(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
PCMag readers know all about our Editors’ Choice award—the gold standard for standout products—but in 2026, we’re raising the bar. Enter the new PCMag Lab Awards, reserved for hardware and software that's not just best-in-class, but serves up a quantifiable, field-leading technical distinction in our tests. Lab Awards winners push performance forward in ways that truly matter when you’re actually buying.
Laptops, of course, are a big focus of PCMag’s coverage. (PCs are our namesake, after all.) So it's fitting that our first laptop-related Lab Award focuses on an essential aspect of any machine: its battery life. How long can a laptop really last off the plug? It’s a deceptively thorny question, but one every shopper cares about—and one we’re uniquely equipped to answer.
PC Labs tests more than 100 laptops a year, and we're keeping pace in 2026, with 200 new models in our database since this time in 2024. We test a lot of machines—a healthy chunk of the field—and have accumulated a deep, consistent dataset that tracks how systems perform over time. And we just saw a laptop whose numbers shot out of our spreadsheets like a rocket: MSI's Prestige Flip 14 AI+, which lasted more than 40 hours in our test of maximum battery life. That's a new high-water mark.
We'll get into the nuances of how we test laptop battery life in a moment. (It's getting more slippery to test, as we'll explain.) But bottom line: If you travel a lot, have a long commute, or compute in class, battery longevity's a big deal, and this MSI model is a dream machine if you tend to forget your charger on a regular basis. Given that shoppers these days favor practical features over vanity upgrades, a laptop that simply refuses to die might be the ultimate flex.
The 2026 Trendline: Laptop Battery Life Is on an Upswing
Until recently, our battery-life testing had plateaued for some time. We saw per-charge running times settle into a predictable range. Most of the longest-lasting Windows machines would land at around 20 hours on our test. A few of Apple’s MacBooks went well beyond that mark, with a couple topping a (then) eye-popping 30 hours.
Over the last couple of years, however, we’ve seen the trendlines in battery life going up and to the right. The introduction of Qualcomm’s efficient Snapdragon X chips and Intel’s Core 200V (“Lunar Lake”) and Core Series 3 (“Panther Lake”) processor families has resulted in a rash of 25-hour-plus results, with 30 hours no longer a unicorn. In our 2024-to-2026 test set, we've logged six machines with more than 30 hours of running time, and in our current battery-life top 10 (more on those machines in a moment), the shortest result was just shy of 28 hours.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)But 40 hours? That brings us to our first Lab Awards winner for Best Laptop Battery Life. MSI’s Prestige 14 Flip AI+ is a 2-in-1 convertible laptop, and it set a new high-water mark for battery life in our video rundown test, with a running time of 42 hours and 6 minutes. The Prestige 14 Flip AI+ we tested is built around an Intel Core Ultra 3 Series processor, the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H. (See our full review of the Prestige 14 Flip AI+, which also landed our Editors' Choice Award.)
The Prestige 14 Flip AI+ and its 40-plus-hour battery life showing may well get bypassed before long, given the now-steady flow of efficient Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 and Intel Core Ultra 3 Series laptops passing through PC Labs. (Not long before we launched our awards, we registered a lusty near-35 hours from the HP OmniBook 5 14, based on a Snapdragon X Plus processor.) But this MSI model’s impressive result will take some effort to top.
The Rundown: PC Labs' Battery Testing Process, Explained
What goes into measuring battery life, and under what conditions did our winner achieve this result? More so than many of our other tests, measuring battery life is a tricky, tricky business. It’s just as much about technicalities as about philosophies.
There are many ways you can drain a laptop’s battery throughout the day, and no one method accurately reflects how all of us compute in the real world. Everyone engages in their own mix of browsing, data processing, media editing, gaming, and idling. Plus, everyone’s specific mix varies from day to day.
Some synthetic benchmarks aim to approximate a mix of idle time, simulated traces (work resembling application activity), and other battery-rundown tactics. That is a reasonable approach that simulates a typical day in the life with a given laptop. That said, some laptops will perform certain tasks more efficiently than others due to their CPU and GPU makeup, supported firmware, and other factors. With so many processes contributing to the rundown in a synthetic test, it can be impossible to unbake that battery-life cake and pinpoint why a laptop gets a good or bad result.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The basic battery test we've run for many years is a full video-playback battery rundown. To test a laptop, we ensure it’s fully charged and focus on specific settings. We turn off any keyboard backlighting; we make sure the screen never goes to sleep, or changes brightness by time of day or when we step away (disabling any ambient-light modes or “presence detection”); and we limit any vendor-specific, bespoke battery-management settings to reduce variables.
The actual test consists of playing back a video (the Blender demo film Tears of Steel). We run this short movie on a loop as a custom 24-hour-long video file, with Wi-Fi turned off, the audio volume set to 100%, and the display’s brightness set to 50% on the laptop’s brightness slider.
The battery starts at 100% charge. We disconnect the laptop from the charger and immediately start the playback loop, running it until the laptop hibernates with 5% battery remaining. (We designate that 5% mark in the OS’s power settings during setup.)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)With today’s extreme battery runtimes, we can’t keep an eye on a given laptop at every moment during its playback; sometimes the battery dies in the middle of the night! (These days, we set our 24-hour video file to loop when it reaches the end, given that some laptops run for longer than a full day.) Once the battery hits 5% and the laptop shuts down, we plug it back in, boot it back up, and check the video player to see how many hours and minutes had elapsed when the video stopped. This figure is our battery rundown time.
How the Field Breaks Down: Our Battery Top 10
So, how did this MSI model perform compared with the recent field? Here's a spec breakout of the top 10 finishers in our battery life test since mid-2024...
