Manually setting a charging limit on Mac devices

[LuchoTurtle]

If you're familiar with Li-Ion (or LiFePo) batteries, you are probably aware that if you use your laptop most of the time plugged in, having your battery at 100% all the time will affect the longevity of the battery.
This actually makes sense, if one looks at the discharge curve of Li-Ion batteries and their respective voltage. The way these batteries maintain the same voltage at between 20% to 80% is key to understanding how they work. If you want to know the specifics of why having your battery always charged at 100%, you should check this link -> https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries

In fact, Mac devices have an "Optimise battery charging" just for this to cap the charging up to 80% of the battery. This is a neat feature.

However, this "smart feature" isn't always smart, as it takes some time to kick in and learn your patterns. Additionally, it sometimes just doesn't work and charges up to 100%. This is a shame because I tend to always use my Mac connected to the power source, and I want to have a way of manually setting the percentage of the battery I want to cap.

I found Aldente, which allows me to do just that. They have a Pro version but you don't need the extra features, imo. It works pretty well for what I want.
After installing, you can set the percentage you want to have your battery charged up to.

Give it a whirl! This can do wonders to your battery and keep your laptop working for a much longer time 😄

However, there are schools of thought that believe this is an unnecessary third-party app and we should trust the built-in battery management features baked in MacOS devices. There isn't a lot of research on this but some people just prefer "forcing" the battery to have this cap. Of course, you ought to weigh the pros and cons. Are you comfortable having this app control your battery? Do you believe Apple or do you think they don't care and selling battery parts benefits them? Is it smoke and mirrors?

I don't know. But I just thought I'd share 😄

[nelsonic]

@LuchoTurtle thanks for opening this issue to capture this discussion. 🙌
It's a topic that has been raised verbally a few times, 💬
but great to capture it somewhere long-term. 👌

This is what the macOS Ventura UI looks like:

https://github.com/davidwernhart/AlDente-Charge-Limiter looks interesting. 🔋 👍

I have the exact same Laptop as you so it will be good to A-B test this. 🆎
Going to rely on the built-in optimisation and we can compare notes in a few years. 😜

[nelsonic]

My Mac knows that I very rarely use it on Battery, so has automagically limited charging to 80%: