I review laptops for a living — this laptop has the best battery life of 2023

I don’t care if a laptop is made of unicorn tears, 24-karat gold, and Egyptian cotton, if it doesn’t have long battery life, I don’t want it. So which laptop has the best battery life of 2023? Unsurprisingly, it’s a Mac.

As much as I hate to admit it (I’ve been a PC girl for as long as I can remember), MacBooks are the reigning champs of power efficiency. I mean, come on. Look at our oft-updated laptops with best battery life page — it’s a total Apple invasion!

It’s worth noting, however, that if you’re looking for a laptop with the best battery life in recent years, as opposed to 2023, it’s actually not a MacBook. It’s a PC, but it’s likely not a laptop that you’d ever want, dear reader. It’s called the Getac S410, and it’s not designed for the average Joe. It’s bulky, chunky and built to withstand the harshest environments, which is why it looks like it’s been ripped out of a robocop’s caboose. 

It has an incredible, jaw-dropping runtime of 29 hours and 38 minutes, according to our testing. However, if you have no plans of trudging through Antarctica nor the Sahara Desert, the Getac S410 is not for you.

Macs, however, as a laptop category, have been beating Windows laptops by a landslide when it comes to battery life. Let’s dive into the longest-running laptop of 2023, according to the Laptop Mag battery test.

Which laptop has the best battery life of 2023?

The laptop with the best battery life of 2023 is — drumroll, please — the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 Max chip, which is available via Apple’s official website for a starting price of $2,499.

According to our in-house testing, which involves running the laptop at 150 nits of brightness while surfing the web via WiFi, the 16-inch MacBook Pro lasted 18 hours and 56 minutes. To give you some perspective on how incredible this runtime is, according to our historical data, the average premium laptop lasts 10 hours and 30 minutes.

So the 16-inch, M2 Max MacBook Pro lasts nearly eight hours longer than your typical laptop. You might as well throw your charging cable away because you won’t need it (that was hyperbole; please throw it away). Getting those annoying, “Battery low” alerts will be a thing of the past for you, thanks to this highly power-efficient MacBook.

Which MacBook Pro 16 did we test?

If you’re curious about which configuration, specifically, we tested to get this approximate 19-hour runtime, check out the specs below:

• Processor – 12-core CPU (M2 Max)
• Graphics – 38-core GPU (M2 Max)
• Memory – 96GB
• Storage – 4TB
• Display – 16-inch, Liquid Retina XDR Display (3456 x 2234 pixels)

This particular model will set you back $5,299. (I know, I know; it stings!) However, as mentioned, the cheapest configuration for the 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $2,499 and comes with the following specs:

• Processor – 12-core CPU (M2 Pro)
• Graphics – 19-core GPU (M2 Pro)
• Memory – 16GB
• Storage – 512GB
• Display – 16-inch, Liquid Retina XDR Display

And good news, according to our testing, it offers the same runtime as the $5,299 model, so whether you decide to get the entry-level model or splurge, you should still get about 19 hours of battery life.

Bottom line

If the 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops are too pricy for you, consider the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro, which has the second-best laptop battery life among recently released MacBooks. It lasted a whopping 18 hours and 20 minutes, according to our in-house testing.

It has a starting price of $1,299 on Apple’s official website, but the configuration we tested — M2 chip (8-core GPU, 10-core GPU), 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD — will set you back $1,899.

If you’re not an Apple fan whatsoever, check out my roundup on Windows PCs with the best battery life of 2023.