While the M1 MacBook Pro delivers long battery life, it’s not the only game in town.
Battery life: all-day but…
After four months of testing, the M1 MacBook Pro is unmistakably a battery-life leader. But I’ve found that several other laptops that I also test regularly are very close to the M1 MBP 13 and, in at least one case, its equal.
To provide a better perspective of the staying power of the M1 MacBook Pro when unplugged, the following are side-by-side comparisons with other leading battery-life laptops.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano:
The latest Windows entry I’m testing, the 1.9-pound Lenovo X1 Nano with an 11th Gen Intel “Tiger Lake” energy-efficient (aka low power) processor, shows surprising battery life, rivaling the M1 MacBook Pro:
- MacBook Pro 13 M1: 10 hours
- Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano: 9 hours
Battery life is based on my usage scenario which includes running Google Chrome with 20+ tabs (the single biggest power drain), Firefox browser, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, social media, YouTube videos (in background playing music), CMS, video conferencing (e.g., Zoom, Microsoft Teams), Apple Music, benchmarking applications, and photo editing. Display brightness is typically set at over 70 percent. Laptop is run until it loses power.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano config I have uses a Intel Core i5-1130G7 processor, a 13-inch 2K (2,160-by-1,350) LCD and is spec’d with 16GB/256GB.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro I use is equipped with the Apple M1 processor and 16GB/512GB.
HP Elite Dragonfly, Google Pixelbook Go, HP Elite 1030c Chromebook
The ThinkPad X1 Nano isn’t the only laptop I’ve tested that gets battery life close or equal to the M1 MBP.
The Google Pixelbook Go Chromebook, which was released long before the M1 MacBook, maxes out at 10 hours of battery life, which is pretty much identical to the M1 MacBook Pro.
HP’s ultraportable, the Elite Dragonfly (2.2 pounds), which I tested for months, has battery life just shy of the M1 MacBook Pro. The Dragonfly goes for almost nine hours based on the usage scenario cited above.
A more recent high-performance Chromebook I’ve been using, the HP Elite c1030, manages 9 hours* of battery life. (As a side note, even with the long battery life, the Elite c1030 is extremely fast due to its brawny specs for a Chromebook: Intel 10th Gen Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD.)
HP Spectre x360 14 (OLED)
The HP Spectre x360 14 — currently my daily driver — with a high-resolution 13.5-inch OLED display falls a few hours short of the M1 MBP, getting up to 7 hours** of battery life. Its spec’d with an Intel 11th Gen Core i7-1165G7 processor and 16GB/1TB.
Final note — heat:
The one area that the M1 MacBook Pro most consistently beats Windows laptops is thermals.
I’ve never been able to get my M1 MacBook Pro hot. The most the M1 MBP gets is slightly warm when it’s hooked up to my LG Ultrafine 5K monitor in the usage scenario cited above.
That’s not the case for more than a few of the latest, higher performance Intel 11th Gen-based Windows laptops, which do get hot to the touch, particularly on the bottom of the chassis.
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NOTES:
*The battery life of the HP Elite c1030 Chromebook was revised (upwards) to 9 hours after further testing, following several Chrome OS updates.
**Re: HP Spectre x360 14 OLED: HP also offers the Spectre x360 14 with an LCD. That model gets longer battery life. OLEDs can be power hungry on white backgrounds, the most common background color I use. You can reduce battery life on OLED laptops by opting for dark mode whenever possible since OLEDs can turn off pixels completely in dark mode while LCDs cannot.
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