6 Chromebooks With Ultra-Long Battery Life

Buying a notebook computer can be a tricky proposition. The conventional wisdom has long been that you need to spend at least $600 to $700 to get something of particularly high quality with good battery life, especially when it comes to traditional Windows laptops. However, there are mitigating factors that can play a role in changing up that calculus. If you mainly use your computer for productivity and you don't need to do any heavy lifting like audio or video editing, then the option of buying a Chromebook – a laptop that uses Google's Chrome operating system, becomes a viable option that avoids the normal pitfalls of cheap notebooks. And with choosing a Chromebook comes the ability to get a better value on the lower end of the price spectrum.

One of the biggest factors in selecting the right laptop is finding one with a good real-world battery life. Once you find a computer that suits your needs and can consistently deliver eight or more hours of battery life on a single charge, your purchasing decisions become a lot easier. With that in mind, let's take a look at some of the top Chromebooks on the market that have shown in formal and informal benchmarking to have exceptional battery life, sometimes even outpacing the battery life rating given by the manufacturer on the official spec sheet.

One Chromebook that gets consistently lauded for its battery life is the Acer Chromebook Spin 714, which retails for $699. Officially, the spec sheet says it has up to 10 hours of battery life. In practice? Professional reviews indicate that the Spin 714 can not just meet that benchmark, but exceed it. The most detailed account of its battery life comes in an October 2023 ZDNet article that ran with the headline "This Chromebook has the longest-lasting battery life I've tested, and it's not even close." Using one of the more standard battery tests, playing a 1080p YouTube video continuously at 50% brightness, the Spin 714 hit the 11-hour mark. Writer Cesar Cadenas remarked that this was the first Chromebook he'd seen deliver genuine all-day battery life instead of lasting closer to six hours.

Tests aren't real-world usage, but if everyone uses similar tests, they're still valuable. PC World's review of the Spin 714, for instance, saw them run the CrXPT battery life benchmark, which had the Chromebook average 15.1 hours before draining the battery, more than 50 percent above the advertised timeframe, with PC Mag's review getting nearly identical results. RTINGS, meanwhile, pegged it at 10.1 hours for web browsing, 7.1 hours for video playback, and 2.6 hours of gaming, all while taking just 1.5 hours to charge.

Another Chromebook that has particularly wowed reviewers for its battery life comes from Asus, which offers up the Chromebook Plus CM34 flip. It's available direct from Asus, where it retails for $599.99 but can be found for under $500 on sale. PC World's August 2023 review of the CM34 Flip centered its headline on just how ridiculously outstanding its battery life is, saying that it offers "19 hours of battery life for $499." According to Ashley Biancuzzo's review, PC World uses the CrXPRT 2 battery benchmark on all Chromebooks, describing it as a battery test "which cycles through various tasks until the laptop dies." She was so shocked by the results that she ran it twice, with the second pass giving similar results. She had expected 10 hours of battery life, a mark that the CM34 Flip came shockingly close to doubling.

Several weeks later, Chrome Unboxed dropped its own laudatory review of the CM34 Flip, awarding it an Editors Choice badge and placing it on their best Chromebooks of the year list. Reviewer Robby Payne didn't use any formal benchmarks, but with the Chromebook at or close to its maximum brightness while he multitasked extensively, he still managed to get 10 to 11 hours of battery life out of the CM34 Flip with each charge. He was particularly impressed that it hit those marks as an x86-based laptop (it runs on an AMD Ryzen 3 7320C) when they're more commonly expected of those using ARM processors.

One budget Chromebook that comes with a long battery life baked into its surprisingly low price is the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 Chromebook, which retails for $319. With a retail price that low, you'd normally expect modest battery life at best, but this Chromebook purportedly blows away those expectations. PC World's review benchmarked it at 16 hours, a pretty fantastic number that puts it well into the realm of all-day battery life. That's a good bit above Lenovo's rated battery life of 13.5 hours, which would be plenty impressive itself. XDA Developers, meanwhile, was able to get to 11 hours in more informal testing with mixed everyday tasks at 50% brightness. 

