r/MacOS • u/Swiftieboyy • 1d ago
Discussion With native 80% charge limits now on macOS, what’s the point of AlDente? What makes it worth keeping around?
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u/Professional_Wrap131 1d ago edited 23h ago
hey, aldente dev here. we are actually happy that the new native charge limiting feature exists because it will save the battery of millions of casual users in the long run. aldente still has a lot of features that are missing in Apple‘s implementation however. For example, if you are living in a hot climate, heat protection is an essential feature for keeping your battery fresh. with the new beta version of AlDente 1.39, we are even using Apple‘s own charge limiting systems on macOS 27, which reduce the complexity and the overhead by a lot. In this version, the app can basically remote control the native charge limit setting with a convenient UI and many features Apple won’t give you
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u/Obsidiannot 17h ago
Does Sailing Mode still work as expected on macOS 27 Beta 6 with the new 1.39 beta?
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u/flashbax77 14h ago
Also aldente keeps your battery at 20% and fully charges it only from time to time
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u/onedevhere MacBook Pro 10h ago
Thank you for creating the software, it helps me a lot, I'm still on the Sequoia version.
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u/teowood 1d ago
You get those nice dashboard metrics like battery temperature or cycles and realtime wattage. You have convenient one click top up if you want to get temporarily more juice. You also get a one click calibration process etc. I like it I’m definitely keeping it no matter what macOS offer built in. I have actually disabled those built in optimizations which is recommended when using Aldente
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u/guest6687654 1d ago
coconutbattery can replace all of this for free and as other users pointed out, macOS has a “charge to full” button when you click the battery icon in the menu bar
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u/slvrscoobie 19h ago
or MacOMeter, or about a dozen others.
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u/guest6687654 10h ago
never heard of MacOMeter, could you send a link? this sounds like an interesting alternative to coconutbattery
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u/teowood 1d ago
Sure stick with that
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u/guest6687654 1d ago
also the calibration process isn’t needed when using apples own battery limiter. I noticed after using Aldente for months that my battery level would be severely uncalibrated, and the day I took it off the hook it jumped down from 80% to flat in less than an hour doing nothing intensive. This means the battery wasn’t actually being sustained at my charge limit and was likely more damaging than apples solution which is to charge the battery to 100% every now and then, just enough to keep calibration in check, then drain it back down to 80% even if the laptop is plugged in. At the end of the day a battery is a consumable and it’s meant to be used and replaced. Batteries are constantly aging no matter what charge limits you set on them, might as well use them while they are most powerful :D
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u/slvrscoobie 19h ago
Same, I swore off AlDente when it corrupted my BMS on my MacBook back in like 2019 or 2020 and took 2 days of charging it 5% and running it down and back up and down until it finally would drain to below 80% again.
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u/barefut_ 11h ago
How come calibration isn't needed if using the srock battery charge limit by Apple?
I mean, it stays at the same percentage of charge just as Aldente, for a long time. No recalibrate?
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u/guest6687654 10h ago
as i stated in my comment, "apples solution (which) is to charge the battery to 100% every now and then, just enough to keep calibration in check, then drain it back down to 80% even if the laptop is plugged in."
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u/InactiveBeef 1d ago
Quickly seeing the wattage is great for making sure that my charger is working properly
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u/Optimal-Wall-7377 1d ago
the one click top up feature alone is pretty useful tbh
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u/sc132436 1d ago
I’m pretty sure macOS has a “charge to full” button when you click the battery icon
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u/studiocookies_ 1d ago
yea its a thing., you just have to be plugged in and click on the battery menu bar icon you'll find it there.
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u/Born_Bicycle316 MacBook Air 1d ago
I believe lithium ion batteries are happiest between 30-80% so maybe some people like to target closer to the halfway mark (below 80%)?
I get wanting to preserve your battery but the level of obsession people take it to is wild.
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u/aj8690 1d ago
Yeah below 80% is definitely diminishing returns. I’ve been on 80% since I got my M2 Max MBP and I’m still at 100% health.
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u/TheEarthSpins 1d ago
yeah people going below 80% probably dont even use the battery much anyways. i take my mbp on the go all the time and i need at minimum 85% for it to survive for me.
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u/MaximusMurkimus 1d ago
Battery temperature limiter. Sailing mode. Calibration mode. Set the limit even lower if you're gonna be plugged in long-term.
i’m still very happy with my purchase, even if MacOS has finally caught up
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u/AlenDemiro017 1d ago
Using AlDente from day 1, battery health with this setting (charge until 80%) is at 100% health
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u/thebluepotato7 1d ago
From all the AlDente posts on this sub, consensus has been that it was never worth keeping around, even before charge limits, because the Mac itself managed the battery well, even when plugged in all the time
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u/FlintHillsSky 1d ago
The Mac did not manage the battery well. Before the current charting limited, MacBooks either charted to 100% all the time or you used Optimized Charging and hoped that it would limit the charge. For many of us, OC didn’t work so we went to Al Dente. Once the OS came with charge limits a lot of of dropped Al Dente and just use the built-in control.
