Is Laptop Battery Life Getting Too Long?

Starting with models from the early 90s, I have owned numerous laptops in my life, and for almost all that time battery life has been the biggest concern of all. For the past few years, I never spared a thought for how much battery life is left on my laptop—so should we stop adding more?

Laptops Last up to 24 Hours Now

The Apple MacBook Pro M4 base model laptop has a claimed battery life of “up to” 24 hours, and it seems, for normal, day-to-day type work, you can get pretty close to that figure. When I got my old M1 MacBook Air, I was blown away by the 15 or so hours of battery life I could get from it without any compromise in performance compared to having it plugged in.

Recently, Snapdragon-powered Windows for ARM laptops have caught up to Apple in battery life and somewhat in performance. Perhaps most surprisingly, it seems Intel’s latest ultraportable mobile processors have become just as power-efficient as its ARM competition (as tested by Ars Technica), with none of the compatibility issues that plague Windows for ARM.

Whichever general-purpose laptop you buy, unless it’s extremely low-end or (ironically) extremely high-end, will probably give you more battery life than a typical work day requires.

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Apple MacBook Pro (14-Inch, M4)

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Powered by an impressive M4 chip, the 14-inch MacBook Pro starts with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, a 10-core CPU, and a 10-core GPU, available in Space Black or Silver.

But, Charging a Laptop Is Easier Than Ever

One of the biggest reasons battery life has been such a source of anxiety in laptops for most of their history, is that you need access to an AC power outlet to recharge your computer. That’s not quite the case anymore, since most modern laptops can charge using USB-C. Even those that use big power bricks to run, can often still trickle charge in your bag from something like a power bank, or from a USB port in your car.

Smaller Batteries Make Space for Better Features

So do you really need 24 hours of battery life? Because battery life always comes at the expense of something else. So, if you are making a laptop that’s more power efficient than the previous generation, you can actually shrink the battery and keep the battery life the same as the previous computer. Until the M4 models, Apple essentially did this with its iPads. They all had more or less 10 hours of battery life each generation, but with better performance.

So, if we decide that a number like 12 or 24 hours of battery life should be enough for your target customer, why not leave it at that and use the extra space from the smaller battery each generation to improve cooling and performance? Why not add more ports, or more SSD storage? Once you’re past a certain level of battery life, most people will get diminishing returns from adding even more.

How Much Battery Life Does the Average Person Need?

Of course, there isn’t one level of battery life that will make everyone happy. For most people, a work day is eight hours, and a guaranteed eight hours of battery life at maximum power draw might be a good rule of thumb. That would translate to a much longer time for lighter workloads, but there has to be some sort of benchmark here.

At the other end of the spectrum, if laptops start offering more than 24 hours of continuous battery life under medium to heavy workloads, I’d say that’s about the time we can stop trying to add more battery life, and rather use future power efficiency gains to make laptops better in other ways. More features, less noise and heat, and better performance, while still offering all in a day’s work.