This better be the cure for COVID-19... come on Tim, get with it! Steve would have had it solved by now!
Acidblood - you seem to be the voice of reason - and NO were are not related
My 2018 15" MacBook Pro currently shows a max charging capacity of 95%. I take this to mean that since I have had it, it has lost 5% of its maximum possible charge.
My question to you is: 'Reading your advice, by installing this latest Catalina update will I prolong my battery life' ?
Have I 'baselined it' at 95%?
If so how can this be a bad thing - surely I'm responsibly 'looking after' my battery just not from 100%?
Thanks
Sure, we are not reaching theoretical maximums with laptop battery charging/lifetime and there is plenty of room for improvement. There are things we can do to extend battery life in the interim: do not charge overnight, charge when the battery is in the range of ~15%, only charge to 100% occasionally, etc.
When you jump in your car and turn the key, do you immediately smash the gas pedal to the floor (like my neighbor does)? If car designers limited your ability to do that, the car would last longer and not burn oil after a couple of years (like my neighbor's car). I value my car and have only purchased one new... >10 years ago. There are things that I do to take care of the car that the manufacturer did not recommend, document or advise me on that will extend the life of the vehicle.
I also value my Apple gear and take care of it in ways that fall outside of what "should be" theoretically possible so that each one maintains resale value and works reliably for a long time.
Two points from me:
Battery Management
A couple of weeks ago I changed the battery in my nearly 6 year-old MBP (Retina, mid-2014, 13") after 1150 cycles, short battery life and system report flag "replace soon".
With an eye on the possible automatic safeguarding of my newly purchased battery's lifespan, my initial enthusiasm at early reports of new battery management functionality in MacOS 10.15.5 was soon dampened with the announcement this would only be available to devices with Thunderbolt 3 ports. No doubt there's a perfectly valid technical reason why this restriction has been imposed, but I fully concur with previous posts pointing out why this functionality would be particularly useful to older devices. I guess it's a consequence of my MBP being classed as vintage a few months ago......
Thanks for a detailed reply. I hope everyone else takes note. I’m gonna ditch the Mac method of charge control and check out the Al Dente app. Thanks again.I'm not familiar with any published research investigating the effect of changing battery management strategies mid-life. However, mechanistically speaking, I'd expect that yes, other than "baselining" the battery at 95%, your battery would start heaping benefits from proper management from now on. I conjecture this is true for any battery above say 75 or 80% capacity -- below that the decline is quite rapid, although maybe you'd be able to buy a few extra months even then.
Do note, though, that capacity estimation is not highly accurate. Just yesterday mine was at 95% and now it's at 97% (actually I just went to look again, a few minutes later, and it's at 98%). So allow for a few % variability from the "true" figure; perhaps your battery is just as good as new. Also, battery manufacturing is not an exact science either; you have a nominal capacity that is the same for, say, all 2018 15" MacBook Pros (or any other piece of equipment that uses the exact same model battery), but due to manufacturing variances, yours may leave the factory with a few % higher or lower capacity than nominal.
As for using the feature in the Catalina update, so long as it actually works, yeah, it should help. If your experience is anything like mine using the Optimized Battery Charging feature of iOS, though, it's going to be an absolutely useless feature. I've mentioned at another point of this thread that I only saw it work once ever since the iOS 13 launch on my iPhone X. I just became familiar with the Al Dente app, and if you like being in control as I do, this is a much better solution. Just set it to whatever percentage you want the charging to stop at, and it'll do exactly as told. You, better than anyone else, know when you're going to need a full charge, so just pull down the menu bar icon and set it at 100% say an hour before you're going to need it.
As for what you should set it at: anything is better than 100%. 95% is better than 100%, and 90% is better than 95%. I'm certain you'd get many benefits at 90% and still very good runtime out of it. If 80% is acceptable to you, you'll probably be heaping most of the benefits of battery management. Personally I run mine at 60% which seems to be the sweet spot for absolute maximum lifespan (see e.g. this and this for a layman's synopsis of the research), but I'll be the first to admit it's not right choice for everyone.
If you want to go all the way to ensure your batteries last as long as possible, there are a few other tips which you can read about in the linked articles, roughly in order of importance (although avoiding charging to 100% is probably the second most important one, losing only to proper temperature):
1. Avoid hot temperatures as much as you can (but avoid extreme cool as well, e.g. anything below 10 ºC, at least while the battery is charging or if it's being quickly discharged, say when using a CPU-intensive app -- and remember these are battery temperatures, not ambient temperatures; there are apps which will let you measure that).
2. Avoid deep charges/discharges (100% to 0%, or 90% to 10%); the exception is once every few months to recalibrate the battery gas gauge. I know this is sometimes impossible, but say you were using your computer which started from a 60% charge and used it down to 50%; and in an hour you're going to need to use it down to 30%. It's better to charge it back to 60% and then use it down to 40% and charge it again.