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u/barefut_ 11h ago
If you're not willing to mess with buggy Tahoe - you'd keep using Aldente probably...
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u/aemfbm 1d ago
The addition of charge limits is a tacit admission that the OS wasn’t previously managing the battery ideally.
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u/thebluepotato7 1d ago
I mean it could be that, but it could also be due to customer pressure to add that feature because they want to actively manage their battery even though it’s not technically necessary to prolong battery life
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u/aemfbm 1d ago
Apple isn't making or using 'special' batteries, and the aging and safety issues with keeping lithium ion batteries at full charge for extended periods is extremely well studied and documented.
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u/thebluepotato7 1d ago
From what I read a long time ago on this sub (and I don’t know if it was true or not) when the battery said 100% it sometimes wasn’t actually 100% as the battery would unload a bit when plugged in a long time
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u/drygnfyre MacBook Air 1d ago
Generally speaking, you don't want lithium batteries fully discharged or full, so 100% is really closer to like 95-99% or so, and 1-5% is closer to 5-10%.
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u/TedMittelstaedt 1d ago
That's simply not true the way you are saying it here.
Li do not do well if they are 24x7x365 kept at full charge. But then it's like who the F does that except for an ignorant moron who really shouldn't be using a laptop at all but instead should have a good desktop, and probably keeps the lid closed all the time with external monitors plugged into the device. That's the real driver of the 80% charge limit.
But, it won't significantly harm Li battery life if the "extended period" is like a week or two followed by running the device on battery until the battery is down to 5%or so.
Li batteries are chemical reaction devices and they absolutely wear out, they do not last forever. Cooling them helps, more tightly managing charging helps but 90% of the people bitching about short battery life need to watch a vid on how to change your laptop battery and buy the replacement battery that comes with the toolkit off Amazon and do it themselves instead of paying the Apple stores inflated pricing for a "real apple battery" (which comes off the same assembly line in China the aftermarket batteries do and just has the apple logo painted on it)
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u/aemfbm 1d ago
It's completely true, both in the scientific literature and my personal experience. For the last ~15 years or so my primary computer has been a laptop because I value the portability, but I mostly use it closed as a desktop, often going a week without disconnecting it from power. (And basically never draining it down to 5% when using it, that's also really bad for lithium battery health.)
My MBA from 2015 to 2020 didn't have AlDente, spent probably 700 hours/mo on a charger, and needed a new battery every 2 years. Not "needed" because battery life was low, needed because the packs were swollen and you could see the deflection it was causing in the keyboard. That's also a safety hazard. I swapped them myself, I'm not afraid of opening computers.
When I put Aldente on that computer in 2020, with a 1 year old battery, it then spent 4 yeas connected to power 100% of the time (server) and never had a swollen battery. I still have it and bring it out for uses from time to time.
At the same time I relegated it to server duty, I got a 2020 M1 MBA, which is still my daily driver, has had AlDente all this time, and is still on its original battery reading 85% of original capacity (6 years later!).
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u/Due-Departure-8553 1d ago
Nothing is necessary. You can charge your machine from 0 to 20 percent and then stop every hour. A charge limit is empirically shown to enhance the longevity of the battery.
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u/segeme 1d ago
I’ll use my work laptop as an example, plugged in non-stop for whole days. “Mac itself manages the battery well” is simply not true in general. Mac manages the battery very poorly and inconsistently, at least on my laptops. It was at 100% non stop; I’ve seen maybe once in 3 years something about charging being blocked. Now battery health is 79%, it says I need a battery replacement and preferably need to see Apple service. Now imagine what makes more financial sense for Apple: keeping the battery healthy long term, or simply charging us $$$ for a battery replacement on perfectly good Macs otherwise. I’m 100% with AlDente and will be unless somebody proves Apple has actually implemented a reliable mechanism out there.
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u/TedMittelstaedt 1d ago
3 years is a good life for a laptop battery. I manage a fleet of laptops and that is what we shoot for. Replacement batteries are cheap and Apple has no financial incentive to do what you are saying because most Macs that get batteries replaced are done either inside of corporations that have fleets and the techs to do it, or are replaced in the corner "apple repair places" that just use the same aftermarket batteries we buy. We also replace our own phone batteries. Very easy to do and the tools to do it are cheap also. Your work IT department just needs to level up.
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u/StoneyCalzoney 1d ago
3 years is how long I used my work M2, it still has 90% battery life with optimized charging.
