Battery charging using dock and M1 MacBook Pro

I recently switched from a 27" Retina iMac to a 13" M1 MBP, a separate monitor and a CalDigit TS3 PlusThunderbolt 3 dock. Everything works well - no problems with waking up monitor, keeping external backup drives mounted or other issues. The dock is connected to the MBP with the CalDigit-supplied Thunderbolt 3 cable.

How should I manage the MBP battery charging? Currently the MBP battery charges continuously through the dock connection and remains at 100% charge. I understand that this is not optimal for battery longevity. Is there a setting or an app to automatically discontinue charging the battery, then resume charging when the battery discharges to a certain level?

Not unexpectedly, disconnecting the Thunderbolt 3 cable to the dock triggers an error message “disk not ejected properly”, referring of course to the external disks running Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner. These are connected to the dock. I would not want to manually eject two external disks in order to manually disconnect the dock-to-MBP Thunderbolt cable just to cycle the battery charging periodically. Is there a more elegant way to handle this?

System Preferences->Battery->Battery and make sure “Optimized battery charging” is selected. After that, never worry about the battery again; just use your Mac :slight_smile: (There is much angst about batteries, but the long and short of it is that Macs manage their batteries quite well. It won’t last forever, but it’ll last a long time pretty much on its own.)

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That is as of when, my 2014 MBP only lasts about 2 hours. I replaced the batter with one of OWC and they told me I had to “condition” the battery.

I am stuck on Big Sur.

“Optimized battery charging” is doing the conditioning for you. Plus battery technology has advanced quite a bit over the last decade. I assume your replacement battery is built to the same spec and tech as the original

Does Jettison software address your issues?