Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: Early Thoughts on Battery Life

Though I was a week late to the Copilot+ PC party, I feel like I’m mostly caught up with my benchmark-reliant peers in the tech reviewer community. But there is one exception, and there’s not a thing I can do about it: I’m desperate to develop a real-world understanding of how Copilot+ PCs perform in one crucial area, and it requires a lot of time. There’s just no way to cut corners here.

I am referring, of course, to battery life.

Battery life isn’t accurately measured by any benchmark. These benchmarks, which usually involve local video playback or some web browsing script, both run on a loop until the battery dies, meaning they don’t reflect how real people really use laptops. In the real world, laptops move between being powered and being on battery, are put to sleep and sometimes left idle for days, and they’re pushed and prodded in unpredictable ways, at unpredictable times.

Several years ago, a friend who worked at a PC maker called me, curious why the battery life average I reported for whatever laptop was about half as long as the figure they were seeing internally, a figure that other reviews confirmed. Irked that I even had to explain this, I told this person that my measurement was more realistic because it represented real-world usage. And so they changed tact, asking which apps I used. So I started going down the list until I mentioned one that offended them. “Photoshop Elements?” they exclaimed, interrupting me. “Well, no wonder your numbers are so bad.” Losing patience with this, and again irked that such a thing required an explanation, I told them that many real people really use Photoshop Elements. What no people do is run local video on a loop until the battery dies.

We agreed to disagree on that one, and yet all these years later, it’s still very common—near universal, it sometimes seems, to see laptop reviews that are just a rote listing of whatever scores that device got on whatever list of benchmarks. Not to pick on anyone, but the PC World review of the Surface Laptop 7 is a typical example: Microsoft told the publication that this Copilot+ PC was capable of over 20 hours of battery life, “a promise it easily fulfilled” when PC World ran exactly the same benchmark as Microsoft had—it’s always the same damned benchmark, guys, that’s the point—and the Surface Laptop 7 delivered 20.4 hours of battery life. Mission accomplished.

Also point missed.

Benchmarks are nice because they’re consistent: You can run them the day you first use the PC, wait two weeks,  wait a year, it doesn’t matter. You’re pretty much going to see the same results, and for what should be obvious reasons: When you benchmark a PC, you don’t just open the lid and run a test, you prep it in very specific and well-documented ways to ensure that nothing unusual will lower the results. With battery life tests, you dim the display to a barely visible 150 nits, make sure there are no other apps or background processes running, and perform other optimizations, all aimed at ensuring you see exactly what you expect to see.  Which is what the PC maker expects you to see.

I envy these reviewers, their lives are so much easier than mine. They can rifle through a new PC review just a few days after unboxing it, and that lets them move quickly onto the next review device. They don’t even technically need to use the PC all that much because so much of what they publish is automated. Throw in a few bon mots about the look and feel, a few key components you can touch and see, and call it a day. I guess some are such experts that they can just look at a laptop and immediately render a verdict, just as some can sniff a just-opened bottle of wine and immediately know that it’s terrific. Or not.

I don’t do that. For better or worse, I actually use these laptops over time. I take notes as I go, especially when some experience is much better—or much worse than I expected. These notes typically go in the document that will eventually become the review.

Why do I do this? A few reasons. Basically credibility, of course, or ethics. A sense of responsibility that this expensive device I did not pay for and will be giving back is a significant investment for any reader who might actually pay for it based on what I wrote: I worry that someone might have a bad experience with a PC that I reviewed positively.

This all sounds very obvious. But where some things are subjective—the basically quality of a device, the keyboard feel, or the relative stereo separation of the speaker system—others are perhaps more objective. And objectively speaking, I feel confident stating that Surface Laptop 7, a PC I have not yet tested, is not capable of 20 hours of real-world battery life. And that publishing such a number is … questionable. I can’t do that to people. Even though it would make Microsoft very happy.

Looking at Copilot+ PC generally, and the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 that I’m reviewing explicitly, battery life is one of the top-level items on my checklist. As I’ve noted many times, these PCs, this PC, need to at least be in the same ballpark as the MacBook Air M3 I purchased a few months ago in some key areas for me to deem them/it competitive: Performance, battery life, reliability (instant-on, etc.), and portability (thin and light). It needs to just work. It needs to just work while being silent, or nearly so. It needs to feel effortless.

Beating the MacBook Air, even in some of those areas, would be amazing. But the MacBook Air is magical: I’ve been reviewing laptops for over 20 years, and I have never seen the combination of positive attributes I still experience with this device. Ever. And so I hope for the best while trying to be realistic.

