macOS recently introduced the ability to limit your battery to only charge up to 80%, a feature that I personally appreciate as I’m mostly using my MacBook plugged into a dock and it’s arguably a great way to limit the ageing of the unit.
There’s just one huge problem. Well, two actually. Firstly it doesn’t allow me to set a minimum charge (“start charging when battery is at X%”), so when it falls to 79% it just tops it back up to 80, not a big deal but slightly annoying. The much bigger issue is that the charge limit apparently isn’t being saved to the battery firmware itself so when the MacBook is turned off and plugged into my dock it just keeps on charging to 100%…
Similar issue with my Pixel 9 Pro, it normally sticks to the charge limit quite well, but multiple times a month I’d say it just randomly charges to 100% regardless. Apparently that’s to calibrate the battery or something? As far as I know you have to do a complete cycle to calibrate a battery which 80% to 100% isn’t, also I don’t think a Li-ion battery needs to be calibrated this often, does it?
To contrast, KDE Plasma retains the limit at all times, lets you set a minimum amount and actually tells the battery to always stop charging at that amount.
Am I just not getting something about this?
yeah its annoying to micro manage it
but for a phone and a computer you are using its not a big deal having to charge to 100% occasionally, it wont stay there for long
my dell laptop can have it charge limit set in bios and that works even shut down
other devices are worse cameras radios etc if I want to limit the charge there i have to whip out my programable charger and jerry rig the batteries to it
Just here to vent that Pixel 9 is absolutely JAM PACKED with USEFUL FEATURES that also DO NOT WORK.
I can’t really complain… then again I probably disabled most of the features you’re talking about
Where are the options for:
- Make screen not randomly hang, filled with ghost images and artifacts
- Have phone actually give notifications when they arrive
- Respect battery charge settings
- Have app-switcher not randomly stop accepting swipe inputs
I think they may have fixed the app switcher thing? Or at least one of them.
Here’s the scenario I kept running into on my 6. I’ll give the apps names to simplify the description, but the problem was generic. So let’s say I’m in Firefox, and I want to glance back at something in signal. So I double-tap “recent” to switch to my previous app, but what comes up is instead WeatherBug, because I forgot I glanced at that between Signal and Firefox. So I still want to go to Signal, but when I get there, I want my previous app to be Firefox, not WeatherBug, so I double-tap recent again to get back to Firefox as an interim step. Then I hit recent yet again, and this time the whole screen freezes up and won’t respond to touch. The workaround I found was that if you interacted with the screen on WeatherBug–usually I’d just scroll it down and back up a tiny bit–it wouldn’t lock up. So I got in the habit of doing that.
Recently there’s been a change, though, and it seems to fix that bug. Unfortunately, it also screws up the “switch to last app” functionality sometimes. Now I’ll be in Firefox, open recent apps, scroll past Weatherbug to open Signal, and when I double-tap recent, it’ll switch to WeatherBug.
So it’s still a screwy mess, but at least it’s not locking up as often anymore.
install GrapheneOS
Ok, that sound more like your phone is kinda iffy. I don’t mean to piss you off by saying this, but have you tried a factory reset?
Oh FFS lol
These are all well known and well documented problems
I installed Arch on my macbook pro and simply write the maximum charge value to a file and it worked flawlessly. The macbook has great hardware. MacOS is holding it back
What model. I’ve got a 2016 m1 touch bar. Audio and wifi are still spotty on Linux.
It’s an M2. I’m using asahi alarm. Wifi, audio, webcam etc all working. External devices like docks and dongle support saw great improvements compared to MacOS. You now have the option to use an external wifi dongle, it will work out of the box.
I’d like to have standardized LFP battery form factors and BMS interfaces. I’m not really enthusiastic about everyone rolling their own battery form factor for a given product that isn’t going to be available forever, even if it can save a bit of space. That battery is going to degrade over time, and unless I’m going to throw the product out soon, at some point I may want to replace the battery.
We had this solved with traditional cells (AA, AAA, C, D, etc).
when the MacBook is turned off and plugged into my dock it just keeps on charging to 100%…
Why would you ever turn it off?
That’s just what I do. I don’t think many people just leave their computer running 24/7.
Laptops yea. It’s just like your phone.
I don’t think many people just leave their computer running 24/7
Why not? There is no point in turning it off. Just close the lid and it goes into a deep sleep mode. It’s super efficient and it’s ready to go instantly if you need it.
It’s don’t know anyone who turns their MacBook off when they don’t use it.
I’ve never really been a Mac user primarily so I just adopted the best practices from Windows and Linux. If macOS is supper efficient that way then cool.
I still wouldn’t leave it on 24/7.
Do you also turn off your phone at night? Or your tablet?
Personally, I don’t think mobile devices such as cell phones or tablets should be lumped into the same category as personal computers such as laptops and desktops.
Like, sure, they are technically still computers, but they are treated more as always on assistants.
