The brand new Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425M) is our current reigning champ of battery life when it comes to Windows laptops. But more than that, it also has better battery life than both the Apple Macbook Air 13 M3 and Macbook Air 15 M3 models.
When it comes to laptops with the best battery life, Apple has sat at the top of the list for years now. But Apple’s strict hold on battery life has met a decent challenge from a Windows laptop with the newest Zenbook 14. Does this mean Windows laptops are catching back up in terms of battery life? Let’s find out.
Battery life: the facts
All three laptops were tested using our Laptop Mag battery test, which is run almost identically on Windows and Mac laptops. We set the laptop displays to 150 nits of brightness, uninstall any pre-loaded antivirus software, disable Bluetooth and location tracking, disable battery saver mode, deactivate keyboard backlights, and adjust display and power settings so the display stays on for the full duration of the test. We then set the laptop to surf through a series of web pages until the laptop dies. For more information on our battery test, our Head of Testing has put together a very detailed explanation on our How we test laptops page.
The major difference between the Windows and Mac versions of our battery test comes down to browsers. On Windows machines, we run the test using the new Chromium version of Edge while we run the test on Macs using Safari. These are the default browsers, which is why we ran with those instead of any of the other myriad browser options.
So outside of browsers, the tests are easy to compare to one another despite the operating system differences. So when it comes to raw numbers, the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425M) outpaced both Macbooks on our battery test with 15 hours and 52 minutes of battery life. By comparison the Macbook Air 13 M3 reached 15 hours and 13 minutes and the Macbook Air 15 M3 hit 15 hours and 3 minutes.
It's nice to see a Windows laptop put up a true fight in the battery life stakes, and the Zenbook 14 OLED is now our laptop with the fourth-best battery life. Of course, the top three laptops are still Macs. The Macbook Pro 16 M2 Max still holds the crown at 18 hours and 56 minutes, with the Macbook Pro 16 M3 Max and Macbook Pro 14 M3 coming in second and third respectively. So Apple does still hold onto the lead, but it is slowly losing the edge.
It’s worth noting that the Zenbook isn’t just a marathoner with long battery life, it also managed to beat the MacBooks on several performance benchmarks. If you want to read more about this impressive new MacBook challenger, read our full Asus Zenbook 14 OLED (Q425M) review.
