on our battery test in the past, there's a good chance Apple reclaims the "Best Battery Life" title with the new MacBook Pro 16 M4 Pro and M4 Max configurations.
