Intel and LG Display may have beaten Apple and Qualcomm with the best laptop battery life ever

The Dell XPS 16 keeps on going.The Dell XPS 16 keeps on going.One of the coolest laptops we saw at CES in January was the new Dell XPS 16, with a unique 1–120Hz variable refresh rate display that can sip power when you don’t need the screen to stay speedy.Just how little power might it consume? Notebookcheck has tested a version of the laptop with that LG Display screen and a new Intel Panther Lake chip — and it appears to be the most efficient laptop that’s ever gone through its Wi-Fi web browsing test. At idle, the Core Ultra 325 laptop drew as little as 1.5 watts, and lasted nearly 27 hours of web browsing despite only housing a 70 watt-hour pack. That’s well shy of the 99.5Wh Dell has sometimes crammed into its 16-inch models.That’s more battery life than Notebookcheck has gotten out of any MacBook or MacBook Pro, and apparently more than all but two other laptops since it started running this test in 2014. And of those two laptops, one relied on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip, a larger 84Wh battery, and a mere 60Hz screen — while the other had two batteries for a total of 149Wh and a 60Hz screen as well.I should caution you that we typically see much less battery life in an actual workday than we do in fixed battery life tests. But compared to other laptops, this Dell + Intel + LG Display combo seems like the new battery life champ. Note that Dell also sells it with a higher-res tandem OLED screen, though — you’ll need to settle for 1920 x 1200 and no touchscreen for best battery life.While Dell may deserve a lot of credit as the system integrator, this tech may not be exclusive to Dell for long. LG Display announced that it’s become the first in the world to mass-produce a 1–120Hz laptop LCD panel (which it’s branding as Oxide 1Hz), and plans to mass-produce an OLED version in 2027. Intel, too, isn’t just working with one display vendor: last October, it announced it was working with Chinese panel maker BOE on 1Hz refresh rate computers too.Similar display tech has been in our smartwatches and smartphones for a while, by the way: 2019’s Apple Watch Series 5 introduced a 1-60Hz screen to use less power, I believe 2021’s Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra was the first with a 10-120Hz screen (though I’ve seen reports it only went down to 48Hz in practice) and that year’s OnePlus 9 Pro went down to 1Hz, and Apple added 1-120Hz to pro iPhones in 2022.A free daily digest of the news that matters most.This is the title for the native ad