Our Tesseract score puts the movie playback into a more usable number. The Surface Laptop was able to play back a local movie file for over 15 hours, which is amazing considering the battery capacity here. Media playback allows the CPU to offload work to fixed function hardware in the media block, which allows most of the processor to go to sleep. Our web test involves a lot more work for the CPU, and as such the results are generally quite a bit lower than our older light test, and that is the case here again with the Surface Laptop losing over an hour of runtime compared to the light test, but it still came in well above any other laptop we’ve tested, offering over 10.5 hours of runtime. Despite the smaller battery, the Surface Laptop 2 lasted for over 11.5 hours, which is fantastic. The scripting isn’t a very big task for modern processors. Our lightest test is our oldest, which cycles four webpages per minute. To test the battery life, we calibrate displays to 200 nits to make the test as even as possible, and then run through several workloads. The battery is only slightly larger than the 45 Wh in the Surface Pro 6, and it performed well in our battery rundown tests. But Microsoft tends to focus quite a bit on power usage instead of raw capacity, and as a result can eke out extra battery life through other means. By Ultrabook standards, the 47.5 Wh battery capacity in the Surface Laptop 2 is on the light side, as some of the competition can offer 60 Wh or so.

Surface laptop 2