These days, when it comes to laptop hardware, everyone’s talking about neural processing units (NPUs) and artificial intelligence PCs. What they should be talking about is laptop battery life!
Whether you’re looking for a lightweight productivity machine or a powerful gaming laptop, you shouldn’t have to settle for bad battery life. That’s never been more true than in 2025, as battery life and power consumption have dramatically improved over the last few years — to a degree, anyway. Not all laptops have good battery life.
Older laptop models and low-tier options still suffer from poor battery life, and some budget gaming laptops even skip the integrated graphics, opting for constant use of a Nvidia or AMD GPU, which drains the battery much more quickly. Watch out for that.
Again, I repeat: You don’t have to settle for bad laptop battery life anymore. Whether your laptop has an Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm chip, you can get great battery life! Here’s what you need to know.
Big power efficiency improvements
The PC industry has been focused on boosting battery life by improving energy efficiency. On a technical level, there’s a lot going on.
Changes in the manufacturing process have resulted in big steps forward. Semiconductor manufacturers have been finding ways to make the individual transistors on a chip ever smaller — and smaller transistors use less power. For example, Intel’s Lunar Lake chips are based on a 3-nanometer process while Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips are based on 4-nanometer processes. It’s taken many years and many iterations to get to this point.
Mark Hachman / IDG
Modern CPUs also try to boost power efficiency through a combination of both “performance cores” (P-cores) and “efficiency cores” (E-cores). Your computer relies on power-optimized E-cores for most day-to-day tasks and only draws down on power-hungry P-cores when necessary.
These are the two biggest reasons why CPU power efficiency has improved. Technical details aside, what matters is there are now more laptops with amazing battery life than ever before.
Intel Lunar Lake, AMD Ryzen AI, and Qualcomm Snapdragon X
If you’re buying a laptop this year, it’s important to understand your processor options. The latest CPUs are Intel’s Lunar Lake, AMD’s Ryzen AI 300, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus. You’ll also find many machines with previous-gen CPUs, but those likely won’t deliver the long-lasting battery life you’re looking for.
Intel’s Lunar Lake — also known as Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) — is the latest processor on this list to hit release, and in my hands-on experience, Lunar Lake delivers the best battery life of all these processors. For example, when I reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360, it delivered nearly 24 hours of battery life in our battery rundown test despite a 76-watt-hour battery and 16-inch OLED display. That’s a huge increase over many laptops with Intel’s previous Meteor Lake CPUs.
Rob Schultz / Foundry
The downside is that Lunar Lake PCs aren’t speed demons, especially when it comes to multithreaded CPU performance. They do a good job of delivering snappy desktop performance for productivity applications, but CPU-heavy processing tasks are rather slow. They aren’t the right fit for serious gaming or workstation PCs. For that, Intel announced at CES 2025 that Arrow Lake processors are coming to fill the gap.
AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 isn’t as impressive as Intel’s latest hardware for battery life, but it does take the crown on performance — and the battery life is pretty decent when you consider that. You may find AMD Ryzen AI 300 is a better fit for a workstation-focused laptop. You’ll get less-but-still-good battery life and more performance. (Intel is hoping to make inroads in this segment with those Arrow Lake processors.)
Chris Hoffman / IDG
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus CPUs are the odd chips out. These aren’t your traditional x86 processors that you see from Intel and AMD. They’re Arm-based hardware, like what you’d find in an M-series MacBook or a smartphone.
Matthew Smith / IDG
At launch back in summer 2024, they were trumpeted as having the absolute best battery life and being a leap forward for PC laptops. For example, in my review of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, it exceeded 20 hours of battery life. But Snapdragon laptops are no longer uniquely long-lasting after Intel’s Lunar Lake debut. They do perform well for everyday desktop tasks, but they aren’t the right fit for PC gaming.
What to avoid when buying a laptop (if you care about battery life)
Certain factors can really drag down a laptop’s battery life. For one thing, if a laptop is packing an older or previous-gen processor, it will have worse battery life simply due to its outdated tech.
When shopping around, it’s common to find laptops with older processors, especially if you’re focusing on laptop deals and sales. They may be way more affordable on clearance, but that previous-gen CPU won’t be able to match the level of battery life you can get from the latest laptops, so temper your expectations.
Thiago Trevisan / IDG
In addition, the more power-hungry the processor, the more it’s going to drag down battery life. Powerful gaming laptops might have a power-hungry CPU (like an Intel Core i9) plus other power-hungry components (like a 4K display with 144Hz refresh rate), which will all contribute to power drain and kill battery life.
Some gaming laptops also cut costs by using a processor without integrated graphics. Normally, gaming laptops rely on power-friendly integrated graphics for everyday tasks and switch to power-hungry GPUs for actual gaming. A laptop without integrated graphics must rely on the power-hungry GPU all the time, which kills battery life.
Mattias Inghe / IDG
The size of the laptop’s battery also matters. Laptop batteries tend to cap out at just below 100 watt-hours, the maximum allowable size for lithium-ion batteries on airplanes according to TSA rules — but thin-and-light laptops usually can’t fit batteries quite this massive! Furthermore, budget-friendly laptops often have significantly smaller batteries to keep the price down, so they tend to have shorter battery life.
Most importantly, I recommend reading in-depth laptop reviews to get a better idea of real-world battery life for individual laptop models. Spec sheets don’t tell the whole story. Here at PCWorld, we run all the laptops we review through a standard battery rundown test, which gives us a realistic idea of how they actually perform.
Don’t need battery life? Get a desktop PC
Perhaps you just plan on using your laptop at a desk all the time, in which case battery life might not matter to you. Perhaps you’re even eyeing a beefy gaming laptop with maximum power, which would also be a valid reason to not prioritize battery life. (Although you’d be surprised at the battery life many gaming laptops can deliver nowadays.)
IDG
If you’re really going to be using your laptop at your desk all the time and you really have no intention of ever taking it on the go, then why bother paying for the portability? Consider a desktop gaming PC if you need power or a compact mini PC for maximum value.
But if you do need a laptop, then I encourage you to pick one with awesome battery life. There’s no reason to skimp on that anymore, not if you’re shopping in 2025. You won’t regret it.
