How to Take charge of energy-saving settings

1 Display brightness

A Mac screen’s backlight uses a lot of power, so let’s turn it down. Go to System Preferences > Displays and move the Brightness slider to the left. Uncheck ‘Automatically adjust brightness’ to stop it going back up on its own.

2 Energy Saver

Energy Saver’s relevance is obvious, but don’t forget about it! In System Prefs > Energy Saver, you can set how soon the display goes to sleep when your Mac is on battery power and left idle. The faster you set this, the more power you’ll save.

3 Wi- Fi and Bluetooth

Turn wireless communications tech off if you don’t need it – Wi-Fi still uses power even if inactive. You can do this from the menu bar icons, or in System Prefs’ Bluetooth and Network panes for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, respectively.

4 Stay on top of apps

Click the battery icon in the menu bar, and look for the ‘Apps Using Significant Energy’ section. Do you need those apps open? Quit them! This will ensure that they’re not actually eating up CPU cycles when you think they’re idle.

5 Tame online content

Browsers are often the worst culprits for high energy use, mostly because of badly made ads. A content blocker will save you a few points of battery life. In Safari, go to Safari > Safari Extensions. Try the Ghostery extension.

6 Auto graphics switching

On MacBook Pros with two graphics chips, make sure you haven’t disabled this setting in System Prefs > Energy Saver. If you have, your Mac always uses its more power-hungry discrete chip, even when it’s running only light tasks.