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Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

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Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#191

Post by Zak »

floatrock wrote: post #173
Zak wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that adding additional charge to the battery is difficult. It's that the current has to be tapered off when the battery is near-full so it doesn't go over its rated voltage.

Thanks for the clarification, the analogy clearly isn't very good. Out of curiosity, have you found a better ELI5 analogy that doesn't bend over backwards with a rube goldberg setup of pipes and waterflow? I've struggled explaining this phenomenon to people buying EV's, where charging behavior become a regular thing people need to figure out.

Well, if they're familiar with beer, and sophisticated enough to pour it into a glass: poured very quickly, the beer will develop a large head that overflows the glass, but pouring slowly creates a smaller head (or none, but don't do that).

There's not more beer, but it fills more space temporarily when poured faster.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#192

Post by hunter2_ »

noisem4ker wrote: post #122
duskwuff wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. That was more for consistency with how storage devices are sold -- if a 10^30 byte hard disk is described by storage vendors as "1 TB", it's incredibly confusing to users to have it show up as "931 GB".

There's nothing wrong with letting users learn how hard disk marketers are ripping them off, instead of playing their game. But, as usual, Apple prefers to choose blissful ignorance for their sheep customers. Besides that, we have proper units for binary multiples: KiB, MiB, and so on. I've only seen KDE use them properly so far, and it's a shame.

Is it really "ripping them off" to use SI prefixes for base 10 just because (a huge number of) other people are accidentally using SI prefixes (base 10) when they really ought to be using IEC prefixes (base 2)?

Calling it a a "2 TiB disk" when it's actually a 2,000,000,000,000 B disk would be a blatant ripoff.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#193

Post by Nyra »

mr_toad wrote: post #153
treyfitty wrote: post #139

I thought keeping a MacBook plugged in was advertised as OK (Even said to be BETTER) since the power is being drawn from the AC source rather than the battery. What’s the deal, is it better to leave it plugged in, or not?

Generally speaking it’s better to keep it plugged in than to repeatedly charge and discharge it. But it’s even better to keep in plugged in at 80% charge instead of 100%.

Really? I'm not very knowledgeable about the subject but I always understood that discharging the battery was healthy. Is there somewhere I can read up on why that is?

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#194

Post by hunter2_ »

gok wrote: post #20
rootusrootus wrote: post #3

I wish they'd give us the option (on the iPhone and iPad as well) to arbitrarily set the maximum charge level. Just like on my Tesla, I'd like to be able to tell my phone not to charge above 80%.

Note that essentially all modern battery systems essentially do this under the hood. The "100%" shown to the user isn't the most you could charge the cells, just as high as you want to charge it to meet lifetime degradation targets. Tesla just goes a bit crazier here and exposes more headroom because they can rely on drivers being more involved in charging strategies.

What separates drivers from phone/laptop users? Certainly not techies vs normals. It would seem to me that both cohorts are capable of, and potentially interested in, deciding between "shorter days but more years" and "longer days but fewer years."

I think the real difference is that car manufacturers' business health depends on less maintenance over many years, and phone manufacturers' business health depends on planned obsolescence.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#195

Post by hunter2_ »

nodesocket wrote: post #12
dartdartdart wrote: post #5

For people who use their laptops primarily as plugged in machines, there should be a 50% max charge mode.

I keep my MacBook Pro 16" plugged in 80% of the time, but when I want to go work at a coffee shop on battery having 50% would be a big inconvenience. How much longer in terms of battery life are we talking doing 50% charge vs 100%?

You would remove the 50% charge limit prior to undocking so that it's at 100% right on time. Calendar integration could easily automate the limit-removal time (maybe 30min before you have to leave, or whatever is needed).

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#196

Post by mmwelt »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #7

PSA: If you have a thinkpad, the lenovo settings app lets you control this too. In lenovo vantage, go to Device > My Device Settings > Battery settings > Battery Charge Threshold.

Many laptop manufacturers seem to be doing this already. For ASUS laptops, there is a Windows store app that lets you control the setting:

https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NKCLN5X4RR9

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#197

Post by jimmcslim »

It would be great if they made this available for Mojave... Catalina seems like such a shit-show that I have yet to upgrade.

God knows my laptop is spending alot of time on its charger at the moment.

Given 10.15.5 is likely to be the last version of Catalina before whatever comes next... maybe it will be time to jump in?

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#198

Post by Razengan »

rubber_duck wrote: post #53

I got a top spec 15 MBP a year ago and I have to say the experience is appalling - 4000$ device that goes full airplane takeoff levels of noise at any serious workload, no ability to control performance (I would gladly throttle the CPU sooner to avoid everyone in the office turning my way when I start an emulator or keep the fans at lower RPM but constantly instead of letting the CPU idle at 60-70 degrees with no fan…

The core thermal management of macOS seems to be better than Windows:

https://youtu.be/LGOmbNRlZdM?t=495 (8:15)

And I've always gotten better battery life on average on MacBooks than other laptops, and in macOS than in Windows on the same Mac.

The problem is when there are bugs (of which there are many) in the other higher-level daemons and third-party apps that get stuck in some task and cause the CPU to unnecessarily shoot up.

For example I try to do things like renice +20 for every Steam process, because it's a bad macOS citizen and suddenly shoots up to 100% CPU for no reason, but it doesn't help until I terminate them. Even the TextInput etc. daemons get randomly wonky and have to be terminated.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#199

Post by hunter2_ »

alliao wrote: post #184

my favourite laptop has to be Panasonic's Let's Note I had one wayyy back model W2D and they eventually had this physical button that let you charge up to 80% for longevity reasons. That being said, I still own a macbook pro from 2011 and it's battery is still 100% healthy so I'm quite surprised to see how much's changed...

I doubt you're really at 100%... if you go to "Apple menu > About This Mac > System Report > Power > Battery Information" you can look at "Health Information > Cycle Count" and see how many cycles you've been through... see "Cycle Count Limits" at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201585 for expected lifetime. You could also look at "Charge information > Full Charge Capacity (mAh)" and compare that to whatever the original capacity was for that model.

Re: Apple changes default MacBook charging behavior to improve battery health

#200

Post by kohtatsu »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #186
askafriend wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "issue" was way overblown. Apple's change did the right thing. It fixed a ton of older phones which before were rendered unusable since they would experience random shutdowns due to naturally degraded Li-Ion batteries. Every manufacturer should implement the kind of fix Apple did (and I'm sure at this point, they have). They even mentioned the change in the original release notes for the iOS update.

It wasn't the right thing. People thew out their phones because they were slow not knowing they could have been fixed cheaply with a new battery.

Hopefully nobody actually throws phones out. That bundle of molecules does not belong in a landfill.

My library has a dropbox to refurbish old ones for blind people, for example, but I'm sure dozens of places will be happy to take them off your hands.

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