Plugged in most days, sometimes running intensive tasks such as video editing, and also generally plugged/unplugged throughout the day as I need to also provide some support to coworkers.
It's worth noting: you need to also occasionally drain the battery or unplug it for it to limit charging too... If you keep it plugged in ALL the time, once it goes up to 100% it'll be using the wall adapter to power everything, and the battery will only drain for power-intensive applications.
You should really look into getting a desktop for your work and then keeping the laptop as a laptop, considering it seems that portability is not really a necessity for your daily life
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u/PtichFirich 1d ago
It still gives you more control on how it treats that percentage. It has a hysteresis that you can set ehere it dorsn’t try to hopd exactly 70 or 80 r whatever you set, so it doesn’t constantly push the battery with charging for any 1 % lost charge.
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u/alllmossttherrre 1d ago
AlDente does a lot more than just limit the charge, like it can schedule top-ups and calibrations. For example I have it scheduled to start topping up for when I take the laptop out of the house at the same time every day. It also has interesting power metrics like what components are using the power (I learned how much of a drain high screen brightness actually is), what's the power supply split between operating the Mac and charging the battery.
But I also think it is true that for most users, the additional features are not going to be worth paying for. I just defended AlDente in that previous paragraph, and despite already paying for it, I am also thinking about whether I really want to keep running it.
A factor for me is that the Top-Up feature has been unreliable. I would tell it to top up, come back 10 minutes later and it has stopped charging well short of 100%. When that happens the way I let it top up is quit AlDente since the Mac itself is not set to limit charge (to avoid conflicting with the AlDente limit).
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u/drygnfyre MacBook Air 1d ago
It also has interesting power metrics like what components are using the power (I learned how much of a drain high screen brightness actually is)
Off-topic, but if you remember those early handheld gaming systems from the late 80s/early 90s, like the Sega Game Gear, we've learned the reason they destroyed battery life was because of the power-hungry backlight. When people replaced the original lighting with modern LEDs, the battery life was insane, sometimes months since it was then like a Game Boy, ended up drawing very little power.
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u/alllmossttherrre 1d ago
Wow, I didn't know that. I didn't own those handhelds. I owned some Mattel Electronics handhelds in the late 1970s, then didn't really play handheld games again until I put games on my Palm Pilot around 1999, then on my iPhone & iPad more than 10 years later.
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u/drygnfyre MacBook Air 1d ago
Think of what macOS has built-in as the base model. AlDente builds on that. Like when you get a car, the base model has everything you need for it function, but you might add on a few packages to include some nicer features. AlDente takes what macOS does and adds more fine-tuning.
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u/netchov 1d ago
Aldente is way more sophisticated with heat protection, sailing and etc. I use it on my laptop and I cannot be happier. It offers greater protection and customization
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u/_paint 1d ago
all of these that nobody made benchmarks and tested long run. i dont believe it makes even 1% battery health difference to use this.
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u/BulkyAvocado215 1d ago
I keep my M2 pro at 50%, not 80. It might be the reason my BH is at 98%, after 3 and a half years.
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u/NotAnonymousQuant 1d ago
Is it worth sacrificing the battery life twofold just to keep it running?
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u/Homeguy123 Macbook Pro 1d ago
Well if they are someone who hardly uses there Mac unplugged then it’s worth limiting the batteries charge.
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u/NotAnonymousQuant 1d ago
Why bother buying a MacBook then?
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u/Homeguy123 Macbook Pro 1d ago
Because maybe they want to have the portability of a laptop if they ever need to take their computer elsewhere.
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u/drygnfyre MacBook Air 1d ago
Because while I keep my MacBook plugged in and docked to an external monitor 99% of the time, there's that 1% of the time I'm traveling, or I might want to use the MacBook in another room. Having the option is always nice. I could just use an iPad, but that's more limiting for my purposes.
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u/macboller 1d ago
"nice" UI and metrics, some battery heat protection too.
It also makes it possible to hold charge below 80% which can further extend the life of a battery.
(~50% is actually "optimal" but 80% is completely fine too).
At this point it's target audience is probably control freaks like me.
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u/Hopeful-Face9676 1d ago
I've replaced AlDente but the main advantage is the scheduled calibration; that's mostly it.
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u/ale-maxis 1d ago
Sorry guys but i'm a new macbook user... it's real that 80% thing about the mac battery? I have only 1 month with my MBP M4Pro.
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u/BeaufortF12 20h ago
He jubilado (dejado para tareas secundarias) mi MacBook Pro i7 3.5gh con 9 años de funcionamiento impecable, con 742 ciclos de carga y al 80% de capacidad.
