Lunar Lake laptop seemingly has 5 hours longer battery life than Apple M3 MacBook — Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i reaches almost 24 hours of video playback

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Lunar Lake will seemingly take the crown as the most efficient CPU for battery life, even ahead of Intel's ARM-based competitors.

Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition
(Image credit: YouTube - Lenovo)

Lunar Lake promises to bring incredible battery life to x86-based machines, and we're already getting a taste of what those numbers will look like. Lenovo skipped NDA and released battery life numbers for its all-new Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition notebook ahead of schedule. The new laptop recorded nearly 24 hours of video playback on a Core Ultra 7 258V.

Lenovo benchmarked its upcoming Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, which is thin and light, against Apple's previous generation M2 and M3 MacBooks. The Lunar Lake-powered Yoga Slim reportedly outperformed Apple's M3 MacBook by 5 hours and 22 minutes and Apple's M2 counterpart by 5 hours and 35 minutes.

Testing was done at 150 nits display brightness with the wifi and keyboard backlights off on all three laptops. The video was a locally run H.264 at 24 FPS at 1080P. The Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition had a Core Ultra 7 258V Lunar Lake CPU with 32GB of RAM running on Windows 11 24H2. The Apple M2 Macbook Lenovo tested was running with Apple's vanilla M2 processor with 8GB of RAM on MacOS Sonoma. The M3 counterpart was running on the vanilla M3 chip with 24GB of RAM and the same Mac OS.

Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition Lasted All-Day Playing Local Videos - YouTube Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition Lasted All-Day Playing Local Videos - YouTube
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Lenovo's in-house battery life tests back Intel's claim that Lunar Lake will provide better battery life than competing ARM-based laptops, which are Intel's main threat, especially now that they exist on Macbooks and Windows-based machines simultaneously thanks to the introduction of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X CPUs.

Lenovo's results aren't even the best we've seen so far from the plethora of Lunar Lake laptops coming soon. Acer is claiming up to 29 hours of battery life on a 65WHr battery and IPS LCD screen for some of its upcoming notebooks. Asus is claiming up to 29 hours for its upcoming Expertbook devices, and Dell is claiming up to 26 hours of Netflix playback on its forthcoming Lake Lunar laptops.

The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is a new variant powered exclusively by Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake CPUs. The laptop features a 15.3-inch form factor sporting a 70WHr battery, WiFi 7, up to 32GB of LPDDR5X 8533MHz RAM, 1TB M.2 PCIe Gen 4 SSD, and an 1800p 120Hz LCD screen. Its starting price is $1,279.99.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

24 Comments Comment from the forums
  • DerKeyser
    Cool - if only we didn’t have Windows’ built in battery consumption for excessive windows update processing and then Teams to reduce that figure to a third in real life.
    Reply
  • Gururu
    Intel slowly releasing their hand this generation. Beginning to expect some more phenomenal findings with the PC releases.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    Without knowing the details of which "Laptop with M2/M3" this may not be a apple's to apple's comparison. The Yoga-Slim-7i has a 70 Wh capacity battery, the 13 inch MacBook Air with a M2/M3 only has a 52.6 Wh capacity battery, the 15 inch Air has a 66.5 Wh battery and the MacBook Pro has a 70 Wh battery. Without knowing which model they are testing against this could be really impressive or just matching.

    Still bolds well for these processors, but hard to say which is "better" without a more details about the battery capacity.
    Reply
  • Notton
    It would be nice to see how much watt/hours it sips, but I understand those kinds of tests are harder to measure when the laptop/mini-PC behave differently when plugged in.

    Ultimately, laptops are about the complete package, including the use of larger battery and screen type.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    baboma said:
    It doesn't matter, because like-to-like compare is not the main purpose. The purpose is to impress into the audience's mind that the Lenovo laptop (w/ Lunar Lake) is "just as good or better" than MacBook in battery life.
    I does matter if they are comparing a 13" laptop to a 15" laptop (which seems likely since Apple advertises 18 hours of playback for the 13" Air). In most cases a 13" laptop won't outlast a 15" laptop of similar eras due to being able to house a larger capacity battery. Size of the battery matters in terms of how long something will last. This is why bigger phones have longer battery life.

