MacBook Pro Battery Life Off The Charts Versus Other Laptop Brands

Battery test reveals MacBook Pro is the only brand that’s giving you the right numbers, hence value for your money.

Apple MacBooks have always been the standard for battery life. Many writers would prefer an Apple MacBook over any other laptop brand solely for its battery life, which comes in handy when you’re on a deadline, working during a rather long layover or flight with no electric sockets in sight.

And the Apple MacBook Pro 13″ gets yet another positive recommendation from review website Which?, which has recently put top laptop models from Lenovo, Apple, HP, Dell, Asus, Toshiba, and Acer to the battery life test.

Which? tested 8 Acer laptops, 3 Apple MacBook Pro laptops, 8 Asus laptops, 10 Dell laptops, 12 HP laptops, 20 Lenovo laptops, and 6 Toshiba laptops to compare whether manufacturers’ claims of how long their laptop’s life matches how long users actually get to use the laptop before reaching for that plug.

Each laptop was subjected to three tests, testing the laptop’s battery life from full charge to zero charge over normal laptop tasks as watching films and continually browsing the internet over Wi-Fi. And the results that Which? has arrived at were surprisingly depressing, except for the one—the Apple MacBook Pro.

According to their tests, only the Apple MacBook Pro could deliver the times it has advertised. The Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch promises a 10-hour performance with a full charge and surprisingly, after the tests, Which? was even able to extract at least 12 hours of battery life from a single full charge on a MacBook Pro 13.

Some laptop manufacturers overstate battery life, Which? tests find: https://t.co/UTx1bqbyNk pic.twitter.com/DxILeOO5IT

— Which? (@WhichUK) March 31, 2017

Which? reached out to the various laptop manufacturers to ask the reason behind the huge difference between their marketing numbers and the tests, and companies such as Dell claims that at the end of the day, it all boils down to how a user uses her PC:

“It’s difficult to give a specific battery life expectation that will directly correlate to all customer usage behaviours because every individual uses their PC differently – it’s similar to how different people driving the same car will get different gas mileage depending on how they drive.”

Apple authority website 9to5Mac, however, found that the results from the tests that Which? conducted varies greatly from the latest poll they conducted for MacBook Pro users.

According to a poll of 9to5Mac readers and Apple MacBook Pro users in December last year, there were varying percentages of MacBook Pro users who are getting the battery life they are promised.

“The largest group—a full third of those taking part—reported that they were seeing no more than half Apple’s claimed battery life, at five hours or less. A quarter reported 6-7 hours, while only 15% got 8-9 hours, and just 6.7% the full claimed ten hours.”

These numbers for the MacBook Pro batteries, however, are explained by Apple in a previous statement issued to Apple Insider in January. Consumer Reports also tested several MacBook Pro laptops before 2016 closed, and the results yielded operating times that varied from as great as 16 hours to as little as 3.75 hours.

Apparently, Apple reveals that what was causing the inconsistency in the battery life of the MacBook Pro units is a hidden Safari setting that should not be used by normal customers.

“We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache. This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab.”

This Safari bug in various MacBook Pro units has since been fixed by macOS 10.12.3 last January, yielding great results, with one MacBook Pro unit even running 18.75 hours on a charge.

With Apple being able to deliver promised battery life with the MacBook Pro, we’re left wondering what other manufacturers are really doing with their units. And as more power-hungry apps surface and as more real-world users multitask and play games, it’s going to be even more challenging for laptop makers to create a laptop that could deliver great performance efficiently, at a rate they promised.

[Featured Image by mama_mia / Shutterstock.com]