...and here's how they placed. Note the daylight between MSI's Flip and the next contender, from HP's OmniBook family.
Also, notice the wealth of machines with Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors, as well as relatively low-resolution (1080p or 1200p) panels; more on both in a moment. But it's also worth heeding that three of our top 10 are using Intel Core Ultra 3 Series Panther Lake processors, and those chips have been on the market for only a few months. Expect to see more of them rising in the rankings. Laptops with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 laptop processors are also imminent, so this will be a lively space to watch as the year progresses.
Battery-Life Nuances to Know (and There Are Plenty)
Running a video for more than 40 hours on a charge is extremely impressive, indicative of how far the industry has come in terms of efficiency and battery life. In a field of increasingly enduring laptops, the MSI Prestige flew past the other contenders. As noted, HP’s OmniBook 5 14 was a strong runner-up, and we’ve had a number of 30-hour finishers, but this MSI model made this award a no-contest deal.
This stunning result does come with some caveats, as do all battery tests. No battery test is perfect, and likewise, every laptop has its mitigating factors. First off, consider the very nature of our battery test: Few users will play a single video for this long, particularly with Wi-Fi off. You might equate our test with the experience of being on a long flight, disconnected from a charger and off the internet. But these days, your plane will run out of fuel long before a well-chosen laptop, used just for video playback, will!
Most users subject their laptops to tasks that are much more draining than this, and your battery’s running time will be shorter when crunching through, say, processor-intensive editing tasks, streaming movies, or playing PC games off the charger. Because how people use their laptops varies so much, look at our battery test as a measure of relative battery potential between models, not an absolute of what you’re guaranteed to get in everyday use. You won’t hit 40 hours with this MSI if you use it for a mix of office work, casual games, and Netflix. But it should last longer, in a rough, relative sense, than any other laptop used proportionally in the same way.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The display is a second big factor in any laptop battery test. Peak screen brightness varies across laptops, so the exact nit count at 50% brightness varies, too. (Nits, also called candelas per square meter, are a standard measure of screen brightness.) The MSI Prestige’s display is an OLED, but it is not especially bright, so (all else being equal) its lower nit count means it’s expending less energy; other models may be brighter at their own 50% mark. Because our testing showed the MSI Prestige’s screen to be a little dim, in practice, some people might raise the brightness, which would drain more power. It all depends on where you use the machine, the ambient lighting in that location…and your eyesight.
Another variable: In our experience, laptop screen brightness doesn’t always scale linearly to 100% within the laptop's brightness controls. What do we mean by that? The “50%” brightness setting in a laptop’s control panel, in practice, is not always a mathematical 50% of a laptop’s maximum brightness reading in nits. So why do we use the 50% brightness-slider setting rather than busting out a light meter? Because most users will never examine or measure a panel’s nits level, nor use an instrument on it. They’ll just twiddle with the slider's preset stages and eyeball it. We simulate that by always using the 50% mark.
Another screen factor is the panel's native resolution. We always test the battery at the screen’s native resolution, since laptop users seldom dial that down in most day-to-day scenarios. What does that mean for battery life, though? All else being equal (brightness settings, screen technology, and so on), a higher-resolution screen (say, a 4K panel) with more pixels to push will drain your battery faster than a lower-resolution one (say, 1080p). Like with brightness, you can’t unbake this factor from a given laptop. And again, because most buyers will use a laptop as designed and provided, that’s how we measure. Of course, that can put a laptop with a lower-res screen at an advantage in terms of battery life versus a higher-res one.
Finally, as we hinted at above, processor power consumption and recent trends in CPU design play big roles. Many of the latest laptop processors have incorporated so-called “efficiency” and “very low power” cores, and these newer chips relegate less-demanding tasks to those power-sipping, purpose-built cores, conserving the battery. Video playback is, in many cases, a prime candidate for shunting to those cores. In contrast, multitasking-heavy productivity work and gaming will hit these cores less often and rely on the full-power ones, drawing more juice. So again: Think of our battery test as a relative best-case scenario for comparisons, not an absolute.
Hitting 40: Even With Caveats, This Test Result Is a Milestone
Still, we’ve found our battery-rundown test to be a more-than-effective tool for measuring battery life, and have run it on laptops for years to standardize our results. The most important thing about any testing regimen is being consistent in your methodology, so that results are 1:1 comparable across devices. Keeping to that methodology for years lets you see the trendlines, too. With enough data, a long-lasting laptop is easy to distinguish from one with low stamina.
Indeed, some manufacturers, in their own specs, report their battery projections as “video rundown” times, as we do. When manufacturers provide them, our results generally align with these ratings. Their settings may differ slightly, but our method provides a consistent rubric for both the manufacturer and the reviewer.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)In the coming years, given the developments we’re seeing with low-power cores and other silicon efficiencies, we may need to consider moving to, or augmenting our testing with, a synthetic, user-simulation battery-life test. (Something, perhaps, like UL's Procyon Battery Life Benchmark.) The video-rundown method may lead to battery runtimes that are just too impractically long, or too out of sync with demanding real-world usage. But these alternate tests have their own pitfalls, as we noted: Nobody’s workload is the same, internet connectivity can vary and affect the test, and these tests say less about the maximum battery potential than a straight-through rundown test does.
In short, no single battery-testing methodology can satisfy everyone. Regardless, the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ has set a new bar—by hours!—and that’s worth celebrating. The stars aligned in this machine: a nice-enough OLED screen that’s not too bright, a 1080p resolution that’s not too battery-demanding, and a cutting-edge Intel chip that stretches the battery taffy as far as anyone has. Perhaps another system will usurp it before long, in this new world of hyper-efficient silicon. But for now, the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ holds our first Lab Awards battery crown. Hail to the monarch.