We’ve got to talk about laptop battery life because this is getting ridiculous and not in a good way. Would you accept a 90-minute battery life? I wonder how long you expect your laptop to last before it needs charging? During my testing of the Acer Nitro V 16 AI, it gave up the ghost after just 90 minutes of video playback. Sometimes it takes me that long to find my charger; there’s no way I want to own a laptop that has such poor battery performance.

Contrast this with the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x. This laptop managed 13 hours. To me, that seems about right. It’s significantly more than a standard working day, but it leaves enough in the tank to work through the day and into the evening. Even though I’d prefer not to, I don’t have any issue with carrying a charger around with me. The fact that most laptops support USB-C charging means that more often than not I have a compatible cable with me at all times anyway.

For me, it’s more about the correlation between battery life and both reliability and dependability. If I own a laptop that can last a little over an hour, I’m always going to be worrying about it losing charge completely. It might say it has 30 minutes left, but what if I start a power-intensive task which cuts through the remaining battery juice faster than the laptop expected? Constantly worrying about remaining battery time means I’m not able to wholeheartedly devote my attention to the task at hand.

If your laptop doesn’t have the necessary performance to last much longer than a Netflix episode, then you better make sure you’re near a power socket at all times. You can say goodbye to working on the road or in that artisan coffee shop. Carrying a power bank around with you is a non-starter, who wants to do that? For me, all of this links directly into my ability to be free and creative. I need my hardware to be ready to go when I need it to be. Popular laptops are those that manage to combine great performance without draining the battery too quickly.

So, when laptop brands are designing a laptop, I really wish they would pay as much attention to the battery as they would about whether it has an NPU in it or whether it boasts the latest NVIDIA GPU. There’s no use owning a high-spec laptop if it’s constantly plugged into the wall. I could buy a better desktop machine if I wanted that. To avoid the problem, see our list of the best laptops for battery life.