Battery charge limiter for Apple Silicon MacBook devices | Hacker News Reader

Battery charge limiter for Apple Silicon MacBook devices

github.com

6 pointsstarbugs5 comments

I'm on macOS 15.0.1 and it's built-in. See Battery -> Battery Health in System Preferences, then click the (i) on the status display. It will show a dialog with an option for "Optimized Battery Charging" that charges to 80%.

The option may also have been in earlier versions, I don't recall.

The linked page mentions this:

  Additionally, Optimized Charging uses machine learning to decide when the battery should be held at 80%, and when it should become fully charged.

This option is not new and it never really worked for me. Sometimes it would work fine for a while, then again it decides to keep the MacBook at full charge for weeks. I never really understood what Apple had in mind with this feature. Just give us a proper charge limiting option. With this tool you get exactly this, though limited to choosing 80% or off (charge to full) only. I would prefer a full charge limiter as I have in my Tesla, but for some reason that's beyond Apple.

Does this limit charging even when the MacBook is turned off? That's the major difference between Al Dente's free and paid versions.

I think so as it appears to be using the charge limit feature built into the firmware. I didn't try it though, because I usually never turn my MacBook off.

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