MacOS battery health management has come up a couple of times in the forum, but I can’t see a “deep dive” about it and I have a couple of questions. I’m referring to an Intel MacBook Pro.
Does anyone know how Macs “monitor your battery’s… charging patterns” actually works (Apple’s unhelpful page), and how it functions if you’re not charging on a schedule?
How do we actually feel about batteries that are plugged in full-time nowadays? Does it still affect battery health?
I never used to notice this before because I had Bartender running and couldn’t see the battery icon in the menu bar, but since I wiped my Mac a few weeks ago I haven’t reinstalled Bartender, and I’ve noticed that my Mac is holding the charging at 79% for days on end and never charging to 100%. This is because the “battery health management” setting is switched on, but I don’t have a regular schedule in unplugging my Mac from power, and it maybe only gets unplugged once or twice a week, at random times. The Mac I assume can’t figure out when it’s meant to charge to 100% so it just never does it. (In fact in the Settings it even says “Rarely used on battery”, so the Mac itself knows it’s not on battery much!)
[As an aside, elsewhere in the forum I’d mentioned that wiping my Mac had significantly increased my battery time, but now I think what happened was pre-reboot I had this 80% issue, then straight after the wipe the Mac was charging to 100% while it was “learning my routine”, and now it’s reverted back to holding the charge again.]
It seems like if the battery health management program learns to optimise charging based on user behaviour, but user behaviour is erratic, it will never be able to optimise battery use and Apple’s advice should be to disable the function? But Apple don’t seem to give advice on this and I’m not sure what is the right thing to do.
Anecdotal data points: my 2010 MBP was connected to power all the time. If memory serves well, the battery lasted less than 3 years or so (sorry, can’t remember the exact number of cycles). My newish 2018 MBP is again connected to power all the time and after 4 years battery capacity is around 75%. I think there has been some improvement here.
My belief is that Apple has optimised the charge/discharge cycle when the computer is always connected to power. If the connection patterns are erratic I don’t think it’s going to be of much use, but I also believe that erratic connection patterns are less harmful than “always connected” situations.
This is where the AlDente app by AppHouseKitchen comes in. I run my Mac on battery power most of the time. Apple has never learned a useful routine for charging my M1 MacBook Air. With AlDente, I can turn off Apple’s Optimized Charging and no longer blow past the 80% charge level that I desire. When I get to that 80% charge level, Apple’s own battery widget reports the following:
And I can stay plugged in if I want to extend the life of my battery (reduced cycles) or to take advantage of the wall charger if an offsite backup runs long or I need to keep a power-drawing device plugged into the Mac.
I wondered about this. If I turn off battery health management but I make sure I run my Mac’s battery down once a week, I wondered if that might sort of “offset” the fact I was no longer optimising my charging?
(As is probably evident, I have no idea how batteries work and if I should even care about this.)
Yes, it hovers at 80% (or whatever) to preserve the battery, but it gives you two nice features (among others):
Top Up sends it to 100% until your next unplug, and returns to normal charging after that
Scheduling (or Siri Shortcuts support) tops it up on days you regularly need the full battery. E.g., you can set it to always top up to 100% on Thursdays between 6am and 10pm if you’re on the road that day.
I held off for awhile because of the sort of fear you and others have expressed. But I have found AlDente to be a legitimate and useful utility that solves a problem for me. Apple is doing the same thing except they insist on trying to guess what I want their Optimized Charging to do. AlDente lets me actually specify what works best for me.
I see, fair enough! Tbh, even if it goes really wrong, you just replace the battery at some point, it’s not the end of the world!
I don’t quite think AlDente can degrade the battery directly, it’s just that it most likely messing with the way the OS calculates battery health, which might be the reason why some users are reporting that they observed that their battery health has degraded shortly after installing it.
In 2010 I told a long time friend my worries about my 2010 MBP overheating during hot summers in Spain. I was coming from a self PC builder background, with Zalman copper heatsinks, Artic Silver paste in the CPU, temperature probes in my tower, silent fans… My friend, long time Apple user, just said to me: “These things are designed to be used in Florida during the summer too. Do not try and outsmart Apple engineers.” My 2010 MBP was in commision for 8 solid years, he was right.
Add yet the battery in my 2018 MacBook Pro swelled and needed to be replaced. This was before the AlDente app existed and probably what led Apple to develop Optimized Charging.
Aldente doesn’t do this. It sets the charge percentage target the same way macOS does. Lower level system software and the battery/charge hardware do all the same self-regulation and reporting of battery health back to macOS.
I’m not saying there haven’t been people unhappy with the software.
Talking about swollen batteries… another horror story. My dad told me that his Macbook Air battery had died. I got a replacement from iFixit, and drove to his house --that’s a 500km drive!- only to find that yes, the battery had died in the worse way: it was swollen and had broken the damn unibody case, you could stash a couple of euro coins in the base. Replacing the dead battery was easy enogh, but once assembled again, I found to my dismay that the trackpad was broken making the computer unuseable for my 80 year dad. Still I don’t consider it Apple’s failure because it was a computer from 2013 and the battery was an el-cheapo aftermarket from 2022. So my dad is now using a shiny M2 Macbook Air since last saturday, although he cannot tell the difference… let’s hope he notices the higher battery capacity.
My M1 MBA stays connected to power 24x7. In the past I occasionally discharged it to 40% or so but it always returned to 100% when connected to power. The sweet spot for Li-on batteries is around 40% - 80%. I use AlDente to keep my Mac in that range.
OTOH my iPhone 11 reports it is at 93% capacity and has been showing that for at least 10 months. At this rate my phone will still have around 90+ % capacity when it goes out of support next year. Yeah right.
What’s your AlDente work flow for keeping your Mac battery charged above 40%? I’m unfamiliar with a way to do that. (I used to have the Battery Monitor app speak the battery levels as they declined, but that was still very much a manual process.)
It’s manual. Once or twice a month I set the maximum charge to 40% and have AlDente discharge the battery. Later I reset it to 80%.
I have two Samsung T-7s connected to my MBA through a CalDigit dock and the SSDs will disconnect if I pull power from the dock. Using AlDente allows me to discharge the MBA with the drives attached.
I have family members who have a tendency to fret about leaving their devices out in the sun for a few minutes when the sun shines. My view is, Apple was designed in California - I’m pretty sure their devices can cope with the paltry 25C (77F) of a good British summer day.
Mind you, I find iPhone screens SO RUBBISH in bright sun and this baffles me given that they were invented in California. If I think they’re rubbish in the UK with its two days of sunshine, surely they’ve noticed the issue in their land of the eternal summer? I even feel that the iPhone 14 is worse for this than previous models. I don’t get it. Although maybe in places where it’s sunny and hot people don’t use their devices when not in the shade and so haven’t noticed the problem? Whereas mad dogs and Englishmen are outside in scorching sun and would like to be able to see their screens.
I rarely try to use any screen in bright sun. When I get alerts on my Apple Watch I respond via Siri, on those rare occasions when Siri actually works.
Otherwise I wait until I can pull out my iPhone or iPad in the, preferably air conditioned, shade.
