The article's advice isn't the best. It's better to not cycle your battery whenever possible. Set your battery up to only charge when bellow a certain threshold (I do 70%) lower than the max charge (I have it set to 80%). This optimises for not over straining the battery (by not going to 100%) and it reducing cycles to a minimum for my everyday use only travelling between (desk) locations. I set this up through the power manager of KDE, without much effort. I expect this to be available to most Linux distributions and moderately modern laptops. I think I could also set this up on Mac OS when I was using that in the recent past (and I think it comes with something similar out of the box, but less conservative).
Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
41–50 of 73 posts
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
macOS actually does that somehow indeed. Not exactly, but it does prevent charge when it “guesses” the computer will stay plugged in for a long time based on previous usage.
ChromeOS too.
iOS too, most of android phones too, etc.
And well, most of PCs too… https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-smart-chargi...
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#43I disagree. 2022 mbp. Always plugged in... 5 charge cycles in total.
It seldom charges while plugged in. Even when down to 80% it alerts me it's not charging because I seldom use the battery.
Apple could change this behaviour silently and mess it up but for now it's perfect for my needs.
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#44Please explain like I'm five: if continuously charging and drawing power at 100% hurts my laptop's battery, why doesn't the laptop bypass the battery circuitry, keeping it idle, and use the incoming juice directly?
macOS actually does that somehow indeed. Not exactly, but it does prevent charge when it “guesses” the computer will stay plugged in for a long time based on previous usage.
Which isn't a solution, I just want a toggle so I know it works. I don't want to train some hidden logic so it correctly guesses what I want based on what someone on the other side of the planet assumed my usage pattern looks like.
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#45Personal anecdata: - Work MPB which I got 2021-12, 99% of the time plugged in because I was WFH, last time I unplugged it to return it to my employer, the battery was at ~95% of max capacity (as reported by MacOS) - Personal MBP bought 2021-12, only plugging in when battery was low, and 1.5y later the battery was at 80% of max capacity It was then that I investigated a bit and learned the trick of charging only up to…
Another anecdote:
- 2012 MBP used by my parents, almost always plugged in. Battery died last year. Forgot the cycle count but it shocked me by how low it was. This was before they implemented the feature where it stops charging at 80%.
- 2015 MBP used by me, mostly plugged in for the first few years, then afterwards always on battery, at least one charge/discharge cycle every day (often more than one). Battery died 2 years ago (and was 3 years younger). Cycle count was something crazy like ~2000.
If your laptop is near power, plug it in.
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#46No one: Gizmodo: "Somewhere down the line, many of us got the idea that our laptops should always be plugged in to improve their performance."
It’s worded a little weird there, but it’s not untrue. Laptops with high TDP CPUs and/or discrete GPUs will often perform significantly worse on battery, either by default or always.
It’s why whenever a new M-series chip launches, Apple makes sure to highlight how it performs every bit the same on battery as while charging.
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#47Apple took this out of Mac OS somewhat recently. You can try to rely on their power management, but given battery decay is a common reason to buy a new machine I don’t trust them really. If you have an Apple Silicon Mac I can recommend Battery [1]. It can keep your Mac at 80%, and even force discharge while plugged in to get there. It’s a CLI and status bar utility, I love it. [1: https://github.com/actuallymentor/ba…
Ooh, thanks for this. There's a similar plugin for Decky on Steam Deck too, in case any SD users are reading this.
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this does seem AI generated, or at least “AI assisted” in that it was primarily written by AI and a human slightly modified it and then stamped their name on it. Just look at this paragraph: “Many laptops sit on a charger throughout the workday and all through the night. We don’t even think about it; we just plug in everywhere. We’re charging at work, at home, at the coffee shop – a collective addiction to a la…
But I feel like LLM wouldn't make such non-sensical content, unless they used some obscure LLM. The article is over dramatized causing false statements, doesn't use any of the usual GPT4 lingo etc. E.g. claiming that it is the "worst thing you could do".
Could be, yeah.
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#49It seems like laptops should treat 80% like its 100% and have a separate "overcharge" feature that can be activated manually or automatically on a schedule or when not on home WiFi.
Re: Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever
#50Apple took this out of Mac OS somewhat recently. You can try to rely on their power management, but given battery decay is a common reason to buy a new machine I don’t trust them really. If you have an Apple Silicon Mac I can recommend Battery [1]. It can keep your Mac at 80%, and even force discharge while plugged in to get there. It’s a CLI and status bar utility, I love it. [1: https://github.com/actuallymentor/ba…
Thanks, that's exactly what I was missing. I don't know what heuristic Apple's magical 80% charging setting uses but it does absolutely nothing for me, all I wanted is a checkbox for a limit but that's not "smart" and unpredictable enough I guess.
[deleted]