How and why to activate battery management on our Mac

With the arrival of macOS 10.15.5, Apple offers compatible Macs an extremely interesting function: the management of the battery status. With this function, the Mac will be based on Historical battery measurements to optimize your charge and its durability over time.

What does battery status management do?

Before going into the details, it is important to clarify that the battery of any device is a consumable good. In other words, just like the cartridges printer ink, which should wear out over time. The good health of the battery depends on many factors, for example how fast we charge it, at what temperature we make it, how often, how long we keep it at 100% charge, etc.

With the complexity of keeping the battery in its optimal condition, or in other words, making age as slowly as possible, Apple introduces us to the battery management panel. This new feature supports monitoring of temperature history and battery charge patterns to make necessary adjustments, if needed.

Depending on the actions taken, managing the battery condition may reduce the maximum battery charge in this mode. This will happen whenever necessary to ensure that the battery is charged to an optimum level for use, thereby reducing deterioration and slowing down chemical aging.

As Apple explains in this support document, one of the primary ways to manage the battery condition, or at least the most noticed when using the Mac, to regulate its condition is to reduce its capacity. I mean, instead of load up to 100%, e.g. up to 95%.

This measure, although a posteriori may decrease the time we can use the Mac on a single chargeIt plays a crucial role in keeping our battery in optimal operating condition. If while using our Mac, after fully charging its battery, that 5% more battery is important or relevant to us, Apple offers us the option to turn off the optimization.

If we usually have a charger on hand, or if we can just give up another 15 minutes of use for long term battery health, we can activate (or verify that it is already activated) this function.

How to activate battery status management

To activate (or deactivate) the management of the battery status, we will access System Preferences from our Mac. The steps are as follows:

In the Apple menu () we choose System Preferences.
We entered Saver.
We touch the padlock at the bottom left, enter the password of our mac and press I accept or we use Touch ID.
We touch Battery health.
We activate Manage battery health.
We are pressing I accept.

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As simple as that. We can now expect the durability of our computer battery to increase dramatically. With this measure, Apple seeks, through software, to improve on one of the main limitations of all lithium-ion batteries. As technology advances we may find better options for this type of battery, but in the meantime software solutions seem to be the only option. Solutions which, it must be said, give impressive results based on what we have seen on iOS.