Where? AFAIK this is a feature you need a third party app like Aldente for. The OS does not offer any way to control battery charging level. Yes, it tries to be smart and guess when you need full charge and sometimes decides to charge to only 80% but that doesnt work for all users except the ones with very regular routines and there is no manual control.
Sometimes it flat out refuses the charge. Then I disconnect and use the battery until 30% or so. Then charge when convenient.
My MacBook Air M1 has 165 cycles in 3 years, at 90% of design capacity. I think this is a very solid management of the battery for a computer used every day literally.
My MacBook Pro is at ~85% after 8 years. I don't remember total cycles now.
I find running on battery, lots of things are throttled or disabled. CPU is slower for example. That's probably a good reason for why not.
FWIW, the performance and CPU features are the same on Mx based MacBooks whether they're plugged in or not.
> M powered MacBooks added (...)
Things that Lenovo laptops have had for a generation?
It was also present in HP and Dell's business notebooks for quite some time, but again, it's not smart. Just a pre-defined percentage.
Apple manages maximum charge capacity automatically depending on the way you use your computer.
For this to be happening in 2023 means that some manufacturers at least, seem to be not managing this potential problem at all.
Every company makes big mistakes. Also Apple once built laptops with self-cooking GPUs, a couple ones very fragile keyboards, a series with too-sensitive screen coatings.
We can write tons of problems with every producer. The most important metric is whether they're learning from that or not. As far as I can see Samsung and Apple learnt their lessons.
Apple cannot predict where you are going to use laptop on AC power at home or whether you are going somewhere and need a full charge. So manual control is better.
Yes, it does. Even my 7 years old iPhone X does it. I use some features at very specific times, and it suggests me "do you want to do X?" around the time I do that. So the models work well.
Also, the phone generally enables optimized charging if I put it to charge too early. Scheduling to finish a couple of hours before I wake.
You're conceding that you have a predictable schedule. Folks on the other side of this (who believe it can't work nearly as well as manual control) don't have a predictable schedule. Think of it like {hybrid workers who use a desk all day the same 3 days a week, and are nomads the other 2 days a week, and the ML system can figure this out} vs {on-site workers who use a desk all day 5 days a week, but are nomads a few random days a year, which always catches the ML system off guard}.
Both are valid. A setting that caps it at 80% unless you hit a button for "I'm about to spend a lot more time unplugged than usual, so prepare the battery for that" is the only way to handle unpredictable circumstances. Just like preparing an EV for a road trip.
My Macs charge routine is way more hectic than my phone's which is very predictable, and both of them guesses what I'm trying to do correctly 99% of the time, and that's fine by me.
What I said is, it's working fine for me, but the system is open to tuning both out of the box (I need this now, please charge), or with some small tools (it was called Aldente IIRC), for differing, equally valid needs.
I don't think we're in disagreement here.
BTW, your nick reads ********. Is it hunter2 or something? ;)
That may or may not be noteworthy. Despite half my family using MacBooks, and some having had major battery problems, I’ve never heard of such a notification as you describe (including at least one where I’d certainly have expected to hear about it). And the similar system SMART for storage devices is notoriously unreliable: I’ve personally had devices with dire warnings chug along merrily for plenty more years, and observed one or two failures that never received any warnings.
Oh, don't bring up SMART. I remember long-testing >100 disks, and most of them passed (it took hours), and all of them failed within 10 days after facing real workloads. We needed a temporary storage for migrating things, but we lost no data, because it was just a copy operation.
My 2008 MacBook Pro was able to detect battery problems one year before they started to manifest physically. They did it by adding another controller and an independent firmware to the battery itself, but there was no better tech at that time.
M powered MacBooks added auto hold-off (discharge to 80%, keep it there) or postpone charge (because the battery is used too rarely), to the list of tricks they know, and these are just the visible ones to the user.