> Optimized Charging, a feature that is built into MacOS, aims to ensure the longevity and health of your battery. It does so by "delaying charging the battery past 80% when it predicts that you’ll be plugged in for an extended period of time, and aims to charge the battery before you unplug," as explained in Apple's user guide.
> Additionally, Optimized Charging uses machine learning to decide when the battery should be held at 80%, and when it should become fully charged. If your Mac is not plugged in on a regular schedule, optimized charging will not work as intended.
> This app is a similar alternative to Optimized Charging, giving the user control over when it is activated, what percentage the battery should be held at, and more.
I don't leave my laptop plugged in 100% of the time, however it is plugged in ~70% of the time and I never discharge it that much when it is unplugged. So this little app is perfect for me.
Seems Apple still has work to do on their algorithm, it could easily keep it at 80% and I would never get below 20%.
iPad OS on recent iPads has a dead simple "limit charge to 80%" option in system settings. MacOS should just have the same feature.
I also limit my iPhone's charge by using shortcut automations and a smart power plug. It just turns the plug off when charge exceeds 80% and on when it drops below 75%. Not ideal but I think still better for battery life than having it sit at 100%. (lmk if I'm wrong!)
is the optimized battery charging option in settings that tells you that it will charge to 80% and learn when it needs to charge to 100% not that? it seems to be exactly what you're looking for? it's pretty consistent across all 4 platforms: macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS, they all offer the same feature
For battery longevity, I’ve seen recommendations that the lithium ion battery should be allowed to discharge, and that between 40% and 80% is a good range to keep it in. I’m unable to find the link, but I’ve also seen a more recent (like in the last few years) recommendation that 35% to 75% is better.
Your choice to start charging it at 75% doesn’t seem ideal with any of the recommendations over the last several years.
But then I didn’t configure it anyway because my battery is user-replaceable and costs $70 so I happily charge and discharge it however much I want.
Just wish it had Apple-level battery life.
Their whole ML thing is super annoying. Basically, it means you can never disconnect your Mac from your USB-C monitor, lest it immediately charge to 100% upon a reconnect, and discharge back to 80% only a few days after keeping it at 100%.
I have a few Dells several years old which have the same feature. The difference is that Apple prefers to control you, rather than the other way around.
Of course, questions are whether Apple’s solution can theoretically work good enough, and if so, whether their implementation is good enough.
They already don't provide 50% at all, even though my laptop has been kept connected to mains for 1 year straight. All I get is a range of 76% to 80% or so, with a battery life that keeps diminishing for no reason.
But, in reality, they don't even provide the 20% to 80% range, either, because it still charges to 100% on each disconnect, however brief it may be.
I've had multiple batteries completely fail within just a few years after being topped up to 100% all the time.
I also have a ThinkPad with a 15-year-old battery that's still working just fine (1 hour runtime is not that bad for such an old battery), because it's been kept at the 50% most of the time when I don't need to use it on the go. If it was kept at 100%, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't last 2 minutes now.
I know the non-deterministic nature of this can be frustrating, but it actually has to charge to 100% every now and then in order to calibrate.
Thanks for explaining the reasoning behind implementing your own version instead of using Al Dente. The straightforward UI is really appealing.
I paid for an Al Dente license long ago and have been very happy with it, sail mode and temperature sensitive charging are great features (although I’m not sure how big of an impact sail mode makes).
It’s great to see alternatives available though. Having command line access is really cool.
Anecdotally: I've used sailing mode for the last year or so, and almost always use my laptop on AC power. Before I started using sailing mode, my cycle count was 120; now, a year later, it's 123.
Edit: it must have only claimed water resistant... Lining up the accesories, I think it was a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, which people say tests good in a bowl of water for about 20 minutes. That's a lot longer than I'd leave a phone in a bowl of water, so seems good enough to me?
A replaceable battery will reduce the water resistance by adding more possible water ingress points. There is no question about this.
It will increase thickness because you need a wall between the battery compartment and the device now.
It will add weight and thickness because the battery cover is now a separate piece and can’t contribute as much to the structural rigidity of the chassis.
Thinking that a device could have a removable battery with no downsides is fantasy.
All of a sudden trillion dollar smartphone companies will magically have the engineering talents to produce a waterproof and thin phone with a replaceable battery.
I dunno guys do you think a company that designed a mobile phone chip with 20 billion transistors in it can make a battery door with a gasket?
It’s not like a supersonic jet or moon lander. All phones had removable batteries before the iPhone. All laptops used to have removable batteries.
Older devices built with worse technology had things we don’t have now.
Replacing the battery in an iPhone costs $99 and takes hours to days of time where your phone is unavailable.
Or you can just trade it in and pay nothing while your carrier subsidizes it and bills you monthly with 0% interest.
The customer is given an incentive structure that leads them to the maximum profit route…obviously that’s what businesses want, and why every industry has regulations that constrains business to live inside some basic rules.
Replacing the battery is a once every 4-5 years thing for me, if that. Optimizing the entire laptop around a one-time activity that I can pay Apple to do for me for $250 (OEM quality battery included) feels backward. Give me the stiff chassis and reduced complexity of a built-in battery.
and they recently added a basic GUI as well.
