Among laptop makers, Apple is the most realistic in battery life reported

If you are already looking for a new laptop computer, whether online or in the physical world, you have certainly come across an important aspect: battery time. Manufacturers, including Apple, usually advertise the qualities of their products with somewhat generic numbers "12 hours of battery life", "10 hours away from the plug" or something like that. But are these indications realistic?

It was exactly what Laptop Mag wanted to find out and did it in the most scientific way possible: taking laptops from various brands and comparing the reported battery life with results in the real world. In this sense, guess what: the Apple it was the one that did the best in the tests, with considerable slack compared to competitors; s a Microsoft it also reached acceptable levels, although worse in relation to Ma.

The report tested all of Ma's recent laptops, and found satisfactory results in almost all of them. THE 15-inch MacBook Pro, for example, endured for 10 hours and 21 minutes longer than the estimated duration of 10 hours. J his successor, of 16 inches, was just 5 minutes below the 11-hour estimate, while the 13 ″ MacBook Pro with Touch Bar lasted 8h41min (the estimate of 10h).

Of all the Ma models tested, only the 2019 MacBook Air he did poorly: he delivered the points after 8 hours and 51 minutes, a considerable difference from the 12 hours promised by Apple. On average, MacBooks had a 48 minute difference in the actual battery life in relation to that disclosed by the manufacturer, the best performance among all brands.

Microsoft, second in the test, had an average difference of 194 minutes (3 hours and 14 minutes) between the reported duration and the actual battery life of its products. Only Surface Laptop 3 achieved a performance considered acceptable (with a difference below 2:30): it lasted 9 hours and 32 minutes away from the plug, while the Redmond giant reports a duration of 11 and a half hours.

Among the biggest losers, we have the HP and the Lenovo: the first presented an average difference of 251 minutes (4 hours and 11 minutes) in the published and real duration, while the second stayed in 231 minutes (3 hours and 51 minutes). It is worth mentioning the case of HP Specter x360, with the biggest difference of the whole test: the manufacturer discloses an estimated duration of 22 and a half hours, but the laptop only resisted for 12 hours and 7 minutes an excellent mark under any other circumstances, but which became vexatious simply because poor marketing.

At the end of the day, the ranking of differences in Laptop Mag it looked like this:

  1. Apple (48 minutes)
  2. Microsoft (194 minutes)
  3. ASUS (212 minutes)
  4. Acer (224 minutes)
  5. Dell (230 minutes)
  6. Lenovo (231 minutes)
  7. HP (251 minutes)

The report recalls that one of its main purposes is to stop manufacturers from using the benchmark MobileMark 2014 as a testing method. According to Laptop Mag, it is outdated and does not accurately reflect the patterns of computer use in 2020; note that Apple and Microsoft no longer use the benchmarks in their tests, preferring to adopt internal solutions.

via The Loop