5 Laptops That Outshine The MacBook Air In Battery Life

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

The MacBook Air might be the best Apple laptop for most users, but battery life, while impressive, is hardly the best on the market. Apple promises 18 hours of battery life, but benchmarks and real-world tests by dedicated users don't quite reach that number. That's not surprising, given the limited 53.8 Whr battery, but most test still go above 12 hours on a single charge,  plenty of time for most users. But if you're reading this, you're not most users, at least when it comes to autonomy from the power outlet.

You won't be surprised to know that Apple's more expensive laptops, the ones in the MacBook Pro M5 lineup, were some of the first models we thought of when writing this article. However, some of the models you'll see below really came out of left field. Two-in-one laptops, the ones that flip into the shape of a tablet, are unexpectedly some of the longer-lasting laptops in the market. And since the bulk of the list is made of good old standard laptops, we've gone through what makes each unique, beside the great battery life.

The Dell XPS 14 is a modern version of a classic Dell laptop, and it's impressive on multiple fronts. It's really portable, being less than an inch thick and weighing only three pounds. It comes with decent specs in its base configuration, but there are quite a few upgrades available. Of course, it also has an exceptional battery, but only sometimes. During video playback tests conducted by PC Mag, it lasted a few hours less than the Apple MacBook Pro M5, but the XPS 14 lasted a whole 43 hours during light web browsing, according to tests performed by Hardware Canucks.

The reason this laptop can break the 40 hours mark when, under the same conditions, the MacBook Air M5 does not go over 15, is the extreme 1-to-120 Hz variable refresh rate. This means that when the image on the screen is perfectly still, which it tends to be while web browsing and using productivity software, the screen only refreshes once per second, consuming little energy. Will the XPS 14 last this long during real-world use? Probably not, but it performed well under other tests, too, meaning it has solid battery life even when variable refresh rate is not in use.

As far as price goes, the Dell is not cheap, coming in at $1,599 for the most basic configuration. While it's a little cheaper than the most basic MacBook Pro M5, it doesn't quite share the same specs, with half the SSD space and noticeably worse performances on graphical benchmark tests.

If we take MSI's claims at face value, the Prestige 14 Flip AI+ is the best laptop for those who care by far the most about battery life. The company promises as many as 30 hours of use on a single charge, as long as you spend these 30 hours watching a (very long) movie with speaker volume at 15% and presumably very low screen brightness. 

A more realistic test, conducted by PCWorld with the help of PC testing software PCMark 10, revealed about 18 hours and 15 minutes. This does not include intense activities like video and image editing, being focused on light office work tasks instead, but 18 hours still means over two workdays on a single charge.

Battery aside, the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ has plenty to offer. Another test performed by PCWorld, this time using the gaming-focused 3DMark Time Spy software, shows how much the 4.8 GHz CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and integrated (but surprisingly capable) Intel Arc B390 graphics can do, or at least what it can do when Performance Mode is enabled and battery life is not a concern. A 1080p integrated camera and touchscreen with dedicated Nano Pen complete the offer. It won't make the list of the best laptops under $1,000, but at $1,700, it's quite competitively priced, considering everything included in the package.

According to CNET's tests, the 14-inch version of the HP OmniBook 5 lasted over 28 hours while continuously streaming a YouTube video. PC Mag, on the other hand, said it has "field-leading battery life," and the publication's own tests seem to prove it. 

The OmniBook 5 is available in 14- and 16-inch configurations, up to 32 GB of RAM and a terabyte of SSD storage, along with a Snapdragon X Plus 3.5GHz processor. According to some benchmarks, a high-end configuration performs about as well as a MacBook Air, and should cost about as much. Oddly enough, however, the most interesting of these configurations is the cheapest, coming with 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, 14-inch OLED display, and a processor and GPU that are just fine, all for $500.

This version of the HP OmniBook 5 may not compete with the most expensive laptops on this list, but it's not trying to. Instead, it's built with the right price and specs to make the MacBook Neo look like an overpriced toy. Of course, it has a much better battery, too. The HP OmniBook 5 isn't always available at the unreasonably low price of $499, as the MSRP is technically $1,149, but the machine sure spends a lot of time in deep discount. Even if you're unlucky and try to buy it when HP sells it at full price, quite a few resellers on Amazon and Walmart have it for about $600, which is a solid offer.

The first thing you should know about the Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition if you care about battery life is that it was called "the longest-running laptop that [we] ever tested" by consumer tech publication CNET in its review, with PC World and Tom's Hardware echoing the general sentiment, if with ambiguous wording. Test results from the three websites vary significantly, with 4K video playback falling around the 14 hours mark and the online streaming test performed by CNET claiming an impressive 25 hours and 45 minutes.

The battery life might be the first thing about this laptop to catch your attention, but if you end up buying it, it will be for its mix of affordability ($1,550 on Lenovo's website, at the time of writing) and adaptability. 

It has a big battery and the software is optimized, sure, but it's also a two-in-one laptop that flips into a shape that resembles a tablet. It's also quite powerful, coming with either 32 or 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB or 1 TB of solid state storage, optionally available with an integrated Intel Arc 140V GPU to go with the Ultra 7 258V CPU. According to some performance benchmarks, this is enough to give it an edge against many similarly priced laptops. There's a reason the Yoga 9i 2-in-1 places so high in our list of the best laptops of 2026.

The MacBook Pro M5 is capable of 24 hours of video playback and 18 hours of internet browsing, according to multiple publications that have tested the laptop. Internet browsing is not a taxing activity, and the test results were nowhere close to the 24 hours of autonomy claimed by Apple, but that's still enough to last you for two days of work.

Other tech-focused websites confirm the MacBook Pro M5's place on the list of laptops with the best battery life, which means Apple is no longer the de facto leader in the sector. Even some mid-range models beat it when it comes to the battery. However, we should point out that the most impressive Windows laptops on this metric are not exactly the most powerful, while the MacBook Pro M5, and especially the M5 Pro and M5 Max, are immensely capable machines.

The base model, the M5, is not the best when it comes to demanding activities, due to the standard M5 chip. It's clear by looking at benchmarks that there's a dramatic difference when comparing the M5 and the M5 Pro, a difference that isn't quite there between the M5 Pro and M5 Max. All models are available with a variety of RAM and SSD space, with a price between $1,699 and well over $4,000, with a cheap M5 Pro coming in at $2,199.

To compile this list, we looked at plenty of battery tests and benchmarks performed by consumer tech and PC-focused publications, such as CNET, PC Mag, and Tom's Guide, that compared the MacBook Air's battery life to other laptops. 

Once we had a list of portable machines that seemed to outperform Apple's mid-range MacBook, we checked multiple professional and user reviews for each model. We confirmed that they all had significantly better battery life than the MacBook Air, at least in some circumstances, and didn't have deal-breaking downsides, like an extremely poor build. We also made sure to include models of varying price ranges from different brands.