Also this tool (or Al Dente) still isn't perfect -- if you shut your Mac off for any reason while keeping it plugged in, it will immediately charge back up to 100%. The third party charge limit only limits charging when the Mac is on or sleeping, not off entirely. (Granted, not many people turn their Macs entirely off these days.) So while I love the third party solutions, a native Apple solution would be even more reliable (plus the built-in Apple solution on iOS automatically charges to 100% occasionally just to keep the battery level accurate -- it's pretty smart).
Because that would affect their battery life ratings, making them close to most other laptops.
choose "Optimized Battery Charging". seems to be exactly what you're looking for
my MacBook Pro still thinks its battery is awesome, even plugged in all the time.
Which is also on iOS.
That delays charging to 100%, but still always charges to 100% in the end. I'm talking about never charging beyond 80%.
It’s called “optimized battery charging” and it’s been in macOS for a long time.
It also has a "calibrate" feature which goes through a 100 -> 10 -> 100 cycle which teaches the battery firmware what the actual capacity is now. Useful to run every month or two.
My Air battery is three years old and has 99% health because of using these features.
battery calibrate
calibrate the battery by discharging it to 15%, then recharging it to 100%, and keeping it there for 1 hourThat's right, in the BIOS - it's independent of the OS being run, or indeed if there is any OS at all (which is the case if the machine is turned off and charging.)
It's not a ThinkPad, but an IdeaPad Slim 5i i7-1355U touchscreen.
https://gist.github.com/linrunner/4a6876648765fac5e141f15d05...
https://developers.hp.com/hp-client-management/blog/improvin...
Of course, this doesn't help if you happen to turn the laptop off before it reaches 80%. In that case, it will charge all the way to 100%.
Also known as a Schmitt Trigger
But then I can't tell it: now charge to 100% because I'll travel and need a full charge.
Stupid.
It's much worse than this. One year can be enough for a 20% drop like that, and it's not impossible to go even lower. Think 50% or worse after 'some years' of aggressive use.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/saft-ves16-c...
Maybe this is why my experience is different than most here?
Still, even after 5 years of doing this, my battery life remains within 80% of its original state.
Many people leave their laptop plug most of the time, so this harms battery.
a) really neat.
b) an utterly terrifying wrapper around a wrapper around this:
https://github.com/hholtmann/smcFanControl
See here:
https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery/tree/main/dist
The layer above that is a shell script that downloads and runs shell scripts from github and calls visudo. The layer above that is an electron app that execs the shell script.
I used to be a happy user of bclm, but that doesn’t work any more, sadly. I’ll keep looking for a good option.
There should be an option for the machine to pretend like 40% is 0% and just go to sleep.
I know Windows has this option but it’s deep inside the power settings, they should bring it out of there.
I don’t think Apple devices have anything like that.
With charging, I can't plug and unplug my screen every 5 minutes just to keep it around 80%.
- The app didn't have any updates since July 2024, then got a handful of commits last June and no recent commits ever since.
- I've tried to calibrate with it and managed to discharge but failed to charge back up. It's not a big deal since I could force it back with a `battery charging on`.
- There's also [some issues](https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery/issues/322) reported which [I've also experienced](https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery/issues/301) on my end.
So it works, but it has some complications to keep in mind. Apparently [someone forked it](https://github.com/js4jiang5/BatteryOptimizer_for_MAC) and aimed to fix some of the issues, but the fork is err, opinionated and may or may not be ideal.
pulvinar•6mo ago
It doesn't look like I had installed this "battery" command. It might have been AlDente, but I don't find that anywhere either.
A puzzler.
wslh•6mo ago
Someone•6mo ago
That page also says “On Mac computers with Apple silicon or the T2 security chip, Optimized Battery Charging is on by default when you set up your Mac or after updating to macOS Big Sur or later.”
Maybe, you or a system update switched off that setting? Alternatively, the logic behind that setting may have ‘decided’ that you need 100% charge now (I think this setting isn’t just a “limit charging to 80%” flag, but tries to predict future power demands)
Reason077•6mo ago
It's unreliable, however, especially if you don't have your MacBook plugged in on a fixed schedule every day.
It's good that there are more third-party tools to work around this long-standing macOS deficiency. I've been using another one, called "Battery Toolkit", which has been working well.
v5v3•6mo ago
cnst•6mo ago
Obviously, it'd be nice if it knew of power outages upfront, but charging to 100% after one, is kinda pointless.
Then it stays at 100% for several days, until discharging to 80% several days later.
It's supposed to be smart, but instead it causes the user to alter their own behaviour, e.g., not disconnect the USB-C when rearranging the desk, even if disconnecting would be far more convenient when doing a cleanup or re-arranging furniture.
I miss the time when Apple used to give you choices…
catgirlinspace•6mo ago
For me my MacBook stays at 80% through the evening and night before charging to 100% in the morning when I typically unplug it and put it in my bag. If you open the battery thing in the menu bar it shows when it’s doing this, the time it’s scheduled to be finished charging by, and has a little button to charge to 100% immediately.