When you’re on the road or just trying to work without being tethered to a plug, you want the longest battery life you can get from your laptop. So when Apple claimed that the battery on the MacBook Pro 17-inch laptop lasts 8 hours, we wanted to see for ourselves.

We can’t verify Apple’s claims because the company uses a proprietary test protocol. But when we put the MacBook through its paces in our own tests, we found that it ran for 6.5 hours—not quite the 8 hours Apple claimed, but still the longest life for standard batteries in any of the systems we tested, Apple or Windows. (Extended batteries generally run longer, but cost more, weigh more, and can stick out beyond the edges of your laptop’s case.)

And that’s a full hour longer than the prior version of the MacBook Pro 17-inch, whose battery lasted 5.5 hours in our tests. — Donna Tapellini