A laptop that lasts nearly 27 hours on a 70Wh battery is challenging one of the biggest advantages MacBooks have held over Windows machines. 

Dell's new XPS 16 delivers nearly 27 hours of browsing on a 70Wh battery, challenging MacBooks on one of their biggest strengths. Credit: Dell


The surprising part is that the improvement isn't coming from a bigger battery. It's coming from a screen that can slow itself down to just one refresh per second when nothing on the display is moving.

A 16-inch Windows laptop is taking on MacBook battery life without relying on an unusually large battery. Credit: Dell


The technology, developed by LG Display, is already appearing in Dell's latest XPS 16, alongside Intel's new Panther Lake processor. Together, the two technologies have produced battery life figures that put the Windows laptop ahead of every MacBook tested by Notebookcheck in its Wi-Fi browsing benchmark.

The display uses what LG calls Oxide 1Hz technology. To understand why it matters, consider how conventional laptop screens work. A display's refresh rate describes how many times it updates the image every second. A 60Hz screen, for example, refreshes 60 times per second, while a 120Hz panel can update twice as often. Higher refresh rates make scrolling, animations and fast-moving content look smoother, but they also require more power.

The problem is that a screen doesn't always need to refresh that frequently. When you're reading a webpage, looking at a photograph or leaving a document open, much of the image remains unchanged. Yet traditional displays continue refreshing at relatively high rates, using energy even when there is little visual movement.

LG's solution is to let the screen adjust its refresh rate according to what's happening on it. When displaying static content, it can drop as low as 1Hz, updating once per second. When you start scrolling, watching a video or playing a game, it can increase the rate to as much as 120Hz. That means the display can preserve smooth motion when necessary without constantly consuming power at its highest setting.

The engineering behind this involves oxide-based thin-film transistors, or TFTs. These are tiny electronic switches that control individual parts of a display. LG's oxide technology reduces current leakage, allowing the panel to retain its electrical charge for longer. Combined with proprietary circuit algorithms and panel design improvements, this reduces how much energy the screen needs to maintain a static image.

LG says the technology can improve battery efficiency by as much as 48%. That figure is the company's own claim, rather than a result established across independent laptop tests. Still, the early results from Dell's XPS 16 suggest that the approach can make a substantial difference.

The strongest evidence comes from independent testing. Notebookcheck evaluated a Dell XPS 16 equipped with the new display and Intel's Core Ultra 325 processor, recording nearly 27 hours of Wi-Fi web browsing on a 70Wh battery. That result is particularly interesting because the battery is relatively modest for a 16-inch laptop.

During idle operation, the machine consumed as little as 1.5 watts. That's roughly half the power consumption seen in competing laptops in the same category under comparable conditions. The combination of a more efficient processor and a display that spends much of its time operating at 1Hz appears to be responsible for the result.

For context, Notebookcheck's testing history suggests the XPS 16 has outlasted every MacBook and MacBook Pro it has put through the same Wi-Fi browsing benchmark. Only two other laptops in its database have recorded longer runtimes. One used Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus processor alongside a larger 84Wh battery and a conventional 60Hz display. The other relied on two batteries with a combined capacity of 149Wh, also paired with a 60Hz screen.

That makes the Dell result more significant than the headline number alone suggests. It's delivering nearly 27 hours without relying on an unusually large battery or sacrificing the benefits of a high-refresh-rate display.

There are, however, some important configuration details. The XPS 16 tested by Notebookcheck uses a 1920 x 1200 LCD panel rather than Dell's higher-resolution tandem OLED option. It also lacks a touchscreen. These compromises matter because display resolution, panel technology and additional touch functionality can all influence power consumption. Buyers choosing the more premium OLED configuration shouldn't expect identical battery performance.

It's also important to separate controlled testing from everyday use. Notebookcheck's Wi-Fi browsing benchmark provides a consistent way to compare laptops, but actual battery life depends on brightness, applications, background activity, wireless connectivity and workload. Video editing, gaming and demanding AI tasks will produce different results. Nearly 27 hours should therefore be treated as a benchmark achievement, not a guarantee of what every owner will experience.

The development could also have implications beyond Dell. LG Display announced on March 22, 2026, that it had begun mass production of the world's first laptop LCD panels featuring a 1Hz to 120Hz variable refresh rate. Dell's premium XPS lineup is the first destination for these panels, but the technology is not inherently limited to one manufacturer.

LG is also preparing an OLED version of Oxide 1Hz, with mass production targeted for 2027. That could address one of the current technology's biggest limitations. At present, buyers have to choose between the battery-saving LCD configuration and more premium OLED options that offer different visual advantages.

OLED, short for organic light-emitting diode, uses individually controlled pixels that produce their own light. This allows it to deliver deeper blacks and stronger contrast than conventional LCD technology, which relies on a separate backlight. Bringing the same ultra-low refresh-rate capability to OLED panels would give laptop manufacturers another way to combine premium image quality with improved efficiency.

LG's development is not happening in isolation, either. Intel has also been working with Chinese display manufacturer BOE on laptop panels capable of reaching a 1Hz refresh rate. Their approach involves LTPO, or low-temperature polycrystalline oxide, a display technology already used in smartphones and smartwatches. Intel announced the collaboration in October 2025, although a commercial release timeline has not been established.

The underlying idea is already familiar in mobile devices. Apple's Watch Series 5 introduced a display capable of dropping from 60Hz to 1Hz in 2019, helping it maintain an always-on screen without draining its battery as quickly. Smartphone manufacturers subsequently adopted similar approaches, with devices such as the OnePlus 9 Pro offering refresh rates as low as 1Hz in 2021. Apple later brought 1–120Hz variable refresh rates to its Pro iPhones in 2022.

Laptops have taken longer to get here, partly because their displays have different power requirements and need to accommodate a wider range of workloads. But LG's decision to begin mass production suggests the technology is moving beyond demonstrations and into commercially available computers.

The more interesting question now is how quickly other laptop manufacturers adopt it. Battery life has traditionally been one of the areas where Windows laptops struggle to match Apple's MacBooks, particularly when comparing machines with similarly sized batteries. Intel and LG have demonstrated that improvements to the display itself can change that equation without requiring manufacturers to move away from conventional x86 processors.

As OLED versions arrive and competing panel makers develop their own implementations, the ability to run a laptop screen at 1Hz could become a standard feature rather than a premium specification. If that happens, future laptops may spend far less energy maintaining images that haven't changed, while still delivering 120Hz performance the moment the user needs it. The next meaningful improvement in laptop battery life may have less to do with making batteries bigger and more to do with making every component smarter about when it actually needs power.