Leaving MacBook plugged in bad for battery?

Is it a good idea to shut down your laptop most every night? I am so use to ipads which I rarely shut down.

No need. Your M1 Mac, in particular, sleeps very similarly to your iPad when its lid is closed.

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Agree with @cornchip, with the caveat that in my experience an occasional reboot seems to help with stability.

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Oh yeah. I wind up rebooting every day practically, ususally due to Adobe Photoshop Elements.

I must say that the optimised battery charging setting is working very well on the MacBook. I wasnt sure if there was a way to check but I found Airbuddy shows this information. I am glad there is no need for me to use a thrid party app for battery management

My macbook is plugged in all day. Only in the weekend, I disconnect it. For me its a monday to friday work horse. I do not work weekends.

20220316 1050

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Count me in the camp who leaves it plugged in all the time. I just don’t have the brain space left to worry about battery service life. When it drops low enough, I’ll just get Apple to replace the battery. Easy.

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Optimized battery charging seems to be working properly after three months of use. Most of the time I don’t use my 16 inch unplugged for more than an hour or two at a time. It apparently took 3 months for the algorithm to learn to maintain the charge at 80%. Or, the algorithm changed with one of the updates. Anyway, I’m thrilled that my battery is no longer being charged to 100% all the time.

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KInd of like my Tesla Model S.

Mildly interesting addition to this discussion:

I currently have a 2018 MacBook Pro. It’s my only computer, and I use it for my full-time work. For the first 18 months or so of its life, I was doing a lot of business travel, and so, of course, I often used it on battery.

My last business trip was December 2019 and the MacBook Pro has been sitting on my desk plugged in nearly all that time since. It might as well be a Mac Mini or iMac or some other non-mobile Mac.

The battery level was always charged to 100%.

That was until Saturday, when I started using the MacBook as an around-the-house computer. I often ran it on battery until the charge was down below 15%.

The MacBook has been at my desk plugged in since yesterday morning … and this is what I’m currently seeing on the battery display.

CleanShot 2023-12-28 at 11.10.07

Conclusion: The MacBook’s optimized battery charging decided it was OK to hold a charge at 100% during the years it was plugged in all the time, but now that I’m using the MacBook unplugged, optimized charging has decided the battery needs a good draining.

UPDATE: I stepped away from my desk for about a half-hour and when I returned, the MacBook was not responding to keypresses. The screen lit up with the red “dead battery” warning. I unplugged the USB-C power cable and plugged it back in again. After a few moments, the MacBook came back to life. When I checked battery life, it showed 2%.Now it’s at 56% and still charging.

So perhaps the behavior I attributed to intelligence on the part of the optimized battery charging was, in fact, failure?

BY THE WAY: After three years of living the MacBook plugged in nearly continuously, battery life was about three hours, essentially what it was back in 2018.

I had that same sort of thing happen to me. Used the laptop that day down to 60% or so, left the MacBook plugged in overnight, came back in the morning and it was at under 10%. No idea what happened, other than to note I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it started charging again.

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I am the same exactly, I will try doing that 80% thing. Does that mean never charging it beyond 80%? I don’t understand anything about how batteries actually work to be honest.

I am having a battery drain issue with my 2019 MacBook Pro. It has been set to safe battery charge since that has been available and I leave it unplugged until it gets close to 20%, at that point I plug it back in and let it charge.

I use the laptop every morning for about 30 minutes to type a journal entry into Drafts. In the last few months, I have been losing about 30% battery in the 23.5 hours in between uses. I have tried turning off Bluetooth; Powernap has always been turned off; I quit out of all programs prior to closing the lid each morning; the firmware is up-to date; I am not running Dropbox. I have tried some terminal commands I have seen on Apple forums to try and fix it. Nothing has worked so far. Setting says my Battery Health is Normal.

I have used these and other sites for information on batteries. However, this topic remains controversial.

Manage your Mac laptop’s battery - Apple Support

iPhone Battery and Performance - Apple Support

Battery University Homepage

AlDente - AppHouseKitchen

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Hamsters. Tiny little hamsters on treadmils.

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Thanks for the reminder. I need to go buy hamster food for my devices. :upside_down_face: Tiny little bags of hamster food.

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Tiny hamsters and magic smoke.

I think that part of this is that the two sides talk past one another.

Apple basically says you don’t need to worry about it, because their software handles it automatically.

The other side says that Apple’s stuff isn’t optimal and there are better ways, which typically involve more user fiddling.

Both things can be true simultaneously, depending on how you define the terms at issue (like “don’t need to worry,” “optimal,” “better ways,” and “software handles it automatically.”) :slight_smile:

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Yeah, but lots of us have seen our Mac batteries NOT be okay. No matter how little we worry about it :slightly_smiling_face:.

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