Far too many conflicting opinions about MacBook Pro battery

[motrek]

Just comment on the above. Again, it’s up to the owner to concern or not concern with the battery. I am not expert, I just follow what the articles suggested. Just saying, my iPad M1 bought in Jan this year, still has 105% battery health. My 2014 MBP is also at 81% health last year (before I gave it to my daughter).

I have a 2015 MacBook Pro which I left plugged in 99% of the time and it's at 87% battery health. (Just checked because I'm trying to sell it on Craigslist...)

 

[spiderman0616]

I was happy the other day when my new MBP limited itself to 80% charge, and the immediately unhappy later in the day when I took it off the charger for ~10 minutes and now it has gone back to charging to 100%.

IMO the software should understand that if you only use the laptop on battery power for a few minutes once in a while, it still only needs to charge to 80%.

I'll investigate programs that limit charging later today. I tried AlDente last week but was annoyed that it has an always-present icon in the menu bar.

To be clear, charging to 100% isn't murdering anybody's battery. It's simply not optimal. There are many things that are much worse for a battery.

Agree! I wish there was a preference at least so you could give the OS a general idea of what kind of use case to expect.

 

[jav6454]

Not on my Macbooks it doesnt.... likely a newer OS only feature if it does. It's not possible for me to upgrade past Mojave.

I remember configuring my IBM T42p for this back in ~2005, Sony SZ780 in 2008.

Which Mac do you have?

 

[1madman1]

Which Mac do you have?

2017 Macbook 12" and 2017 Macbook Pro 15", nothing to do with the computers. I cant use anything newer because it breaks all my software.

 

[jav6454]

2017 Macbook 12" and 2017 Macbook Pro 15", nothing to do with the computers. I cant use anything newer because it breaks all my software.

Ahhh, ok, so you are limited on the software support. Understood.

 

[motrek]

Agree! I wish there was a preference at least so you could give the OS a general idea of what kind of use case to expect.

Yeah. Apple obviously thinks it's better to store the battery at 80% instead of 100% or they wouldn't have made the "optimized charging" feature, but then they don't give you a way to do this manually? Ugh.

I ended up buying AlDente Pro. You have to pay for the Pro version if you want to use the 'discharge' feature while a laptop is in clamshell mode. The software has a lot of features that I don't care about and don't want to use (I basically just want to limit how much the battery charges) but it seems like it gets the job done well enough.