The 10% Low Battery Notification

[rmn1644]

I guess its nice that MacOS gives me a low battery notification at 10%, but now a days with 10% still providing at least a half hour and often much more battery life, it seems to be coming on quite a bit too early.

I find myself dismissing it, and forgetting I'm low, and then all of a sudden POOF my mac goes to sleep, at which time I remember.

Wish it would come up at 5% or better yet, a "you have 5 minutes of battery life left" which would finally get me to get up and sort out the charger.

Or am I missing something here around customization?

(Writing this of course after my most recent dismissal of the notification!)

 

[BigBlur]

You've got an interesting point. I guess I've always took it as "it's time to plug in to help preserve battery health" rather than "my computer is about to shut down". It isn't necessarily good for the battery to be draining that low all the time, at least not regularly.

But to answer your question, you can't change it but you could do something like this:

Custom battery notifications for MacBooks to extend battery lifespan

The below AppleScript sets custom battery notifications so your MacBook will notify you to charge when it’s reaches 20% and again to unplug…

konomi-notes.medium.com

Or find a third party app.

 

[f54da]

Am I misreading that script wrong or is that basically having launchd repeatedly run an applescript (via keepalive param, which IIRC gets throttled to like once every 10 seconds or something). What a terrible idea, why not do the polling within the script itself.

Also iStat menus supports custom battery % notifications IIRC.

 

[rmn1644]

Guess I'm more surprised there isn't this "you have 5 minutes left" as I am constantly having it head to sleep. While not draining the battery down is a noble effort, that's not how we act with our phones and I don't expect to act differently with the computer.

All I get on the iPhone is to enter Low Power mode at 10%.

If I'm not home or don't have a battery pack, thats panic time!