Oliver Haslam on April 17, 2020, 11:45 pm

Apple Looking To Extend MacBooks’ Battery Lifespan Through Charging Tweaks

Apple is introducing a new feature to macOS that is designed to extend the overall lifetime of MacBook batteries. The feature, currently available to developers with the latest macOS 10.15.5 beta, prefers to only charge a Mac notebook’s battery to an almost-full state, rather than to 100% capacity.

That, in turn, means that the battery should remain viable for longer. Batteries do not like to be charged to their capacity and doing so repeatedly shortens their overall life. Apple’s move is designed to prevent that, and it’s going to be smart about it, too.

Apple says that macOS will decide who will benefit from the change and then apply it to those machines only. That might mean that your MacBook will continue to charge as normal, and even if your notebook does reduce its capacity you’ll not know about it – the battery percentage will continue to report 100%.

While Apple says that the new feature will be on by default once the macOS 10.15.5 update is available to everyone. those who don’t want it can opt out. A setting will be available within the macOS settings that switches it off completely.

Finally. this power management feature won’t be available to all MacBook users, either. Apple confirms that only notebooks with Thunderbolt 3 will be targeted – all MacBook Pros since 2016 and MacBook Airs since 2018.

We don’t know when this release will be made available to everyone and that will likely depend on any issues that developers come up against during their testing.

(Source: The Verge)