battery For Mac

No matter how advanced your new M1/M2 Mac is, it’s still powered by a lithium polymer battery, which experiences the most strain when fully charged and fully discharged. To ensure you get the most out of it for years to come, limiting its maximum charge is a good idea.

battery is a very simple tool that can do that for you. You can see it as a stricter alternative to the battery management feature built into macOS, which only limits charging when certain that it won’t inconvenience you.

Both lithium-ion and lithium polymer batteries, like the one in your M1/M2 mac, degrade the fastest when the charge level is below 20% or above 80%. While it may seem counter-intuitive to purposely limit your battery’s maximum charge, the level of degradation is so much higher at full charge that it may be worth it in the long run.

This is especially true if you’re using a MacBook that’s mostly plugged-in, as it will always stay at near 100% charge, which results in continuous high battery strain.

Unlike AlDente, this app has no fancy features to speak of, and no paid ones either. You just start it up, enable it from the menu bar, and get on with your day. You can quit the app, and it will continue to limit the charge level until you launch the app again and turn it off. It also continues to work after rebooting.

Even though the GUI is built in Electron, which not everyone is a fan of, that doesn’t really matter since you don’t need to keep it running. What’s more, a command-line tool is installed automatically when running the app, and you can always use that instead of the GUI. The CLI utility also allows you to set a custom charging limit.

battery is great for users who don’t need AlDente’s extra features, those to prefer CLI tools, or even developers who want to make their own better app, which the project’s permissive license allows.