80% charging take weeks to activate on macOS Sequoia

Dannymac22 wrote:

With all due respect to Apple, if it's telling me that 80% is best for my battery, why is their algorithm waiting a week or more to send it in that direction?

Statistics take time to be acquired. We have the same behavior at work. It takes a user being consistent with their on battery vs on power over a period of time before macOS decides it can safely charge just to 80%.

Again, if you do not like Apple's algorithm, you can get a 3rd party utility that will give you more explicit control over charging.

https://apphousekitchen.com/

And no, I do not have anything to do with this company. I just used it BEFORE Apple provided optimized charging, because I had a swelled battery in my company Mac.

And arguing with the forum volunteers is not going to change anything. You can send your feedback to Apple at

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

Maybe you can convince Apple to implement a fixed battery charging percentage. After all they have that in the iPhone.

The Optimized charging goal is to keep the battery healthy as long as possible, while at the sane time giving mobile users as much battery run-time, when on the go.

Optimized charging, when you enable it does not know if you are keeping your Mac on your desk 24/7 or changing overnight, and going to meetings at 8am, or 9am, or noon, etc…, or some erratic schedule.

Until it can determine a pattern, it assumes you need a 100% charge for a full day of mobile use.

Tell Apple you want something different,

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Or get a 3rd party app to set hard limits (see previous posts to one 3rd party app)

BobHarris wrote:

It is not an absolute setting. The Mac has to learn your habits. And if your on battery, on power habits are erratic, it will tend to charge to 100% on the assumption you will be on battery and want the full charge.

There are alternatives, such as

https://apphousekitchen.com/

As to why 80% is better than 100%. If the Mac sits on power 24/7 and almost never uses it’s battery, there is a much higher chance it will suffer battery swelling, warping your case, and risking an internal component puncturing the battery causing a short circuit resulting in fire.

The swelling, not the fire, has happened a lot to the Macs where I work, before optimizing charging was provided. Including my company Mac.

If you mostly use your Mac on the battery, then you are exercising the battery, and it is less likely to have these issues.

However, companies that give employees laptops, have a large number that just use them as a desktop replacement, and keep the Mac powered 24/7. Those are the ones with the problem Batteries.

+ 1

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BobHarris wrote:

Dannymac22 wrote:

With all due respect to Apple, if it's telling me that 80% is best for my battery, why is their algorithm waiting a week or more to send it in that direction?

Statistics take time to be acquired. We have the same behavior at work. It takes a user being consistent with their on battery vs on power over a period of time before macOS decides it can safely charge just to 80%.

Again, if you do not like Apple's algorithm, you can get a 3rd party utility that will give you more explicit control over charging.

https://apphousekitchen.com/

And no, I do not have anything to do with this company. I just used it BEFORE Apple provided optimized charging, because I had a swelled battery in my company Mac.

And arguing with the forum volunteers is not going to change anything. You can send your feedback to Apple at

https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

Maybe you can convince Apple to implement a fixed battery charging percentage. After all they have that in the iPhone.

+ + 1

It is not an absolute setting. The Mac has to learn your habits. And if your on battery, on power habits are erratic, it will tend to charge to 100% on the assumption you will be on battery and want the full charge.

There are alternatives, such as

https://apphousekitchen.com/

As to why 80% is better than 100%. If the Mac sits on power 24/7 and almost never uses it’s battery, there is a much higher chance it will suffer battery swelling, warping your case, and risking an internal component puncturing the battery causing a short circuit resulting in fire.

The swelling, not the fire, has happened a lot to the Macs where I work, before optimizing charging was provided. Including my company Mac.

If you mostly use your Mac on the battery, then you are exercising the battery, and it is less likely to have these issues.

However, companies that give employees laptops, have a large number that just use them as a desktop replacement, and keep the Mac powered 24/7. Those are the ones with the problem Batteries.

Dannymac22 wrote:

I'm asking for an explanation of the implementation, and you folks simply don't know what it is.

Yes, you are correct -- the algorithm is proprietary, Apple does not publish it, maybe something akin to a "trade secret."

BobHarris provided Apple's feedback link:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

There are many papers published on this topic of how to optimize lithium battery life. Unfortunately, the best ways to extend battery life is not necessarily consistent with the way people use their computers, since sometimes they want a laptop to last a long time away from a power supply. So the goal is not 80%, that represents a compromise of sorts.

Also, the iPhone and a Mac laptop are very different and Apple manages their batteries differently. iPhones pretty much have to last at least 18 hours and preferably 24 hours or longer without a source of power. So the iPhone will typically stay below 100% and then charge up to 100% just before the time that the user typically disconnects it from power each day (the user pattern is important here). Laptops don't charge up to 100% when kept on the power supply for a long time, but the user can force it to.

Lastly, you seem very focused on 80%. My laptop (MacBook Pro) is plugged in almost all the time and it often settles in at 72% or 70%, not always 80%. But it is responsive to usage patterns -- for a few weeks I had to change to extensive use of the laptop away from the charger much of the day, and instead of staying at 70% or 80%, it started charging to full 100% whenever I connected to power. Then i went back to leaving the laptop connected to power all the time and that change in use pattern was "noticed" and it went back to 70% or 80% steady state. The transitions took a week or two, maybe several weeks.

Dannymac22 wrote:

Thanks. I guess what's mysterious to me is what my habits have to do with it. It's pretty simple. If the charge is 100%, stop charging until it gets down to 80%. My habits have nothing to do with that. As it turns out, I mostly have it plugged in.

