It’s frustrating to sit down at your laptop for an afternoon of work, only to realize that it’s hovering at two percent battery. Oh, and you forgot your charger at home. Perfect.
That’s why battery life is one of the most important factors shoppers consider when searching for the best laptops, according to a 2025 CNET survey. (FYI: Mashable and CNET are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.) That makes total sense. While not everyone needs a marathon runner — PC gamers and creative professionals will probably prioritize performance — a laptop that constantly leaves you stranded without juice is an inconvenience. It’s not truly portable, which is basically the whole point of buying a laptop instead of a desktop PC. This is why Mashable tests every laptop we review for battery life using a standardized video rundown exercise.
Modern laptops should provide an all-day charge
The battery lives of laptops have improved dramatically as of late — Windows laptops, in particular. In 2024, only one PC we tested lasted over 20 hours. In the last two years, three models have surpassed the 30-hour mark, two have lasted over 24 hours, and 10 more have lasted at least 20 hours. Our median battery life for 2024-model-year PCs was 12.5 hours; for this year’s models, it’s at 18.5 — a 48 percent increase. This boost was fueled by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series chips and Intel’s Panther Lake chips.
In the MacBook realm, Apple’s switch to custom M-series silicon in 2020 was a game-changer. With a rated battery life of up to 18 hours, the original M1 MacBook Air had 50 percent more stamina than its Intel-powered predecessor. Subsequent M2, M3, M4, and M5 Pro and Air models we’ve tested have lasted for up to 21 hours per charge. And the new budget MacBook Neo, while short-lived for a modern MacBook, outlasts the average cheap PC or Chromebook with roughly 15 hours of battery life.
The best MacBook to buy in 2026: Comparing the Air, Neo, and Pro
These massive battery life bumps aren’t the result of laptop batteries getting bigger. They’ve happened because laptop chips are getting smaller and more efficient, according to another CNET analysis. Tinier processors don’t need as much juice to work.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series chips and Apple’s M-series chips are further aided by the fact that they’re both based on ARM instruction set architecture, or ISA. Put simply, ISA determines how a laptop’s chip talks to its software. ARM ISA is less complicated than the traditional x86 ISA used in Intel and AMD chips, so ARM-based laptops tend to be more power-efficient. (The only catch is that you might run into compatibility issues with some specialty software and PC games.)
Which laptop has the highest battery life in 2026?
The best battery life laptop we’ve ever tested is the HP OmniBook 3 16, which held out for 40 hours and 14 minutes in our video rundown test. No other laptop we’ve tested has surpassed the 35-hour mark, though one comes close.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.