Android Central's review was built around just how impressive the Slim 3 was relative to its modest spec sheet, particularly its MediaTek-branded ARM processor. That review cited the "long battery life" as a strength, though it didn't cite any figures beyond pointing to the official claim of 13.5 hours. 9to5Google was also somewhat vague while still very positive, describing the Slim 3 as a Chromebook that can "easily last through a full day (5-6 hours) on a charge with plenty left over by the end of the day." It's not an absolute powerhouse, with the weaker chipset making it less than ideal for multitasking, but it's pretty clear that in this price range, among less-powerful Chromebooks, the Slim 3 has superior battery life to a lot of the competition.

One Chromebook with awe-inspiring battery life right around the lower-middle area of the Chromebook price range is the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook, which retails for $499 but can often be found for well under $400 on sale. PC Mag loved it, giving it a four out of five stars rating and an Editors' Choice recommendation, finding it to be particularly amazing for battery life. How amazing? The Duet 5 "dominated" their battery tests, clocking in at roughly 21 hours. Though the review concedes that their methodology, video playback with muted speakers, "isn't the most severe battery-drain scenario," it still beat all other Chromebooks they tested by a margin of several hours. Even three years after that review was published, a newer PC Mag rundown touts it as coming in almost six-and-a-half hours ahead of the next best finisher.

TechRadar was also impressed, giving the Duet Five a 4.5 stars out of five rating. In addition to clocking similarly impressive battery life to what PC Mag found — 16 hours and 20 minutes in a movie playback test and 18 to 19 hours "with the right tweaks" — the review gushed over the Chromebook having a "gorgeous" OLED display as opposed to the more conventional LED-lit LCD. Laptop Mag gave it an identical score, and in testing, the Duet 5's battery life came in at 13 hours and 31 minutes of what they describe as "continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi" with 150 nits of brightness.

Another contender for battery life is the Acer Chromebook Plus 514, which retails for $399.99 direct but can be found elsewhere for less. Acer claims up to 12 hours of battery life, and CNET's testing showed that to be decently close to accurate, with their video streaming test forcing the battery to tap out at 11 hours, one minute. "Anecdotal" testing in the same review found that it lasts roughly seven to eight hours of "general use," though Wired found that, in their experience, the Chromebook Plus 514 tended to last an hour or two longer than that.

PC Mag, meanwhile, clocked the battery life at 14 hours and 18 minutes using its testing methodology, which plays a 720p video on a loop at 50 percent screen brightness and 100% volume while Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are disabled. With Wi-Fi disabled, it's not necessarily a great approximation of real-world use, but it still outlasted almost every other Chromebook that PC Mag tested. Even Chrome Unboxed, which felt Acer's claimed 12-hour lifespan was unrealistic, praised the Chromebook Plus 514's battery life for getting into the eight to 10-hour range per charge most of the time. IT Pro technically listed the battery life in the "Cons" column of its review summary, which goes to show you just how much they liked the Chromebook Plus 514. That "Cons" entry was worded "Battery life is only just all day."

One more option from the premium Chromebook category comes from Asus in the form of its Asus ExpertBook CX54 Chromebook Plus. Retailing for $699.99 but often selling for less at both Amazon and Best Buy, it manages to bring pretty stout battery life despite its beefed-up specs that include an Intel Core Ultra 5 125U CPU. In Wirecutter's September 2024 rundown of the best Chromebooks, the CX54 was selected as their "Upgrade Pick," and battery life that their tests concluded was about 12 hours long. The same review also praised its lightweight yet durable construction and well-made keyboard and trackpad, as well as the presence of a fingerprint reader. This Chromebook's webcam also received praise for its high-resolution display and superior webcam, plus promises of a decade of software updates.

IT Pro, meanwhile, did a more traditional, formal review of the CX54, giving it a three-and-a-half stars out of five rating. Alongside more praise about the performance, display, and build quality was their own battery rundown test, which lasted 10 hours and 39 minutes playing a 1080p video on a loop. Less formally, it lasted a full eight-hour workday pretty easily, with reviewer Stuart Andrews only needing to charge it more if he was looking to do extra work done at night. If anything, it's a lot more powerful than you'd expect from a Chromebook, but that power could become more relevant as Google adds more AI features to the Chromebook ecosystem.