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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

> It’s not clear what the firmware fixes or patches

I'm on M2 MB Air, and it seems odd to me that it (seems to) runs off battery even when plugged in and fully charged. Mine has been plugged in at desk for over a week, every day when I get on it says it's "Power Source: Power Adapter" yet it battery charging goes "On Hold" and dwindles as if it's running off battery all day. For example, it's mid-day for me and I'm at 79% but it's never been unplugged.

My last was a MB Air 2013 so maybe this is new behavior that I'm just not used to, but it seems strange. If I had to unplug and leave, I'd expect to be leaving with 100% charge.

Edit: "Optimized Battery Charging" was turned on as commenter mentioned, thanks for the tech support HN!

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80% is the 'ideal storage' condition for the battery. If it's always charging to 100%, the battery life is pretty dramatically shortened. Apple enabled this new charging manager that tries to learn your patterns (if you always unplug in the AM and leave with it, it'll learn to charge to 100% before you leave, for example). You can also click the battery icon in the tray (if you have that turned on) and tell it to charge to 100% 'right now', which only takes a minute or two with a full size charger.

This is a positive thing for the life of your battery, but if you do want to disable it, there's a setting in System Settings - click the 'i' in the circle next to Battery Health, and turn off 'Optimize Battery Charging' there.

It sounds like Optimized Battery Charging may be turned on.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212049

Yep, solved! Did not know about this setting (kind of buried in the Settings UI) - thanks for the tech support!

One of the many utilities I love that comes with my Set App subscription is AlDente Pro. As others have pointed out, it allows me to set 80% as the max for my battery and it also will change the color of the LED on the magsafe connector to green once it gets to 80% and charging stops.

I had optimized battery charging enabled but my Mac seemed to always charge to 100% - with Al Dente I can force it to do what I want.

And recently I found Al Dente pausing charging because the battery temp got too warm. So then I went down a rabbit hole and found out I could tweak the fans up slightly higher with iStat Menus (also part of my Set app sub). There are other utilities that will do similar things - those just happen to be two I use, especially since I tend to use my MBP plugged in the majority of the time.

If it thinks it's going to be plugged in for a long time (based on previous usage) it'll pause the charging around 80% to preserve the battery health.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT

Are you using the stock charger? I would see similar behaviour on my 2018 MBP when I used a USB-C charger without enough power.

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