You can revert battery settings to their old defaults by turning off the feature.Įssentially, Apple has decided it needs to adjust the default MacBook battery-charging behavior to be less aggressive at fully charging batteries in certain circumstances in order to extend battery 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.

(All charging data is kept private on the MacBook unless the Mac has been opted in to share anonymous analytics data with Apple.)Ĭharging 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. 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. 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 new feature, which will only be available on Mac notebooks with Thunderbolt 3 ports 1, enables a new default approach to charging and discharging MacBook batteries. 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. The way MacBook batteries charge is about to change. Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

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