After 13 months and 86 recharge cycles the battery of my mobile laptop is still healthy like new, astounding! What's also great with the current Haswell processors is their power efficiency. At around half display brightness the notebook only consumes around 2.5 Watts when idling, that's amazing! These new chips give you at least 12 hours of battery life, I often get more out of one charge as long as I don't do photo editing but only browsing and writing. The minor successor of Broadwell chips has been delayed to beginning/mid next year instead of the scheduled summer 2014 release. That means the next "tock" (big step forward in Intel roadmap language) of Skylake chips, that are supposed to bring significant speed boosts, are very likely to not be released before 2016. So, if you need to buy a laptop now, there's no hesitation to take a current Haswell machine. Broadwell won't be much different and Skylake is still far away.

Happy computing!

KIKI