Laptop Makers Wildly Overstating Battery Life

For years, it has been an accepted truism that a manufacturer’s estimated battery life of a new laptop is misleading, to say the least, but now it has been (mostly) proven. An investigation by Which? has shown that the discrepancy between the official estimated battery life and the actual battery life of a new laptop is, often, quite large, with some tested models falling below 50% of the manufacturer’s claims, though testing did reveal one significant exception.

Laptops from Lenovo, HP, and Acer fared the worst, with both models tested managing a battery life of less than half the manufacturer’s estimate, while the Dell that Which? tested barely managed 60% of the official estimate. Remarkably, though, the Apple MacBook Pro tested managed to exceed the official estimate by 20%.

Some results from the Which? laptop battery life test:

Lenovo Yoga 510

• Claimed battery life: 5 hours
• Which? tests: 2 hours, 7 minutes

Apple MacBook Pro 13

• Claimed battery life: 10 hours
• Which? tests: 12 hours

HP Pavilion 14-al115na

• Claimed battery life: 9 hours
• Which? tests: 4 hours 25 minutes

Dell Inspiron 15 5000

• Claimed battery life: 7 hours
• Which? tests: 3 hours 58 minutes

Acer E15

• Claimed battery life: 6 hours
• Which? tests: 2 hours 56 minutes

Which? contacted the manufacturers of the laptops tested to ask them about the discrepancy between their estimates and the Which? test results. “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,” a Dell spokesperson said. HP explained that its battery testing “uses real life scripts and runs on real applications like Microsoft office.”