3. Avoid fast charging. If you leave your MacBook Pro to charge with the 87W adapter and the lid closed, you're going to charge it at a rate that's borderline fast (what people call 1C or thereabouts). I've seen research show visible degradation at 1.2C, and even more at 1.4C charging (i.e. 20% and 40% above what the charger does). Whenever possible, I try to charge it more slowly than that. For instance, the old USB-A iPad charger outputs 10-12W, which should be plenty to charge a MacBook Pro with its lid closed overnight (even 0% to 100% should take about 10 hours or so). The 18 W USB-C iPad charger is noticeably faster, and the 30W MacBook Air charger is an excellent compromise in my opinion, if you're not in an extreme hurry to charge your computer. However, even the 61 W charger for the 13" MacBook Pros is an improvement over the 87W adapter.
me too!
my system is:
iMac 27" 5K late 2015 Catalina 10.15.5
Lacie d2 Thunderbolt 3 8TB
connecting with USB-C (USB, not TB3) -> A (because my mac only have USB 3.1 A, no USB-C)
after disconnected, I can't re-connect Lacie by un-plug / plug the USB cable.
This trouble happens only since 10.15.5. I have no trouble with 10.15.4 and earlier.
I suspect Clean My Drive 2, so began to stop it, but I don't have any idea.
add:
Now I'm using my iMac, and suddenly d2 TB3 is disconnected, so Finder shows the alert dialog!
Is there any Mac OS update that isn’t free? Seems like a pointless point.
Fair point. I was thinking more "castastrophic failure" than "insidious deletion of individual messages".I use Backblaze. I use Time Machine on a NAS with redundant drives. I make SuperDuper! clones every now and then.
None of this will be of any use to me if individual e-mails go missing and I do not notice it until some time in the distant future when I try to find them.
I'd rather put off upgrading than to have to figure out how to find and merge missing e-mails from ancient backups back into the archive.
T'anks for this info.Not recommended. It has been longstanding advice from Apple that if you use your laptop all day, you should run it for 1 hour on battery only. A battery that is permanently topped up is not a healthy battery.
So I guess my question is ... is this update safe enough to install on MBP 16" and 13" MBA 2017? Given the somewhat unstable nature of Catalina, I thought I'd ask. And I can't quite seem to deduce the consensus in this thread.
I updated last night and this morning my external display started flickering. Doesn't happen all the time, I'd say every 2 or 3 minutes. Never happened before so it is something related to this update. I'll reboot the machine later on and hope it stops flickering, as it is quite annoying
edit: it stopped after rebooting![]()
thats obsolete now with the new feature, I imagineNot recommended. It has been longstanding advice from Apple that if you use your laptop all day, you should run it for 1 hour on battery only. A battery that is permanently topped up is not a healthy battery.
I'm glad your display is stable. Sometimes, though, cause and effect aren't so easy to spot. For example, I had occasional screen and audio crackle trouble using my external monitor. It turned out that after several years' use it was the (good quality) USB-C cable. After repeated insertions and removals, the connection can become a little loose. Solution: I got a brand new cable. It fits snugly and tightly (a little extra force needed to remove it). No more glitches.
thats obsolete now with the new feature, I imagine
I updated 2 hours ago and I have had 5 crashes on a 2019 Macbook Pro 16 inch, it my laptop no longer recognises any external displays!I dont think it does. I updated to 10.15.5 about six hours ago, and I just had the first crash.
Anyone else pissed off that the MacBooks that can most use this battery management right now, older ones, don't have the feature?
I know Apple wants us to upgrade our hardware but at least don't be so blatant about it.
That’s not true. For 10.15.4, head to the AppStore and you can download a full ~8gb dmg installer package. From this you can build the USB recovery drive. I’m wondering if they pulled the 10.15.5 dmg release as it’s still listing 10.15.4 from 2 months agoNowhere. Apple does not distribute their OS that way. You can wait until 10.15.5 shows up on the MAS and grab the installer.
The update has not been pulled.Did they pull the update due to the APFS bug?
Sorry I will clarify, have they pulled the AppStore dmg? I can still see the update listed in software updateThe update has not been pulled.
Drop the following in Terminal and Software Update will download the latest 10.15.5 full install app.Sorry I will clarify, have they pulled the AppStore dmg? I can still see the update listed in software update
I changed the connection from USB to TB3, after one night with sleep (I and my iMac), the drive is being connected!Sorry, I also connect it with USB 3.1 (Thunderbolt 3), my configuration is on a Mac mini 2018. But I've tried it on my iMac 5k and it's the exact same thing. Everything since the upgrade to MacOS 10.15.5