Intel is embarking on a branding effort that’s designed to make it easier for consumers to choose a laptop that achieves a minimum set of requirements for battery life and speed.  Starting today, you’ll begin to see a label that says “Engineered for mobile performance” next to laptops that last nine hours on a charge, go from sleep to browsing the web in under two seconds, and perform just as quickly when unplugged. 

That nine hours of battery life won't be like previous manufacturer claims, where laptop makers could easily cheat.  Here's how I described the difference in May:

Intel says Project Athena laptops will need to deliver 9 hours of real-world battery life, browsing the web over Wi-Fi, with their screen set to a level of brightness (250 nits) that a user might actually have in the real world.  This is important, because today’s laptop benchmarks are anything but — when a PC maker says your new machine gets 24 hours of battery life, they’re typically measuring that by playing back a video that barely taxes the processor, with Wi-Fi off, and low screen brightness to boot.  Who uses a laptop like that? 

Intel says laptops that get the label will need to pass a verification process with Intel’s engineers, and it has more than 100 partners on board. 

For a variety of reasons, it won’t be as big of a deal as “Intel Inside” was in its day, nor would it be fair to call it the de facto successor to the “Ultrabook” brand you may have heard of.  Intel isn’t calling it a brand or even a label; instead, it’s a “visual identifier.” 

It’s a half-hearted attempt to give consumers an easy way to know they’re buying a more modern laptop, without the brand power of those earlier efforts.  Still, it’s something closer to what I expected Intel to do when it originally announced the consumer-friendly Project Athena initiative to hold manufacturers to a higher standard.  Back then, Intel forgot to create any meaningful way for buyers to know which laptops actually meet its requirements. 

Intel says it is creating this optional “visual identifier” so consumers can recognize these more modern laptops when they see them in physical and digital stores.  Dell will use the “visual identifier” to help sell its new XPS 13 2-in-1 laptop (the first certified Project Athena design), which just happens to be available for purchase starting today. 

Weirdly, Intel says the “Engineered for mobile performance” indicator is explicitly not a brand or a logo, which seems wrong on its face.  Perhaps Intel defines these things differently than most of us do.  It’s also not a sticker you’ll find on actual machines, which I’m happy about because palm rest stickers suck. 

Intel’s effort here does make sense in terms of the overall context of its market position: its chips have gained a reputation for not being as battery-friendly as ARM-based alternatives.  While ARM-based Windows laptops are still not as fast as Intel-based ones, they do have super long battery life and are able to wake more quickly from sleep.  Those are precisely the specs that Intel is touting with this “Engineered for mobile performance” label. 

What worries me is that this not-a-logo and the entire Project Athena program are still entirely optional.  I stand by these words I wrote in May:

I suspect OEMs will merely submit laptops that they already know will succeed — and I wonder if it’ll get much adoption even then.  Manufacturers seem to be awfully fond of being able to advertise that their laptops can last 24 hours on battery, and I can’t see them easily agreeing to instantly chop that number in half. 

Intel says we can also expect to see the “visual indicator” used on product pages for the HP EliteBook 1040 and HP EliteBook 830, and it’s asking all of its customers and retailers to start using it. 

Update, August 9th at 7:22 AM ET: Added a graph to clarify what kind of battery life we’re talking about.