End of reign for Apple MacBooks, they are no longer the most autonomous computers
Asus ZenBook S 14 Oled (Core Ultra 2)
Launch price €1599
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Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition
Launch price €1599
How the price table works
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At IFA, it was the game of the new school year: announce a battery life for its future laptop model that is greater than its competitor. And the manufacturers didn't mince their words: Dell opened the show with an XPS 13 announced at 25 hours of battery life, Asus announced a pro model at 28 hours, the prize goes to Acer and its Swift 14 AI with 29 hours of battery life announced.
28 hours of battery life! Who can beat that? © Digital
Lunar Lake: sobriety in x86
The common point of all its models announced with incredible autonomy: the Intel Lunar Lake processor. Lunar Lake is Intel's new architecture specially designed for laptops and engraved with the best current process from TSMC, the N3B.
So, if the Meteor Lake architecture of the Core Ultra Series 1 left us a little hungry with very decent or even very good battery life for manufacturers who have optimized their laptops as best they can, the Core Ultra Series 2 with their Lunar Lake architecture is, according to Intel, 40% more energy-efficient, enough to propel laptops equipped with Core Ultra Series 2 beyond MacBooks.
Lunar Lake: 40% more efficient cores than Meteor Lake. © Intel
Lenovo Demo
The MacBook Air 15, the target to be shot down. © Lenovo
Lenovo has therefore demonstrated in video the autonomy of its flagship: the Yoga Slim 7 Aura Edition presented at the IFA. Thus according to the Chinese manufacturer with the same protocol, namely a 1080p video executed locally with a screen set to 150 cd/m2, the Yoga Slim 7i lasted 23h54 against a little more than 18h for the two MacBook Air 15 in M2 and M3. This information is all the more interesting since the Yoga Slim 7i is in 15-inch format and has a battery with a capacity of 70 Wh like the MacBook Air 15 in M3, thus offering an almost perfect comparison.
x86 instructions as efficient as ARM instructions?!
If you had buried x86 processors (Intel and AMD) in favor of ARM processors (Apple M and Qualcomm), Intel would be about to make you doubt and they are counting on it if we are to believe their statement given at Computex in Taiwan: “The power difference between x86 and ARM instruction sets is a myth and Lunar Lake is here to prove it”.
We should quickly know how sober the laptops with Intel Core Ultra series 2 processors (Lunar Lake) are, since the first tests will appear on September 24. Les Numériques was able to get its hands on a ZenBook S 14 with a 75 Wh battery in order to give you a first opinion on this new Intel architecture. For its part, Apple should respond very quickly to Intel with its M4 MacBooks, the announcement of which is expected towards the end of October.
