It’s no secret that a big reason you’ll find MacBooks among the best laptops is the insane battery life that Apple’s machines are claimed to possess. Intel may have just snatched the battery life crown with its new Lunar Lake mobile CPUs, though. According to a battery test released by Lenovo, its Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, packed with a Core Ultra 7 258V chip, lasted 23 hours and 54 minutes in a local video playback test, beating both M2 and M3 MacBooks by over five hours.
It’s a bold claim, and one that comes shockingly ahead of schedule. Laptops packing Intel’s latest chips are set to go on sale on September 24, so reviews should go live around that time. But Lenovo seems to have jumped the gun a bit with its battery test. Although Lenovo doesn’t clarify if its test was using a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, it shows a dominant lead for upcoming Lunar Lake laptops. The M2 MacBook lasted 18 hours and 19 minutes, while the M3 MacBook pushed ahead to 18 hours and 32 minutes. Still, they’re far behind the nearly 24 hours of battery life Lenovo laptop saw.
Beyond Apple, this type of performance exceeds Copilot+ PCs we’ve seen with a Snapdragon X Elite chip, such as the Asus ProArt PZ13. In our own local video playback testing, this laptop lasted 18 hours and 39 minutes, while the M3 MacBook Air lasted 19 hours and 39 minutes. The best performer in this test we’ve seen is Dell’s XPS 13 9345, which lasted 22 hours and 9 minutes. Even then, Lenovo claims its upcoming Lunar Lake laptop lasts longer.
Battery life is very important to the success of Intel’s upcoming generation. With the release of Copilot+, there was a significant bump in laptop sales, but that didn’t come on the back of new AI features — it was due to longer battery life. Lunar Lake laptops won’t have Copilot+ features at release, but Microsoft says they’ll receive support in November through free Windows updates.
Although it’s always important to wait for third-party reviews, we aren’t dealing with leaked benchmarks here. This is an official test from Lenovo, and one that seemingly had all three laptops operating under identical circumstances. Considering how closely Lenovo’s numbers align with our own, the idea of 24-hour battery life on upcoming Lunar Lake laptops might be a reality.
It’s not exactly surprising that Intel has pushed ahead in battery life. Lunar Lake is a radical redesign of Intel’s approach to CPUs, and it marks the first time the company is outsourcing manufacturing to chipmaker TSMC. The chips ditch Intel’s long-standing Hyper-Threading feature to save battery life, and they prioritize the efficient cores as the main driver of performance. Those two changes have massive implications for battery life.
The lingering question is if Intel can keep up performance while achieving this level of battery life. Lunar Lake chips top out at eight cores total, which means they could struggle in heavily threaded workloads. We’ll just have to wait until September 24 when the laptops launch to know for sure.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.