Apple tries to pick the approach that maximizes your battery life. Keeping the battery at 80% is a good approach but it's not perfect. There are technical papers written on this subject, it is an active field of study and research, and it seems that a % somewhat lower than 80% would be more ideal for battery life but perhaps 80% was chosen as a balance between protecting battery health versus leaving users with not enough charge on the Mac to use it for very long.

For instance, a user pattern where the battery is every so often discharged to 50% and then up to 100% gradually, or perhaps stays between 50% and 80% in normal use by that owner might be better for the battery than just sitting at 80% all the time. So the algorithm might decide not to sit at 80% as long as the user's pattern of use is judged to be better for the battery than a flat 80% would be.

No one here knows the algorithm details. I think it best to leave it to Apple to pick what is best for your battery. Their algorithm factors in the latest knowledge in the field. Individual owners think they know best, but I think in most cases they do not. As your use pattern changes, it may change how it handles it. So your habits actually have everything to do with it.

Dannymac22 wrote:

Apple says "Optimized Battery Charging is designed to reduce the wear on your battery and improve its lifespan by reducing the time your iPhone spends fully charged." That's their stated goal. But if it waits a week to do that, it's not really doing that.

Apple's battery management is very different on iPhones versus laptops. Whatever time Apple's algorithm waits in order to figure out how to manage iPhone or laptop batteries, it is to try to sense long term patterns of use and avoid overreacting to short term fluctuations in those patterns.

Again, you are overworrying this (I believe). Batteries all wear out eventually, even ones that are sitting for a long time on a powered off device, as well as ones kept charged to 100% or 80% or whatever. They all wear out. Apple tries to make them last as long as possible ble. If you believe you can do a better job at that, simply override the defaults and manage it yourself.

As respected forum contributor @Grant Bennet-Alder likes to say (I'm paraphrasing very badly here)......the goal of Optimized Charging is not to be 80% charge, the goal is to maintain battery health by exercising the battery if necessary.

Don't worry about the battery or any of the battery values until the battery is no longer working to your expectations. Then & only then see if the battery is reporting a "Service Recommended" condition. That's it.

I suspect that the computing power required for BHM is less than 0.001% of the capacity (but can't prove that assertion!).

If you are REALLy worried about THAT, then simply disable BHM, run a benchmark, then reenable it and rerun the benchmark. See if there is an improvement. Or just disable BHM but in exchange for that 0.001% boost, you might pay a price in having to replace your battery a year or two earlier, or even worse, suffer from a swollen battery which can actually 100% disable a laptop or even pose a fire hazard.

This discussion is somewhat moot because there is nothing a user can do to modify or tweak BHM. All you can do is turn it on or off. Your choice! Having had a work computer suffer from a swollen battery in the past, before BHM was available, I know my choice is to go with BHM.

Apple and its algorithms don't care about your habits. and algorithms don't "think." It's just a mathematical calculation to maximize battery life.

So what if Apple spent money. Apple spends money for business reasons. Apple probably realized that having recalls or free battery replacement campaigns due to batteries failing sooner than necessary was a cost that implementing the battery health management could alleviate. Which might have cost a few work months of effort versus the $millions to replace many many batteries whose failure could have been prevented and resulted in unhappy customers. The company I work at has about 3000 Mac laptops in use and saw countless battery failures (one was my work laptop's swollen battery) before BHM was implemented. Now I haven't heard of any such failures.

Dannymac22 wrote:

Yes, but I just continue to wonder why statistics are needed. If the goal is to charge to 80%, that's easy to do without statistics. I could manually just pull the plug every time the charge reaches 80%, and there would be no safety issues. No overheating. No swelling. I just don't understand why intelligence is needed to do "optimized charging". It would be nice to get some explanation. As noted, I have optimized charging turned on on my MBP, and the charge is still sitting at 100% after a week.

To understand the Apple Algorithm we need to turn the Calendar back to November 12, 2020

That is when Apple introduce macOS 11 Big Sur which also coincided with the first M1 Apple Silicon computers

The framework for the algorithm was baked into the OS

That was also the time with Apple Sold Intel Based computer along side the Apple Silicon machines

With the introductions of new versions of macOS's and newer versions of M - Class Silcon computer while still supporting Intel machines

No Doubt, the algorithm was reworked and redefined in-order to match the newer versions of macOS and newer versions of M Class computer . Intel machines, probably not so much as Apple stopped selling new Intel-based computers in June 2023

Moving to current times.

Apple has completed the transition away Intel to Apple Silicon machines

Where am I going as it relates to algorithm and type of computers ?

macOS Tahoe will be the last release for Intel-based Mac computers. Those systems will continue to receive security updates for 3 years.

So, the code used in the algorithm I suggest maybe far more streamline to only deal with one type of computer ( Silicon " versus supporting both types of computers

Far less code, far more cost efficient and far less overhead developing

Dannymac22 wrote:

With all due respect to Apple, if it's telling me that 80% is best for my battery, why is their algorithm waiting a week or more to send it in that direction?

I don't believe Apple says 80% is best for your battery. It might be what Apple chooses as a compromise between the factors I mentioned before when a laptop is connected to a charger almost all the time, or for some other pattern of use. If the battery is "exercised" once in a while, that might be better for its longevity than keeping at 80%.

You may be overworrying this. It's a battery, they wear out eventually and then can be replaced. Apple tries to minimize that and make it last as long as possible. I would set battery health management to "on" and move on to worry about other things. But if you aren't happy with it, simply turn it off and try to manually keep your battery charged to whatever level you think best.