Please Standby (Premium)

The other night, I prepared for bed as I often do here in Mexico, by removing whatever collection of PCs and phones are on the bed–I’ve been working on a major update to the Phone Link chapter for the Windows 11 Field Guide–and bringing them out to the table I use as a desk in the living room. In this case, there were two laptops, a 14-inch HP ZBook Firefly I’ve been reviewing, and an older 16-inch laptop I keep here in Mexico.

The ZBook was almost fully charged, which I know because I had detached it from the power cable in the bedroom a little earlier in the night. And its lid was still open, as I had been using it before we went out that night. So I closed the lid, stacked it on top of the other laptop, left them both in the living room, and came back to the bedroom and read a bit before going to sleep. A series of events that normally wouldn’t warrant any discussion.

Except that I woke up the next morning and everything went south.

It all started normally enough: I made and then drank some coffee while I read the news, put in my contacts and cleaned up, and then opened the lid on the ZBook in anticipation of using it in my docked setup here to record First Ring Daily with Brad. It didn’t power on.

Hm.

Recently, I’ve been discussing how the Windows PC experience has turned into a roulette wheel of reliability issues, where you never know what you’re going to get each day when you power up a laptop. This comment has been generally true for years, I suppose, but left unsaid until now is that I’m specifically referring to PCs based on Intel’s lame duck “Meteor Lake” chips, the first-generation Core Ultra chips that I’ve used in every Windows 11 review laptop this year.

There is something wrong with Meteor Lake. Maybe multiple somethings.

I’m writing a separate piece about Intel’s belated come to Jesus moment with efficiency, the first major milestone being the Lunar Lake family of chips that will debut in new Copilot+ PC-based laptops this coming holiday season. But what you need to know now is that Lunar Lake is a major architectural change when compared to Meteor Lake, with dramatically better integrated graphics and NPU, one that dispenses with Hyper-Threading for the first time in a mainstream Intel processor in over 20 years.

That’s fascinating on its own. But it’s even more fascinating when you consider that Meteor Lake was itself a major architectural change when compared to its predecessors, with dramatically better integrated graphics. It was also the first mainstream Intel processor to included an integrated NPU, and Intel was so impressed by this feat that it created the AI PC brand to describe PCs built using it. And yet.

There is something wrong with Meteor Lake.

That Lunar Lake is so different from Meteor Lake, which we now know to be a one-off, is perhaps a clue, though there are, of course, other reasons this happened. One of them being the need to meet the needs of the Copilot+ PC specifications that outclass the capabilities of Intel’s AI PCs. But Meteor Lake might also be viewed as the more extreme of two previous architectural shifts Intel made in recent years, the first being the 12th generation Intel Core “Alder Lake” chips, Intel’s first mainstream chips with a so-called hybrid architecture featuring discrete Performance cores and Efficient cores.

Things have been wonky ever since these chips appeared–you may recall me identifying issues with USB-C hubs, issues that have never been resolved–but they’ve gotten worse with Meteor Lake. Indeed, from a reliability perspective, Intel seems to have lost the script. But it’s not just reliability: Battery life has gone downhill as well, a fact I confirmed with other laptop reviews a month or so ago at an in-person event. Unlike with the USB-C hub issue, this time, I’m not the only person noticing the problem.

Like Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake seemed to come out of nowhere, and you can see how Intel has finally started scrambling to meet the Arm threat–seen first in Apple Silicon-based Macs but more recently in the Snapdragon X family of chips for PCs–in the quirky way in which it released the product. Among its other changes, Meteor Lake dropped the P-series chips that 12th and 13th Gen Intel Core chips took mainstream, another sign of the elephant dancing. Intel was clearly making it up as its dire competitive issues finally became clear. And yet.

There is something wrong with Meteor Lake.

I noticed this while reviewing the first Meteor Lake PC I received. Despite its beefy 28-watt H-series processor, that laptop didn’t outperform its U-series predecessors in normal productivity work, and the battery life was much lower than expected, especially when compared to its predecessors.

This would become a theme.

In each of the laptop reviews I’ve taken on so far this past year, I struggled to understand what was I seeing. These were excellent laptops for the most part. But two trends emerged: Battery life was down, a lot. And the U-series (and, briefly, P-series) chips that dominated in thin and light/Ultrabook-class PCs had been supplanted by less efficient H-series chips for some reason.

You can find some version of my concerns in each of the Meteor Lake-based laptop reviews I wrote this year.

“I averaged only 5 hours and 12 minutes overall … I was surprised this wasn’t better,” I noted of one laptop. “I saw almost exactly 5 hours of battery life on average in real-world usage,” I wrote about another. And so on.

The laptop I’m currently reviewing, the ZBook Firefly G11, is averaging a bit over 3.5 hours of battery life. By comparison, the Firefly G8, based on an 11th Gen Intel Core processor, got between 7 and 8 hours of battery life. Granted, part of that is tied to the newer laptop’s dedicated GPU. But that might account for a 20 percent change. Take that out, and this drop-off is consistent with what I’ve seen with Meteor Lake across the board.

