How To Properly Maintain Your MacBook Pro's Battery

Jun 08, 2023

Aside from the amount of physical space saved when compared to a desktop computer, portability is a major draw of most laptops. You can bring them along on trips, carry them with you when commuting to and from work, or just walk into another room if you feel like a change of scenery (or if a cat has taken over your desk chair).

The thing about laptops — or any modern electronics that don't rely solely on being plugged into a wall outlet, really — is that their internal batteries eventually start to run down. And when the battery runs down, you'll need to replace it or the laptop itself. Or at least start tethering yourself to one spot via the power cord, which defeats a laptop's main purpose.

Unfortunately there's no way to perpetually maintain a laptop battery forever. No matter what you do, even if it's never using the laptop (be it a Windows machine or MacBook) in the first place, it will inevitably start to weaken. That said, while you can't prevent the inevitable, you can delay it by taking steps to preserve your MacBook battery's health.

One of the simplest ways to extend your MacBook Pro's battery life is to let the MacBook itself manage power consumption and distribution. All newer versions of macOS — from Big Sur (macOS 11) and up — feature built-in options that will help to keep your battery operating efficiently for as long as possible.

With Optimized Battery Charging turned on, your MacBook will start to learn your usage habits (i.e. what times of the day you use it most). Then it will automatically throttle battery charging at certain times of the day, based on usage data, in order to cut back on the strain and keep it from "chemically aging" as quickly as it would otherwise. The drawback to this is you may see your MacBook pause charging at 80-percent from time to time, but this is nothing to be concerned about as it's just the optimized charging working as intended.

Of course, there are other steps you can take besides automatic battery preservation to keep your MacBook's battery from aging too rapidly.

Follow these suggestions and your MacBook's battery should perform well for several years. Though when it does begin to fail, prematurely or not, you can take it to Apple for maintenance.