No, you’re not getting 30 hours
I ran PCWorld’s standard laptop battery life rundown test on Samsung’s Galaxy Book6 Ultra with an Intel Core Ultra 7 356H. I put the laptop into airplane mode, set the screen to around 250 nits of brightness, plug in some earbuds, and play a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on loop. Then, I see how long it runs before the laptop suspends itself. I run this at least twice to ensure the results are consistent.
On average, the Galaxy Book6 Ultra lasted 1,543 minutes (about 25.7 hours). That’s darn impressive, especially for a high-performance x86 machine with Nvidia RTX graphics hardware. But it’s also nowhere near the stated “up to 30 hours” of battery life.
A lot of factors can affect a laptop’s battery life, but the chart below shows representative examples across Intel Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake laptops. (This one’s battery life actually exceeds Qualcomm’s original Snapdragon X hardware!)
Chris Hoffman / Foundry
Compared to other laptop CPUs, it’s a big leap. This Panther Lake laptop runs cool and quiet, sipping power when you’re just on the desktop. It’s like Lunar Lake before it, except with stronger performance and better power efficiency, all on the traditional x86 platform for maximum software compatibility. It’s great! But is it 30 hours? No.
Our battery life rundown test gives us a good way to compare battery life between laptops. One that comes in at 25 hours won’t get you 25 hours of real-world use, but it’ll certainly last much longer than one that comes in at 14 hours. That’s how these battery life benchmarks should be used: as a comparison between machines. That’s all.
Psst. If you want to see which laptops blew away the competition, see our roundup of the laptops we tested with longest battery life.
