Apple Changes Default MacBook Charging Behavior To Improve Battery Health (sixcolors.com) 26
The way MacBook batteries charge is about to change. Apple has released a new developer preview of macOS Catalina 10.15.5, and as these releases often do, it contains a new feature: Battery Health Management. From a report: The new feature, which will only be available on Mac notebooks with Thunderbolt 3 ports, enables a new default approach to charging and discharging MacBook batteries. According to Apple, the feature is meant to reduce the rate of chemical aging of the MacBook's battery, thereby extending its long-term lifespan -- but without compromising on day-to-day battery life. The feature works by analyzing the temperature of the battery over time, as well as the charging pattern the laptop has experienced -- in other words, does the laptop frequently get drained most of the way and then recharged fully, or is it mostly kept full and plugged in? In the latter case, Battery Health Management is more likely to stop a bit short of full capacity in order to extend the battery's long-term lifespan. (All charging data is kept private on the MacBook unless the Mac has been opted in to share anonymous analytics data with Apple.) Charging a modern laptop battery to 100% and leaving it there for extended periods of time -- especially at warm temperatures -- can dramatically reduce the battery's usable life. This is hardly limited to laptops: I own an electric car, and the manufacturer makes it very clear that it should be routinely charged to only 80 percent to extend its battery lifespan.
Re: Will it throttle your laptop? (Score:2)
Youâ(TM)re an idiot,
Power management techniques, strategies and even hardware are completely different in a mobile device running an Arm SoC and a laptop computer running an Intel CPU.
âoePorting the code from iOSâ is both impractical and unhelpful.
Nothing new (Score:2)
This has been available for ages on many laptops. The only difference is that you had to actively configure the charging level, instead of letting an algorithm to do it (and maybe screw with it).
I even had an app capable of doing this on my old Nexus 4 phone. But as phone manufacturers seem not interested in these kind of features, compatibility of these kind of apps is very low (and requires root access).
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Yeah my 2012 era $700 new Thinkpad had this feature, I don't think it was new then.
That was eight years ago.
Lighten up, Francis (Re:Nothing new) (Score:2)
I am strongly convinced that Apple laptops will soon devoid of active internal parts, and they'll just sell us the cardboard display mockup.
Then don't buy any Apple laptops.
Separately, you'll purchase the universal converter dongle, and a dongle for you CPU, a dongle for your WiFi, a dongle for your Bluetooth, a dongle for your RAM, a dongle for your dongle...
Then don't buy any Apple laptops.
Explain to me how a rat's nest of dongles is more sleek and stylish than having everything built in again?
No, really, you don't have to buy an Apple laptop. Explain to me why this concerns you to the point you need to comment on this? Could you use this doll to point to where Apple hurt you?
You are right that this is nothing new. Having to buy adapters and cables has been the norm for laptop computers for a very long time. Somewhere in my basement is a box full of old PCMCIA adapters. Partly because I'm just a pack rat, but mostly because I
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I still have to use them. My job requires it.
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
Charge bracketing is my most requested feature for any lithium-ion battery powered device. I wish it were standard.
I haven't seen a way to configure it on the Dell 7730, but at least the work-issued MBPs will get it (not that it'll matter, since their batteries are shot anyway, precisely from being full all the time, since they're functionally desktops).
Anyone know how?
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Not sure about the Dell 7730, but my Del XPS 15 from 5 years ago has this. There is some battery setting in the BIOS, where you can choose "adaptive" or some fixed threshold. I have mine set to charge only when the battery is lower than 50% and only charges up to 80%. Still have a very reasonable battery life out of it (though not the 5+ hours I used to get when I got it).
Re: Nothing new (Score:2)
It never ceases to amaze me there are actually people who accept sub-8 hour battery life out of a notebook when 12+ hours has been possible for years.
Re: Nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, most 12+ hour notebooks I see either use a gigantic external battery pack, or it's a "12 hours if you're going downhill with a tailwind" type situation.
People generally have found Apple is wildly conservative with battery life, and often the 8 hours coincides with "typical" use scenarios with high brightness, videos, web surfing and mild computation. But people have exceeded those ratings as well - 8 hour battery life has been found to easily be 9 or 10 hours. The "leave it idling with screen dim and no one touching it" can easily be 12+ hours, but Apple doesn't report that as it's not a useful metric. Of course, do something heavy and battery life can drop to 3 hours if you're maxing the GPU and CPU.
Apple could easily quote 12+ hours like every other manufacturer. Decades ago, they did. But these days, th ey report rather accurate battery life figures that are achievable with normal use. No need to discount it 50% like other manufacturers who simply stretch it as long as possible
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It never ceases to amaze me that there are people who think that their use case and priorities are the only valid ones.
Sure, nowadays there are ultralight laptops that can last much longer, but I wanted mine with a 4k screen and reasonably decent dedicated graphics card for the time (2015). And even if I know that nowadays laptops are much more efficient, if mine is still working why should I replace it because there are newer ones that last longer? I'll replace it when it breaks.
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Depends on your use case. I can't say I've ever needed 12 hours of battery life out of any of my laptops. 8 hours is more than enough. It's rare that I need to use it on battery anyway, as it is more of a portable desktop. If the battery can hold the contents of the RAM while it's sleeping and not plugged in for a couple of days, then I'm good.
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Over here in Thinkpad-land:
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_stop_threshold /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_start_threshold
echo 95 >
echo 93 >
On Win7 I needed their bloated battery monitor utility. I don't know if it's still the case on Win10. I expect it's the same story for Dell.
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It definitely should be something the software just does, but give you options/notifications about what it's doing and allow you to override it if you truly want/need to(like I want my laptop battery at true 100% before I go on a business trip where I'll be using it heavily on a plane/train).
Other 10.15.5 Fixes? (Score:1)
What I want to know is will Apple be fixing the system crashes [slashdot.org], kernel panics, and other problems with 10.15.5 update.
Catalina has turned out to be a piece of shit OS. I should have stayed on Mojave
There is a workaround (Score:1)
What I want to know is will Apple be fixing the system crashes, kernel panics, and other problems with 10.15.5 update.
Have you actually seen any? I have not... but even though Apple says a fix is coming soon, there is a workaround [macsales.com] (from the forum in the story you linked to).
Catalina has turned out to be a piece of shit OS. I should have stayed on Mojave
I have one system that had to stay on Mojave for the moment, Catalina has been more stable for me. By the time I finally can though Apple may well be onto
Just do what IBM/Lenovo and Dell do (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't try to guess when the user would want to top-off their battery - you're likely to guess wrong. Simply let them set and change the charging thresholds whenever they want, for example 80/20 - stop charging at 80%, and don't start charging until the battery drops to 20%.
This is called giving the user enough rope with which to hang themselves. I get it, we're all nerds here. Our preference is to use Linux and that our Kernels have 1000 configurable options, and our GUIs a magnitude more. But we *are* in the minority. There's a reason companies like Apple made their resurgence through simple, easy to use, dare I say "designed for the lowest common denominator" (in all sincerity, I don't mean to pick on Apple users) products. Being overwhelmed with options and settings just d
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You can't believe people accept living in a world governed by physics? Must suck to be you.