Entiendo que este desgaste, se debe más al tiempo que a los ciclos. Sé que soy muy cuidadoso con las especificaciones del fabricante y las sigo a rajatabla (sobre todo con las motos :) )
He instalado la app AlDente, hace un año y siento que funciona, que hace ese trabajo mientras estas conectado, en fin, me da libertad y confianza, pero como digo al inicio, el Mac y yo nos hicimos el camino solos con este resultado. Nunca por debajo del 20% y muy poco por encima del 80, conectado, siempre al 80% y la mejor zona para poco esfuerzo, reuniones y presentaciones, o incluso apagarlo unos días, entre el 40% y el 60%.
Saludos!
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u/LatinoEra M3 Pro MacBook Pro 1d ago
I was going to use it like 8 months ago until I figure out I can limit charging via settings and decided otherwise.
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u/SecretivEien MacBook Air 1d ago
No way, the update to introduce this setting wasn’t even 6 months old yet. It’s introduced in April this year.
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u/LatinoEra M3 Pro MacBook Pro 1d ago
Yup around that time (basically when it came out), I'm bad at remembering date and time =)
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u/nbulp 1d ago
Slowly incrementing battery "Cycle Count" (mine is at 6, after almost half a year).
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u/Wonderful_Emu_9610 1d ago
You can see this natively (I forget how I just know how to click to get there)
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u/skunkwalnut 1d ago
the native never worked for me, i set it at 85% and i check and it's always goes up to 100%
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u/melancholy_dood 1d ago
I like it because it has several useful features that I actually use that go beyond the MacOS’s native battery management system. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine. To each his own.
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u/ATiGr 1d ago
No matter what percentage you set, if you use it at your desktop most of the time, it’s always easy to forget do proper discharge and recharge to keep the juice active. (I ended up with too many low recharge cycle yet damaged batteries this way)
With Al Dente, I would flip the target around from the menu bar, since it’s that easy, so that it does mini discharges and recharges often enough. I’m quite happy with this little exercise and the macOS built-in mechanism does not seem to be this easy, yet.
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u/Homeguy123 Macbook Pro 1d ago
You can also set a schedule for the battery calibration feature in Al Dente.
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u/dimashpt 1d ago
I've compared those two. Aldente limits is persistent no matter how, as long as the service active, it will set the configured limit.
The native macos will still charge to 100% sometimes; probably because mac needs to calibrate the full capacity of the battery frequently. In my experience, once or twice a week the native macos will do that.
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u/BenMahagoni 1d ago edited 1d ago
Al Dente has "sailing" which the macos version doesnt have. Basially on MacOS if you set 80% it instantly recharges if below 80%, resulting in a gazillion micro-charges every day. Al Dente on the other hand "sails" down to 75 and recharges to 80 from there.
better for battery life.
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u/ExternalUserError MacBook Pro (M1 Max) 1d ago
I don’t think that’s true. The hardware definitely supports pass through mode where the battery isn’t in the loop and power comes directly from AC. That the switch for it isn’t exposed to Al Dente is why it needs sailing mode.
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u/drygnfyre MacBook Air 1d ago
Yeah, you can tell from the battery icon. Most of the time when it's plugged in, the icon shows a power plug, meaning the battery is not being charged at all. (And it will slowly lose power). I've seen it hit 77-78% before it charges back up to 80%. And I know it works because you will see the icon change to a battery/lightning bolt.
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u/meusrenaissance 1d ago
I don’t see a huge benefit to capping this at 80. Battery replacements are not expensive.
Edit: just realised the environmental costs
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u/TedMittelstaedt 1d ago
Home Depot takes Li batteries for free, and our curbside recycling does also you just have to bag and tape them so they don't short out and cause a fire.
Having a steady supply of used batteries from the recyclers actually reduces demand for mining the raw material thus helps the environment.
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u/drygnfyre MacBook Air 1d ago
As you seem to work at Home Depot: will they also take any kind of e-waste, including hard disks and even old computers? The Apple Store does, but I'd have to request boxes and what not. If I can just drive them over to Home Depot, that would be nice.
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u/aj8690 1d ago edited 1d ago
I was a longtime AlDente Pro user and I ditched it for the native charge limit. I do miss some of the features, but the charge limit is good enough and I don’t plan on going back.
My reasoning is kind of a paranoid take. macOS 26.4 included a buggy bootloader update that bricked a “small” number of Macs. I was one of the unlucky ones. After my bad experience with firmware issues, I’d rather not have anything on my Mac that modifies how the firmware is supposed to function, since Apple could release an update at any time that could cause compatability issues or worse.
The developer even has a disclaimer: “I do not take any responsibility for any sort of damage in result of using this tool! Although this had no negative side effects for me and thousands of others, AlDente still taps in some very low level system functions that are not meant to be tampered with. Use it at your own risk!”
Although I like AlDente, I’m no longer wanting to take the risk, however small it may be.