macOS Battery Control

BatteryThrottle

A compact menu bar app that helps your MacBook avoid unnecessary battery wear from high charging currents or from sitting at high voltages.

Why I made this App

As a professor of battery chemistry (atomic structure and dynamics of cathodes, anodes, and electrolytes), it annoys me when I see my MacBook's OS choosing to do things that are bad for its battery. As Apple so often does, it tries to make the battery controls a little too automatic and that's not ideal if you're a savvy user.

I get annoyed whenever I see my laptop unnecessarily aging its own battery by:

  1. Charging at too fast of a rate
  2. Sitting at too high of a charge

So I made a simple app to stop those two behaviors as well as giving me a quick way to boost up to a still-safe travel level when I know I'll be on the go and needing the battery later on.

And I don't want to have to spend time fooling around with anything complicated, so I made everything controlled by just single clicks.

Three Core Modes

Charge Limiting: No charge icon → Gentle charge icon

BatteryThrottle applies gentle charging toward your set limit and then stops.

Top Up For Travel: Fast charge icon

One-click fast top-up to a higher preset level before leaving wall power.

Discharge: Fast charge icon

Temporarily ignore the A/C plug and run off the battery to drain it down.

BatteryThrottle v. Other Apps

I've done collaborations with a wide variety of scientists in the industrial Li-ion battery sector as an academic, so I have a pretty good guess on the internal chemistry of MacBook cells. In the app, I suggest optimum charge levels and rates based on that knowledge, given as ranges that encompass the possible stoichiometries, dopants and additives that Apple might employ.

Compared to some things I've seen in other devices, MacBooks use a pretty good battery management system. HOWEVER, macOS can only guess about your plans for the day so there's no doubt you'll do better if you take direct control.

This app is streamlined for easy use. It does the things you need without extra clutter or baggage. Free to try for a couple of weeks and then if you want to continue, it's way cheaper than the alternatives.

BatteryThrottle is certainly the only package designed with the knowledge of a professor of battery chemistry. It's also the only one that lets you limit the rate of charging to a safer level AND the only one that lets you define and preset a stable "upper" level for travelling. It even has a fully automatic updating framework so that the app will continue to work long term. And your battery will too.