Boost your MacBook’s battery
Here’s how to avoid running out of juice when you’re working on the go
These days, modern MacBooks offer jaw-dropping battery lives – thanks to Apple’s new M1 chips, they’re able to claim up to 20 hours’ life for the latest MacBook Pros. That’s great if you’ve bought a brandnew model, but about the rest of us?
The good news is that, whatever the age of your MacBook, you can tweak and optimise the battery to ensure you get the maximum length of time from it. But before we begin, let’s perform a quick health check.
Verify battery status
You can find out about your battery via System Report (look in the Hardware > Power section), but it’s missing some key information that you can bring together into one convenient spot using a third-party app called coconutBattery (coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery).
Once installed, not only will the app reveal info you can now see in System Report – namely its cycle count and its overall health – but you’ll also get to compare your MacBook’s current battery capacity to its original capacity, giving you an idea of how much charge has been lost over time, as well as other useful stats, such as temperature. A Pro version (£9.95) offers more features, but as you’ll see shortly, your money is better spent elsewhere.
The number of cycles reveals how many full recharging cycles your battery has undertaken – most Macbook batteries from 2010 onwards support
up to 1,000 cycles (visit bit.ly/ bccmacbooks for confirmation). If you get an alert about your battery needing replacing – either now or in the near future – then check out ‘Battery begone’ below for your options.
Even if your battery is in reasonable condition, look for ways you can maintain its health to ensure it will give you many years of service before needing to be replaced. For example, don’t leave it permanently plugged in and perform the occasional maintenance cycle (charge to 100%, then leave it on battery until it drops below 20%) to recalibrate it. If you need reminding on a daily basis, then find out how FruitJuice can help in step 1 on the opposite page.
Once your MacBook’s health check is done, it’s time to examine how to improve the time your MacBook runs between charges. Start by verifying basic system settings: open System Prefs > Battery and verify the display is set to go off after a short period, and that both ‘Put hard disks to sleep…’ and ‘Slightly dim the display…’ are ticked, while the Power Nap function is unticked. The biggest battery power hogs are revealed on the opposite page, but many hardware settings can be configured via System Preferences, and you can further reduce the strain on your display by switching to Dark mode.
But what about background processes and power-hungry apps? Here, you want a solution that only kicks in when your MacBook is running on battery power. Once again, third-party apps offer a variety of different solutions. Endurance ($20, about £14, after 14-day trial, enduranceapp.com) offers a ‘low-power mode’ that throttles the processor, dims the screen and sends background apps to sleep when not being used. Turbo Boost Switcher Free (rugarciap.com) allows you to throttle your processor for free, while AppPolice (github.com/AppPolice) lets you rein in individual apps to preserve power.