This is amazing and wanted to share this. Haven't seen this with any other Mac I've owned. Big Sur effectively tells me I need to use more of my battery
I do use this system on battery on a daily basis for maybe 1/2 hour to about two hours max. It's likely sipping battery because this was on an Apple M1 system and isn't consuming enough to maintain good battery health.
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It's interesting to see that it also provides me an option to "Charge to Full Now" which makes sense if I need it.
Respectfully disagree that either/both MBP Battery optimization(System Preferences>Battery>"Optimized Battery Charging") or Battery Health (System Preferences>Battery>Bettery Health) choices are great or even necessary. They aren't for me.
In my case, the MBP2019 got a new battery under warranty two years ago due to performance issues and its charging support in its previous versions of OS. From there, starting with a brand new battery, onwards to when they first introduced these two features (versions of Catalina, I think) my real battery performance has degraded - the battery actually failed when I needed it most- during a presentation, when I was on battery power.
My battery life started at max and before changing my charging methods (using MacOS), my expected battery life had gone from (apple measured data) 7336mAH to
6800mAH at full charge. Under these new methods, over a few weeks, the hours expectancy has gone up to 7130mAH. Real use has proven this. Whenever I use my battery it is at pretty much high power (11W+).
Seems to me Apple's idea of a usable battery is one that it's intended to work best when the battery is NEVER NEEDED. Kind of reverse psychology of having a long life battery powered laptop in the first place, right? Like insurance against need- works great if you never need battery power, like a UPS. Nope. Duh!
What works the best for me, and measurably improved the charging and availability of a fully charged battery when actually need is pretty simple- turn off all of the above and set a schedule of discharging in use - for me it's 3x/week @ about 40 minutes , then plug the Mac in to charge and let it charge fully, e.g., no charging on hold until 100% charge is reached. I
I found a helpful app for that and it works great, replacing the Apple monitoring display with far more detail- BetterBattery 2 Pro (BB2), available in the App Store. BB2 tracks my history in its own database taken from sensor reports same as the System gets. Having a separate database make the information accessible and trackable through System/OS even hardware upgrades (if saved).
