Dell XPS 14 Panther Lake Laptop Hits 43 Hours In Battery Test Beatdown Of M5 MacBook Air

Many believe that Apple makes the most efficient laptop chips and that MacBooks have the best battery life because the Arm ISA supposedly offers superior performance and efficiency over the crufty x86 ISA. But that is not the case. Apple's products are relatively strong because Apple's engineers do an excellent job at designing them for a purpose and optimizing the hardware and software as such. Well, that's exactly what Dell did with its new XPS 14 laptop as well, allowing it to exceed 43 hours of "light use" battery life in the latest testing from Hardware Canucks.

In a video review directly pitting the Apple M5 Macbook Air 15 against a Dell XPS 14 laptop fitted with a mid-range Core Ultra processor, our colleagues up north were astonished to observe the XPS laptop nearly tripling the battery life of the MacBook. This wasn't some idle video playback test, either; rather, this is a light usage benchmark that simulates Chrome browsing and media playback.


You might scream, "well that's because Dell put a huge battery in the XPS!" It's true that the battery in the XPS is a little bigger than that of the MacBook, but not by nearly as much as you might expect; the XPS 14 sports a dense 70-Whr battery, while the M5 MacBook Air (specifically the 15" model that was being compared) has a 66.5-Whr battery. That 5% battery capacity difference certainly doesn't go very far to explain the battery life gulf.

Instead, the biggest factor—besides the efficient Panther Lake SoC itself, of course—is that Dell's new XPS 14 includes one of the novel 1-to-120Hz VRR screens that can drop itself all the way down to one refresh per second. LG made huge claims about the efficiency gains these displays enable when they were unveiled recently, and Dell's battery performance here is the payoff for those promises.

The rest of the review is worth watching; the Canucks compare just about every aspect of the two machines. The XPS 14 they're using is based on a Panther Lake part with fewer CPU cores and the smaller 4-core GPU, so it doesn't fare well in performance benchmarks versus the full-fat M5 in the MacBook Air 15, but it largely holds its own elsewhere. We won't spoil the conclusion; head over to YouTube to see the full review, and while you're at it, check out our review of a much fancier version of the same laptop.