We Tested 200 Laptops. This One Just Clocked 40+ Hours of Battery Life
PCMag has awarded its first PCMag Lab Award for battery life to the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+, which lasted 42 hours and 6 minutes in a controlled video playback test. The result marks a new benchmark among over 200 laptops tested since 2024, driven by advances in efficient processors like Intel’s Core Ultra 3 Series and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. While real-world usage will yield shorter battery life, the test provides a standardized measure of relative endurance. This achievement reflects a broader industry trend toward significantly longer laptop battery performance.
- ▪The MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ achieved 42 hours and 6 minutes of battery life in PCMag’s video playback test, the longest recorded in their lab to date.
- ▪PCMag tests battery life by looping a video at 50% brightness with Wi-Fi off until the laptop reaches 5% charge.
- ▪Advances in Intel Core Ultra 3 Series and Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors are driving recent gains in laptop battery efficiency.
- ▪Real-world battery life will vary significantly based on usage, brightness, and connectivity, but the test offers a consistent comparison metric.
- ▪Six laptops have exceeded 30 hours in PCMag’s tests since 2024, with the top 10 all achieving at least 28 hours.
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Regular readers of PCMag know all about our Editors’ Choice award, our mark of value and excellence that we bestow on the best products that come through our labs. But here in the spring of 2026, we just minted a new honor: the PCMag Lab Awards, for products that achieve excellence in lab testing—and, more specifically, those that set a new performance benchmark. All of the products that we tag with our new Lab Awards badge have achieved a field-leading technical distinction of some kind—one that matters to our readers when they go to buy.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.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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