The best MacBooks have been the battery life champions since Apple introduced its M-series chips, though things have gotten more competitive. This year, the best Windows laptops packing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors have not only matched MacBooks’ endurance but even surpassed them. With Apple’s laptops in danger of falling behind in battery life, here comes the Apple M4 chip to give those laptops a chance to strike back.
We just reviewed the MacBook Pro 14-inch (M4, 2024) and MacBook Pro 16-inch (M4 Pro, 2024) and they both rank as some of the best laptops for battery life. The former endured for an astonishing 18 hours and 31 minutes in our battery life test, while the latter sped along like a certain toy rabbit for an unbelievable 20 hours and 46 minutes! That makes the new 16-inch M4 Pro-powered MacBook Pro the longest-lasting consumer laptop Tom’s Guide has ever reviewed.
The MacBook Pro 16-inch M4 Pro is now the reigning champ for laptop battery life, but how do its competitors stack up? Let’s find out!
MacBook Pro 16-inch (M4 Pro, 2024) battery life vs competing laptops
The M4 Pro MacBook Pro 16-inch I reviewed has a 16.2-inch (3,456 x 2,234) Liquid Retina XDR display, an Apple M4 Pro chip with 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores, 48GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. Valued at $3,499, our review unit features the same M4 Pro chip as the $2,499 entry-level 16-inch MacBook Pro, though this laptop starts with 24GB of RAM and 512GB of storage.
Running this 16-inch MacBook Pro through our battery test — which consists of loading webpages and playing videos at 150 nits of screen brightness — Apple's new laptop averaged 21 hours and 46 minutes of battery life. As I said, that crushes the endurance of any consumer-grade laptop we’ve ever reviewed.
In the chart above, we compare the MacBook Pro 16-inch M4 Pro to some of the Windows laptops and MacBooks we’ve tested and reviewed. This list doesn’t include rugged laptops, which are in a class of their own. As you can see, the new 16-inch MacBook Pro surges ahead of both its competitors and fellow MacBooks.
The top five longest-lasting laptops all have either a Snapdragon X or Apple M-series chip. The Lenovo ThinkBook 16 G7 (20:23) and Dell XPS 13 (19:41) land in second and third place respectively, with the 14-inch MacBook Pro M4 (18:31) and HP OmniBook X (17:16) not far behind. The 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 (15:44), along with the 13-inch MacBook Air M3 (15:10) and 15-inch MacBook Air M3 (15:03) also turn in respectable times, though the gap begins widening at this point.
You might have noticed all the Intel Lunar Lake laptops at the bottom end of the list. While notebooks like the Asus ExpertBook P5 (14:21), Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 (14:12), and Asus Zenbook S14 (13:51) would have once floored us with their respective battery life results, that’s no longer the case in a world where Snapdragon X and Apple M-series processors exist. That said, the Acer Swift 14 AI (15:53) manages to sneak its way near the middle.
Battery life bottom line
Most stories and marketing surrounding laptops in 2024 have centered around their promised AI capabilities. While the prospect of “smarter” laptops is intriguing, the real tangible benefit these machines provide is exceptional battery life — especially those packing Snapdragon X and Apple M-series chips. With this focus on energy efficiency, it should (hopefully) become easier to find a long-lasting laptop regardless of manufacturer.
Right now, Apple’s M4-powered MacBooks take the lead for battery life. I can’t wait to see how its competitors answer the challenge.
