Today's MacBooks have solid SSD storage. Mechanical hard drives are long gone. That means that there is only one component of your laptop that inevitably suffers from wear and tear over time: Battery.
Apple knows this and wants to help your MacBook battery last many years with good performance. With Big Sur macOS comes a new battery management to make it more efficient. Let's see it.
We have been running macOS Big Sur betas for two months on the developers' Macs, and a week with the public beta for all those restless users who cannot wait to install the Official version coming this fall.
One of the novelties of this new version of macOS is the battery control in the MacBooks, to take care of it as much as possible and thus optimize its performance and extend its useful life. What until now was "Energy Saver" in "System Preferences" is now simply called "Battery". Let's see what's behind the name change
Usage history
The first section that we find within «Battery» is «Usage history«. This screen shows us two graphs: a graph of battery level and a graph of the screen in use. You can view the data for the last 24 hours or the last 10 days.
Battery
More control of your MacBook battery from here.
The section "Battery" has options that you might be familiar with in the "Energy Saver" section in earlier versions of macOS. Here you can do several things:
- Choose to display the battery status in the menu bar.
- Set when you want the MacBook screen to turn off while operating.
- Set your MacBook to automatically dim the screen when using battery power.
- Turn Power Nap on or off, which performs some background tasks like checking for iCloud updates while your MacBook is asleep.
Power adapter
The section "Power adapter" it is similar to the "Battery" section, except that they are set for when the MacBook is connected. Here are the settings:
- Displays the battery status in the menu bar.
- Set when you want the MacBook screen to turn off while operating.
- Make the computer stay awake while the screen is off.
- Activation for network access.
- Turn Power Nap on or off, which does some background tasks like checking for iCloud updates while your Mac is asleep.
Schedule
In the section "Schedule«, You can set times for when you want your MacBook to automatically start up, wake up or sleep.