HI all.
Finally changed my old laptop and I’ve been wondering if I should be using an app like Al Dente or batt to preserve it’s battery cycles. Anyone have personal experiences with one or the other that they care to comment on?
Thanks!
I repair Macs. Just use basic lithium battery practices:
- mostly keep charge between 30-80%
- charge fully if you are about to use
- long term storage with a 70% charge
- don’t run down to empty if you can help it
- don’t leave plugged in all the time
- avoid prolonged temperature extremes
- avoid shitty chargers, Apple chargers are expensive but generally worth it
Beware of add-ons that access hardware, for various reasons.
Apple batteries are rated for around 1000 cycles, or around 5 years of average use. Follow the above advice and you might eke out 1500 or so.
I could totally be misunderstanding the problem or question here, but doesn’t Mac OS have a built-in setting/feature to cap the battery charge when left plugged in?
Yeah I use Al Dente and it’s great. Definitely worth paying for. I set the charge limit at 80%, and mostly use my m1 macbook plugged in. The battery life is so great anyway that I very rarely need more than 40-50% of battery in a day when using it lightly. My battery only has 350 cycles from nearly 4 years of use due to using it plugged in mostly.
Honestly setting the charge limit should just be built into macos. Since it’s possible, I have no idea why they don’t offer that. I find their “machine learned charge limit” or whatever it is to be almost useless because most of the time it just charges to 100% anyway. The built-in feature seems to be very specifically for if you charge overnight and have a regular wake up schedule, it will hold at 80% until a few hours before you wake up and then still go to 100% anyway.