Myself, I leave my cell phone, smartwatch and tablet on 24-7. Only restarting when I have an issue, it needs an update, or the battery dies. However, my desktop, game consoles, laptop, and TV’s are turned off as soon as I’m done using them. (Although the TV doesn’t actually turn off because it forces a rest mode.)
edit: I got OCD on my list orders
Yes.
Lol. Can’t tell if lying, genius, or psychopath.
Definitely the latter
Adding on, I don’t think I’ve turned off my MacBook in years. The only time I remember turning off a MacBook was when I put it away in storage for a while.
I don’t leave mine running 24/7 either, but I fully cut off the power when I’m not using it. The dock is plugged into an extension cord with a switch so I can easily cut the power after putting the laptop to sleep or shutting it down.
I don’t know if I’m typical, but neither desktop or laptop are ever fully off for me under normal circumstances, sleep mode is the default
To save money on electricity bill, reduce wear on the components, refresh the contents of ram… why would you just leave it on if you’re not using it?
MacBooks use practically no power when in standby. Turning it off actually uses more power than leaving it on (due to the time and processing power it takes to start everything back up).
Leaving it on also reduces wear on components. Being on all the time doesn’t cause a lot of wear, it’s switching between on and off that causes wear due to the component warming up and cooling down.
why would you just leave it on if you’re not using it?
We’re talking a MacBook, not a desktop Windows machine. There is no benefit to turning it off and a lot of downsides.
Practically no power isn’t 0. It’s up to 3watts. For comparison a Pixel 10 at 100% CPU is 6.5 watts.
Oh no, 3 watts. How will I cope with the €0,00 that is going to cost me?
I bet you throw your trash onto the street too. “It’s just one plastic cup. One plastic cup doesn’t matter.”
How is that in any way equivalent?
You are throwing away 3 watts/hr because you can afford it while ignoring the tiny environmental damage it causes.
All of you are reading way too much into it. Turning a computer on and off doesn’t hurt it. Leaving it on all the time doesn’t hurt it either. A MacBook will last at least ten years if taken care of decently.
As far as the battery thing, mine’s still at 100% output (not charge) after 2 years. I set the charge limit to 80% (OP is incorrect — macOS 26.4 didn’t set the charge limit to 80%, it didn’t set it to anything, it gave you the option to limit charge to 80, 85, 90, or 95% charge, or disable it if you’ve enabled it) and it’s fine, I imagine it might last a few months longer, but I don’t expect it to radically change the physics of Li-Ion battery degradation.
Batteries are still a consumable item. MacBook batteries are generally known for their reliability and longevity, though.
It’s very important for these internet people to be recognized as right by a group of anonymous strangers. Failing that, they very much need to make those strangers feel bad in the process.
OP is incorrect — macOS 26.4 didn’t set the charge limit to 80%, it didn’t set it to anything, it gave you the option to limit charge to 80, 85, 90, or 95% charge, or disable it if you’ve enabled it
You’re right, I guess I still think calling something a feature implies that you can turn it off.
Small charge cycles are the worst for the battery, so it should only charge up to charge-limit on plugging it on and then stop until it’s (let’s say 50%) lower.I don’t believe you’re correct. Small discharge cycles are not at all bad for the battery.
https://www.batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries/
Similar to a mechanical device that wears out faster with heavy use, the depth of discharge (DoD) determines the cycle count of the battery. The smaller the discharge (low DoD), the longer the battery will last. If at all possible, avoid full discharges and charge the battery more often between uses. Partial discharge on Li-ion is fine. There is no memory and the battery does not need periodic full discharge cycles to prolong life. The exception may be a periodic calibration of the fuel gauge on a smart battery or intelligent device.
If you look at figure 6, cycling from 75-65% was better than 75-25%.
You’re thinking of keeping the battery constantly charged at an elevated voltage, eg 90-100%. There’s nothing wrong with many small cycles. The most optimal way to use a lithium ion would be many charge cycles and the battery constantly going from 49-51%.
Yeah. It makes me feel like the whole purpose of the limits are greenwashing. Maintaining 79-80% is probably better than 99-100%, but the former is likely only slightly better for battery longevity, when 40-80% would probably double battery longevity vs like a 10 or 20% improvement.
See my comment above with the battery university link, small depth of charge/discharge and frequent cycling is optimal for lithium ion batteries. The longest longevity was many 75-65% cycles, followed by 75-25%, then 85-25%, and lastly 100-25%. There’s nothing wrong with small cycles on lithium ion batteries.
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I think calibrating once a week is totally fair and honestly not that much of a draw on the system.
That’s excessive. There’s just not that much drift in accuracy in the space of a week. Monthly would be enough.
I don’t believe that because this isn’t about capacity calibration, but more so that the battery voltage is almost constant between about 20% and 90%, though varies by battery type, and no matter what, the controller can’t exactly know how much the battery is actually charging and discharging so it has to guess the current state. I’ve seen this happen on a Dell XPS laptop I have from work, I manually set it to limit charging to 80% since the built in “Primarily AC Use” mode cycles it around 95%, and it doesn’t do the occasional recharge to 100% by itself, so about once a month it would jump from whatever percentage it was at to 7%, even from 80%.
