Onur's Page

Do Non-Apple Laptops with Good Battery Life and Performance Exist?


Background Story

I often take my laptop outside and work in random places, like a tent on a mountain. Yes, I'm serious (see 1 and 2)! So, having good battery life is super important for me because finding a power outlet in those situations is not always possible.

I have used many different laptops over the past 10 years, and honestly I have never had a perfect, or even a good one. It’s always been a trade-off: either the battery lasts long but the performance is bad, or the performance is great but the battery drains fast. Some laptops overheat and sound like a jet engine, or even worse, all of these problems happen together! I have tried everything from undervolting the CPU to turning off all the extra laptop features for just one thing: to get more battery life.

Here are some of the laptops I have used in the last 3 years:

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

I disabled the Nvidia GPU and used TLP to turn off and slow down various of things. With that setup, I could get around 4.5 hours of battery life but performance wasn’t great due to the power limitations. If the CPU was working hard, laptop was being super hot and the fan noise was incredibly loud. Typing on the keyboard became uncomfortable because it was so hot! Even though it had an RTX 2060 GPU, I never used it as the battery would die quickly and the heat was too much already even without it.

Dell XPS 13 9315 (i7-1250U)

This one didn’t have heat problems and the battery lasted around 6-6.5 hours. But I couldn’t do any heavy work on it. If I needed to compile big programs, I had to SSH into a remote server. That’s not a bad solution actually. I'm building my own server at home for this reason! I will do small tasks on the laptop and big tasks on the server. But still, you won’t always have access to a remote server. For a laptop with such low power, 6.5 hours of battery life was disappointing. But compare to Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 development experience was much better.

Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 (Ryzen 9 6950H)

What a piece of crap this computer was. Oh my god, I can't believe I got rid of it. I have used more than 10 laptops so far and I have never seen a computer that’s this bad in every possible way. I felt like Lenovo made this computer just to scam me. Maybe they said "Make a ThinkPad that looks sweet like a MacBook but is absolutely useless". This computer gathered all the worst things under one roof. Even if you were just watching videos, it would reach above-average temperatures. If it wasn’t plugged in, there was no way you could watch two movies in a row because your battery would die at the start of the second one! I set the screen from 4K down to 1920x1080, turned off everything like touchscreen, bluetooth, fingerprint and downclocked CPU to the lowest levels, yet the maximum battery life would be 3.5 hours (and that’s the best case; it would rarely make it to 3 hours), and the performance was terrible because I had downclocked the CPU (and even without downclocking, it would still be very bad at performance due to throttling).

Today: Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 13

This is the best laptop I have ever experienced in my life. For casual tasks (when the CPU isn’t under heavy pressure), it lasts around 12 hours. When I'm developing (compiling big projects, browsing with hundreds of tabs), it still lasts around 9 hours. It never overheats. Even when the CPU hits 100°C, it cools itself down very quickly and computer never gets uncomfortable to use. It performs better than the Ryzen 9 because the Ryzen would start overheating and slow down, while this one keeps going. I have been using it for over 10 hours a day for the past week, and I have only heard the fan 5 or 6 times, and even then, it wasn’t loud. This is all with the laptop running on its default settings – amazing, right? I haven’t even done any tuning. If I wanted to, I could probably get an extra hour or two of battery life, but I'm already happy with it.

More Battery!

~10 hours of battery life is great, but if you are traveling for more than a day, it’s still not enough. To fix that, I found an awesome power bank: Anker Prime 27,650mAh (250W). It can charge my laptop 1.5 times, which means I can use it for close to 30 hours without needing to find power outlet. After all the battery struggles I had, it feels like a dream come true. F*cking Z16... I am finally free...

Lessons learned – What to look for in a developer laptop:

  1. Avoid AMD CPUs. They’re terrible for laptops.
  2. Stick to the first rule, stay away from AMD CPUs.
  3. Go for Intel hybrid CPUs (e-core, p-core). Intel Core Ultra 7 165U is the actual reason how my current laptop can be very good in both performance and battery life.
  4. Don’t buy a high-performance laptop. If you need high performance use a remote server instead. High-performance laptops overheat and throttle performance, so you never get what you are hoping for.
  5. Don’t buy a laptop with a GPU. If you want to game, buy a console or build a desktop. For work, always choose a laptop without a GPU and find other ways to handle your GPU needs.

Final Words

I want to thank Intel for doing excellent work on laptop CPU that provide amazing performance while still being power-efficient. And I want to thank Lenovo for making the incredible laptop (No, not Z16!) I just got. But Lenovo, you should stop making the Z16 series and deprecate that model. It's awful!