Consider the Spectre x360. In 2016, I saw 9 to 10 hours of battery life on a model with an IPS display. A 2020 IPS model delivered over 9 hours of battery life. A 2021 IPS model hit 8 hours and 21 minutes. An OLED version in 2022 saw over 7 hours of battery. And then there was that Meteor Lake version in December 2023: 6.5 hours of real-world battery life. Again, there are other factors, in this case OLED and IPS display panel differences. But battery life is falling off a cliff with Meteor Lake.

But again, it’s not just battery life. The number of reliability issues I’ve seen with review laptops this year is notable. It’s getting worse. And I think it’s tied to Intel’s sudden realization that it needs to change. And in changing, in trying to emulate what makes Arm special, it’s breaking things.

Anyway, back to the ZBook. In many ways, I love it, and for all the reasons I loved its predecessors. But there’s also something wrong. And my money is on Meteor Lake. It’s undermining an otherwise wonderful laptop. I’ve had weird performance issues where nothing responds for minutes at a time. Terrible battery life. And then the utterly unique–unprecedented since the horrible days of Surfacegate–experience of waking up to a completely dead laptop that had been nearly fully charged when I went to bed.

This is not OK.

I charged the laptop for a few minutes and then powered it on. It booted up cold, of course. And my browser reported that it had stopped unexpectedly. I wasn’t sure how the battery had died, but I had work to do, and I figured I’d look at it later. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I happened to display Windows 11’s notifications pane and saw something unexpected. It was a Power & Battery notification, delivered at 1:28 am. “Your battery is low,” it warned. “You should plug in your device.”

I had been asleep for about three hours at that point. Which makes sense: The laptop has been getting about 3.5 hours of battery life, as noted. It had clearly “hot-bagged,” albeit without the bag. I had closed the lid, but instead of doing into whatever power state it usually used, it just kept going. And ran out of juice in the night.

I ran a battery report to see what I might discover.

It showed that I had stopped working at around 7 pm when the battery life was 99 percent. I went out for the night and I had closed the lid at 9:40 pm, at which point it reported going into Connected Standby with a 94 percent charge. At 1:40 am, it went into Suspended mode, most likely as the battery completely died. I plugged it in when I noticed it was dead and at 7:47 am, 9 minutes before I connected with Brad for First Ring Daily, the battery life was up to 9 percent.

This was the first–and, to date, only–time this has happened to this laptop, and I can’t recall the last time I saw such a thing. Until then, and since then, it has correctly gone into Connected Standby each time I’ve closed its lid. But looking through the battery report, I can see multiple instances–not every time, but several times–where it slipped from Connected Standby into Suspended … for some reason. Often right after it went into Connected Standby. Which makes me wonder whether it’s having trouble with Connected Standby and is falling back to this older power management state as a result.

I looked at the Windows 11 power management settings, but knowing that what I saw there didn’t matter: HP overrides this with its own configurations. But it was all normal: Power mode was set to “Balanced,” closing the lid was configured for “Sleep” when plugged in or on battery, and while I had customized the screen and sleep timeouts a bit beyond their overly aggressive defaults–15 minutes and 25 minutes when plugged in, respectively, and 5 minutes and 15 minutes on battery–there’s nothing odd about that. And no apps appear to have been abusing the battery in the past 7 days.

In the Power Options interface in Control Panel, I can see that the “HP Optimized (Modern Standby)” power plan is enabled, as opposed to the “Balanced” plan the Settings app reports. I looked through the Advanced Settings but didn’t see anything unusual there either.

HP’s interface for power management is in the myHP app, but there’s not much to it: You can choose between “Smart Sense” and “High Performance.” It had been set to the latter initially, but I changed that to “Smart Sense” after wondering about the poor battery life, but that was over a week ago.

There are all kinds of things I could try, but this has only happened once, and so testing whatever changes will be time-consuming and could prove fruitless. But I suspect that HP started customizing power management specifically because Windows does such a terrible job. And that Meteor Lake has made things worse.

There is something wrong with Meteor Lake.

Will moving to an Arm-based Windows PC fix this issue? I’ll need months of testing across multiple PCs to find out. And I will, of course, do that work, just as I’ll continue reviewing PCs based on Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and other architectures. And we’ll see what happens. But Meteor Lake has always felt off to me. And if the past few weeks have cemented that worry, this particular issue is the cherry on the top of this horrible sundae.

I just want things to work. And I have to say, I’m rather astonished at the comments I’ve received from people on social media–X/Twitter, Mastodon, and Threads–who’ve seen the image I posted of the power management notification. Many seem to blame me, or something I did, and many offered advice about how I might micromanage this functionality. When, in fact, it’s a modern PC and should just work. I shouldn’t have to know anything power management in a PC to use the device, just as I shouldn’t have to know anything about how motors work to use a car. This isn’t the 1800s.

I’m sure there’s plenty of blame to go around, between Intel, HP, and Microsoft. But in reviewing so many laptops, I’ve developed a sense for things. And the evidence keeps racking up. There is something wrong with Meteor Lake. And we can’t move past this wretched platform quickly enough, Arm or otherwise.