    If it's the 15" vs the 15" I agree with you all day, but without knowing that, I standby my original post of, it bolds well for these processor, but doesn't really provide evidence that is better or worse than what Apple is offering in terms of battery life.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    baboma said:
    >I does matter if they are comparing a 13" laptop to a 15" laptop.

    It's 18-second marketing video. Has it ever occurred to you that the omission of the particular laptop models was deliberate?
    Yes, that was my point from the start
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    I am eagerly awaiting a purchase of lunarlake laptop, and I compared all 19 pre-order pre-release units and exactly 3 have a TB4 on both the right and left side (which is something I prefer as I deal with docking stations that sometimes want left or right connections).
    Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura EditionHP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14Dell XPS 13 9350As only the Lenovo offers normal ports(USB-A on tap) and a workable keyboard, as well as a dedicated power button(I really detest having that on the keyboard). It is the laptop I am gunning for. The Dell and HP are try-hard macs with odd design choices (e.g. function keys that are haptic on the xps...).

    I also considered the Asus Zenbook S 14 OLED UX5406SA and MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Evo . I think the Zenbook has the best build quality, even with the price premium and the MSI has the best availability (Amazon) and with great port selection(micro SD!). The problem is Lenovo if you order today, you will not receive till November if you are getting the 32GB and for a fixed ram laptop, It seems very short sighted to get the 16gb config especially when the difference is 100 quid.

    That is the annoying thing, bestbuy has a lot on pre-order but all the models the sport only 16gb versions. I do think Costco will end up with some good 32gb choices around the holidays but I am eager to get one now.
    Reply
  • watzupken
    While this sounds like a good start for Intel’s Lunar Lake, we will know if all these efficiency claim holds when the product is release. Playing video is only 1 type of use case, but people don’t buy expensive laptops to just watch movies or shows.
    Reply
  • BirdNerd
    I think this progress is fantastic! Genuinely. We all want more power, but we also (well, many of us) want more time away from being plugged into the wall for power.

    ...that said...
    Show of hands: Who here uses their laptop with no WiFi (ok, airplane flights, road trips...), keyboard backlighting turned off, watching a video at 24fps with the screen at a ridiculously low screen brightness of 150nits for more than a few hours at a time?

    HAHA, ok, it STILL is a good sign of general power efficiency, but I wish this reporting and other reporting was maybe a liiiiiiiiiitle more assertive about highlighting the carefully orchestrated data (it is pointed out in this article, I wish there was more data though about more normal use cases and how tests like this need to be seen for what they are...slight of hand). Back to what really matters though, we are genuinely seeing some great new hardware coming out and competition heating up around balancing performance and power efficiency. (y)
    Reply
  • Guardians Bane
    BirdNerd said:
    I think this progress is fantastic! Genuinely. We all want more power, but we also (well, many of us) want more time away from being plugged into the wall for power.

    ...that said...
    Show of hands: Who here uses their laptop with no WiFi (ok, airplane flights, road trips...), keyboard backlighting turned off, watching a video at 24fps with the screen at a ridiculously low screen brightness of 150nits for more than a few hours at a time?

    HAHA, ok, it STILL is a good sign of general power efficiency, but I wish this reporting and other reporting was maybe a liiiiiiiiiitle more assertive about highlighting the carefully orchestrated data (it is pointed out in this article, I wish there was more data though about more normal use cases and how tests like this need to be seen for what they are...slight of hand). Back to what really matters though, we are genuinely seeing some great new hardware coming out and competition heating up around balancing performance and power efficiency. (y)
    That's why I wait for reviewers to show what we can expect. I'm glad I waited on buying a Ryzen Zen 5 CPU. I wanted to get one on day one. Well, it turns out I'd be better off with a 7000 CPU, taking in price/performance in my workload. Lol, saved me money!

    I am hunting for a laptop as well and I'm excited for LNL! But I will def wait to see what it can really do.
    Reply