Apple wants MacBook owners to stop using Chrome, and it’s leading with the one argument laptop users tend to care about most: battery life. As part of a new “Switch to Safari” campaign, the company claims its browser can deliver up to five more hours of video streaming on a single charge than Google’s.
The figure comes from Apple’s own testing, carried out in August 2026 on 15-inch MacBook Air models with M5 chips and 16GB of RAM running macOS 27. The machines streamed 1080p video on battery power with screen brightness set to roughly half, using Safari 27.0 against Chrome 151. Apple is also claiming that Safari loads frequently visited websites up to 35% faster, based on a test of 12 popular sites under simulated network conditions.
None of this is especially surprising. Apple builds the chip, the operating system and the browser, so it can tune Safari’s video pipeline and power management in ways a third-party app simply can’t match. Still, these are vendor-run benchmarks, and a few details deserve a closer look. The speed test used a newer Chrome build than the battery test, and a single streaming scenario at fixed brightness says little about a typical workday of dozens of tabs, web apps and video calls. Independent testing will be the real measure.
Privacy is the campaign’s other pillar. Safari blocks cross-site trackers by default, which limits how much advertisers can build a profile from browsing habits. Chrome, as the front door to Google’s advertising business, has a harder time making that pitch convincingly.
The trouble for Apple is that Chrome’s grip isn’t really about efficiency. Statcounter puts its global share at around 66%, against roughly 18% for Safari. Chrome runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android and iOS, ships preinstalled on many Android phones and syncs bookmarks, passwords, history and extensions across all of them. For anyone who uses a Windows PC at work or an Android phone in their pocket, Safari’s Apple-only footprint is a dealbreaker no battery chart can fix. Google has also been pushing raw performance, saying in June that Chrome hit 469 on JetStream 3 and 61 on Speedometer 3.1, gains of 10% and 5% respectively.
The people most likely to switch are those already living entirely inside Apple’s ecosystem who use Chrome out of habit. For them, extra hours away from a charger is a tangible reason to try. Whether that’s enough to move Safari’s market share in any meaningful way is a question Apple’s marketing can’t answer.