So far—and, seriously, it’s only been three days, though it feels like longer—the Yoga Slim has impressed in most areas. The day-to-day performance is notably good. The app and hardware compatibility have been terrific, nearly perfect. Each time I’ve opened the display lid, it’s fired right up (though, again, I need more time).

Some experiences have been a bit more troubling or confusing. The in-box AI capabilities, with a few exceptions, feel superfluous and non-essential. I realize that most will have some critical app or hardware device that doesn’t work well, or at all, and that this uncertainty can undermine everything. The gaming capabilities are sporadically magical, but are more often too unreliable to recommend.

And the battery life, to date, has not impressed.

Here, I need to be clear: When I started using the MacBook Air, it was immediately obvious that something magical was happening when it came to uptime. This thing just ran and ran and ran, and it didn’t seem to matter what I did, the battery life was just always terrific. Where most PC makers tout “all-day battery life,” but don’t ever come close, the Mac was capable of two solid days of work on battery. In the end, I averaged about 15 hours. Really.

The first day I used the Yoga Slim, the battery lasted barely four and a half hours. I chalked that one up to my installing so many updates and apps, but it also put a troubling worry in the back of my brain.  I was always going to pay attention to battery life. But now I was really going to pay attention.

Since then, it’s improved. I saw about 6 or 6.5 of uptime on both Tuesday and Wednesday. But then I worried it would stall there. Today, it’s late in the afternoon, dinner time, and I did have it plugged in for a 30-minute podcast recording. But looking at the uptime so far and doing some math based on what Windows now estimates—these things get more accurate over time, too, of course—I feel like it will land at about … yikes, 9 hours. OK. Something is happening here. Something positive.

There are all kinds of caveats to all this.

The Yoga has air intakes on the bottom of the PC, which can be problematic if you aren’t always using the PC on a hard surface. I’m writing this now on the bed, for example, but I do have an iPad underneath it to give it some breathing space. I just lifted the PC to my ear to see whether there was any fan noise, and it was completely silent. I’m using Word, Edge (with over 35 tabs), Notion, Affinity Photo 2, Slack, and several background apps. The Yoga’s killing it today.

Windows 11 and macOS are architecturally different, as are the Snapdragon X Elite and the Apple Silicon M3. But the Mac runs almost exclusively native apps, whereas I run a mix of Arm-native and emulated x64 apps and likely always will. This is a big difference that is perhaps not highlighted enough: Apple transitioned to Arm processors, but we’ll always have x64 PCs and x64 apps, and they will coexist on Windows. Where Rosetta 2 only had to work well enough to get the user through a transition period, the Prism emulator in Windows 11 on Arm is an ongoing concern, a key long-term play.

And then the big one, really: It’s only been three freaking days. These numbers mean nothing. Absolutely nothing.

In the near future, I will test other Copilot+ PCs from Microsoft, HP, and maybe others. In the longer term, I will test more Copilot+ PCs based on AMD and Intel chips too. And we’ll see: Each will be different or unique in its own ways. A Yoga Slim with 32 GB instead of 16 GB of RAM would be different. A Copilot+ PC running on an Intel Lunar Lake processor will almost certainly be quite different. PCs are a like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.

Thinking about my experiences so far, and comparing it to the MacBook Air, there’s no version of this story where the Yoga Slim “wins” hands-down by exceeding what the Mac is capable of in each important category. And so the question shifts to whether Copilot+ PC is in the game, a credible challenger. In the ballpark, as we say.

Out in the Windows community, you can almost feel the desperation. We need this win, stung by years of problems with Windows 11 on Arm and the seemingly effortless way in which Apple just succeeded in transitioning the Mac to Arm. In using the MacBook Air, an obvious thought occurred to me, that what I want is a MacBook Air, but running Windows 11, which I very much prefer to macOS. That’s why I bought a 15-inch Surface Pro: It’s as close as I can get.

The Yoga Slim comes close too. I need more time, of course. I have more data to collect, more apps to use, more days of waking up, opening the display lid, and having it just work. I’ve been bit too many times to be hoodwinked now. If there’s a soft underbelly here, I’ll find it. I am definitely looking for it.

But I can at least leave this on a positive note: I’d not mentioned battery life yet, in part because it was much lower than expected, undercutting what should be a core advantage, and in part because it’s just too soon to matter. But with battery life seemingly correcting itself, in part as my usage has, wait for it, become more real-world, I’m starting to calm down. I am starting to believe again, that everything will probably be OK.

I don’t see this PC averaging 15 hours of battery. However, real all-day battery life, however you define it, would be just fine. Like many of you, I need Copilot+ PC to be in the ballpark.

And I do feel like it will be in the ballpark.