How to Check Battery Health on Macbook.
If you’ve started to notice a drop in your MacBook’s backup battery, you may be able to save time visiting the Genius Panel and fix the issue. In this article, we’ll take a look at ways to check battery health and optimize your Mac for maximum performance. Let’s start.
1. How to check the battery discharge rate
Standard lithium-ion batteries degrade over time and lose their capacity, resulting in performance degradation over the years. This happens gradually each time you charge and discharge the battery, also known as a charge cycle. In other words, the “Charge Cycle†is a good indicator of the battery health. That is, the longer the charge cycle, the older the battery.
To see your Mac’s charge cycle, click the Apple icon in the upper left corner, open About This Mac, click System Report.
In the “Hardware” section, press “Power” and all the information you need to determine the battery status will appear. Check the number of cycles and status in the Health Information section.
What does this tell you?
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Apple provides a comprehensive list of charge cycles for all MacBooks released over the years. Different MacBook models have different charge cycles from 300 to 1000. The latest Mac battery is rated for 1000 cycles. You can visit this page to see what is the maximum limit for your MacBook and to see if your battery is nearing its normal cycle limit.
For example, I use an early 2015 MacBook Pro with a 1000 cycle battery life, and my car battery approximately 76 cycles. This means I have over 900 charge cycles left before I worry about the backup battery.
2. Check the current charge capacity of the battery
Ok, we have a charge cycle counter, but to investigate further, we can use an app that tells you the current state of your MacBook’s battery.
Battery Monitor is a free app in the App Store that shows the current battery capacity and other useful statistics.
After installing the app, you can easily access it from the menu bar. It shows the current battery capacity, current charge, and if you press the i button, it also tells you the current battery temperature and power consumption.
If the battery is damaged, it will drain quickly and will have a higher temperature than usual. However, keep in mind that if you are editing a video or open a browser with many tabs, even a healthy battery will drain much faster.
3. Optimize your Mac to get more juice
We’ve determined that your MacBook has a healthy battery, but if the battery life has decreased more than the battery has run out, we can optimize some things and get more. Here are a few things you can try;
Disable apps that consume battery power
Click the battery icon in the menu bar to open options. In the “Using Significant Amounts of Power” section, you will find all the culprit apps that may be partially responsible for your Mac’s short battery life. I use Google Chrome and it is a popular battery and if you use it with your MacBook try switching to Safari or Firefox.
Adjusting the brightness of the keyboard and display
When using your MacBook on battery power, you can try dimming your keyboard and display to maximize battery life. It won’t matter much, but there will definitely be something.
Use your own apps
Apple’s native apps are well optimized for MacBook hardware, and using them can really help you improve your MacBook’s battery life. This includes replacing any third-party apps like VLC with its own Quick Time Player.
What’s Next?
This was a quick guide on how to check battery health and improve performance based on it. Of course, there are other ways to extend battery life, such as turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but this is really useless when you are connected to the Internet using Wi-Fi and using a wireless keyboard. However, you can still tweak some of the settings in the Power Saving section to get the most out of your old MacBook. What are you doing to make your MacBook last longer? Let me know in the comments below.
How to Check Battery Health on Macbook