While the new Copilot+ PCs deliver plenty of impressive benchmarks, many crave the blend of performance and battery life that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chipset promised.
The good news is that, for the most part, that is coming true. We’ve tested seven of the new Copilot+ PCs so far, and battery life is generally excellent; there’s just one notable exception.
The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge is the most powerful Copilot+ PC available today, so it’s not shocking that it has the worst battery life. However, the disparity between reality and Samsung‘s claims and the rest of the Snapdragon X Elite laptops had us run multiple additional battery life tests to confirm.
Here’s how far short the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge came from matching the rest of the Copilot+ PC laptops.
How long does the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge last on a charge?
We went in-depth on how we test AI PCs, which is a challenging process at the moment as benchmark developers work to properly capture Neural Processing Unit (NPU) performance along with overall AI performance that utilizes the CPU, GPU, and NPU.
While that process will continue to evolve over the coming months and years, fortunately, our battery test remains as applicable as ever.
The Laptop Mag battery test involves setting the laptop to 150 nits of brightness and cycling through dynamic, static, and video webpages with standby periods in between until the battery entirely runs down.
At the top of the Copilot+ battery life pecking order are the HP EliteBook Ultra and the HP OmniBook X. Both managed a remarkable 16 hours and 22 minutes in our test. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll find the Galaxy Book 4 Edge, which called it quits at 9 hours and 56 minutes.
Multiple Copilot+ PCs are candidates for our laptops with the best battery life page, so it’s simply unfortunate to see one fail to live up to that standard.
Barely under 10 hours isn’t an abysmal showing from the Galaxy Book 4 Edge if we are grading it against the entire laptop market. The premium laptop average on our test is 10 hours and 7 minutes, just narrowly beating the Book 4 Edge. However, Samsung claimed up to 22 hours of battery life for video playback, so below 10 in our admittedly much more rigorous test still came as a surprise.
Just look at the chart below, and you’ll understand why we find this to be a disappointing result grading against the Copilot+ PC laptop curve. The only other Snapdragon X Elite laptop to finish under 14 hours was the Surface Pro 11th Edition, a fanless tablet that you would expect to come up short of the competition.
Bottom line
Multiple Copilot+ PCs are candidates for our laptops with the best battery life page, so it’s unfortunate to see one fail to live up to that standard. This isn’t enough to warn you away from the Galaxy Book 4 Edge; it has enough battery life to get most people through the day, and it has plenty else to recommend.
For example, if you want the best performance of any Copilot+ PC then the Galaxy Book 4 Edge is the clear choice, it scored decisive victories against its Snapdragon X Elite rivals in Geekbench 6, Handbrake, and 3DMark Wildlife Extreme. It even edged out the MacBook Pro M3 Pro in Geekbench 6 multicore performance.
Add in the 3K 120Hz AMOLED display, thin and light chassis (0.43 inches, 2.62 pounds), and a solid array of ports, and you may forgive the Galaxy Book 4 Edge’s battery shortcomings.
The final ace up its sleeve is perhaps the most relevant: It can charge up to 40% in just 30 minutes using the bundled charger, so as long as you can occasionally access an outlet, you can easily keep it topped up.
