MacBook Pro Crushes Windows Laptops in New Battery Tests

In a direct comparison between a number of brand-name laptop computers, British publication, Which?, discovered in a series of real-world testing that Apple’s MacBook and MacBook Pro were the only machines among the bunch able to consistently meet or exceed their makers’ battery life claims.

Of all the models tested, Apple’s recent 13-inch MacBook Pro clocked in at an impressive 12 hours of use — slightly besting Apple’s self-proclaimed 10 hours of battery life for its most recent machine sans the OLED Touch Bar. Another two MacBook models also bested Apple’s 10-hour claim by about 15 minutes while easily putting to shame a bevy of PC-based offerings from the likes of ASUS, Acer, DELL, Hewlett Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba.

Major discrepancies were discovered, however, between some models’ advertised claims, and the results they actually achieved in real-world testing. For instance, HP’s Pavilion 14-al115na, which the PC-maker alleges can achieve 9-hours of battery life, in fact lasted just 4 hours and 25 minutes. Likewise, the “7-hour battery-life” of Dell’s Inspiron 15-5000 barely managed to churn out 4 hours. Other models from Acer and Lenovo, respectively, while not falling unacceptably short of their manufacturer’s claims, were still short by a few hours apiece, nevertheless.

“It’s difficult to give a specific battery life expectation that will directly correlate to all customer usage behaviors because every individual uses their PC differently,” a representative from Dell explained, in a clear defense of the Which? findings, while adding that “It’s similar to how different people driving the same car will get different gas mileage depending on how they drive.”

“[Our battery testing] uses real life scripts and runs on real applications like Microsoft Office,” Hewlett Packard attested in a similar show of defense, adding that “particular specifications” — including screen resolution, RAM, and CPU speed, for example — can ultimately impact battery consumption.

Continuous employment of everyday tasks, such as watching movies or loading webpages over Wi-Fi, were at the core of the testing publication’s strategies.

Sure to add fuel to fire of the Mac vs. PC argument, is that in relation to more liberal estimates of as much as 19 hours from U.S. Magazine, Consumer Reports, Which? estimates for Apple’s 2016 MacBook Pro are actually more on the conservative side of the spectrum at 10-12 hours.

The modified numbers from Consumer Reports fly in the face of their previous estimates, which pegged the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s battery performance at anywhere between 4 hours and 16 hours. Via the release of macOS 10.12.3, however, Apple all but addressed the concerns that were previously raised by Consumer Reports — regulating battery performance, and proving, yet again, that MacBooks are just all-around better machines.

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