News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?. Parent comment

Re:Charging a lithium battery to 80% only? by AnonC on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @08:51AM (#38363575)
I use the paid version of an app called Al Dente [1] to set the battery charging level to a specific limit. The app has a free mode. It has more features than what I stated, and works on Intel Macs and Apple Silicon Macs (limited only by what the underlying hardware allows).

[1]: https://apphousekitchen.com/

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Charging a lithium battery to 80% only? by osdril on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @09:47AM (#38364312)
I don't know if they changed this, but I think AlDente follows a polling approach where it periodically checks the charge level and enable/disable the charging accordingly. Such solution is more hacky and it also could cause some sleep-related issues.

The SMC key discovered my marcan is nicer because it enables the same functionality without having to poll anything, as it's built into macOS.

Furthermore, I don't care about all the extra stuff they have put into AlDente, I just want to keep my battery at 80%.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Charging a lithium battery to 80% only? by Tade0 on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @10:03AM (#38364542)
I had such a switch in my old Samsung laptop. Works much better than software-based solutions, which are often simply unreliable.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Charging a lithium battery to 80% only? by nottorp on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @09:26AM (#38364018)
Subscription pricing eh?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Charging a lithium battery to 80% only? by AnonC on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @02:12AM (#38375912)
There’s a free version that allows you to limit the charging to a specific level. I found this app useful over the years and I bought the lifetime license when it was on a sale. Otherwise I wouldn’t have paid for it since I don’t like the idea of subscriptions either.
[ Parent | on HN ]