Battery Monitor
macOS / Utilitaires
NOTE: A computer with a battery compliant with the Smart Battery standard is required. All portable Macs fulfill this requirement.
More and more computers are mobile devices nowadays. The most important prerequisite for a portable computer is a chargable battery which keeps the device powered. Batteries are not really cheap replacement parts and they are subject to wear and tear. Their lifetimes should be optimized, handling them with the necessary care. Battery Monitor is a small auxiliary application useful in this regard. It offers the following features:
- Display of the charge state in the Dock: This is useful if you cannot or do not like to use the display in the menu bar of macOS, e.g. when you have a screen which is not very wide. Battery Monitor can also show the estimated remaining run time in the Dock menu, even if you are using an operating system which suppresses this information in the menu bar.
- Display of internal battery information: In addition to the charge state, many other technical specifications, e.g. temperature, discharge current, number of charge cycles, expected lifetime, or capacity can be retrieved. The states of each of the battery cells and the manufacturer of the cells can also be determined.
- Capturing charge and discharge curves: The history of the readings measured by the battery unit can be displayed graphically. This way you can plot the charge and discharge curves, for example, one of the most important characteristics for the health of a battery. You can also review the graphical profile of the amperage drawn by the computer, helping to find “power guzzling applications”.
- Bookkeeping of the aging process of the battery: Battery Monitor automatically keeps a log about the charge capacity of the battery which will decrease as the battery ages. This helps you to exactly monitor how the behavior of the battery is changing over time. You can assess if your battery is working normally or if it might be defective. You can also estimate more exactly when the right time has come to purchase a new battery. For computers with replaceable battery units, Battery Monitor can of course monitor multiple battery packs at the same time.
- Notifications during charge or discharge: In addition to the display of the charge state in the Dock, Battery Monitor can optionally inform you about the progress of the charge or discharge process by other means. Inobtrusive notifications using speech or the Notification Center of macOS can be set up.
- Additional overview of connected Bluetooth batteries: If supported Bluetooth devices powered by batteries are connected to your Mac, display of their battery levels can be integrated into Battery Monitor as well.
Quoi de neuf dans la dernière version ?
- The window for monitoring batteries of connected Bluetooth devices now shows a USB indicator when an Apple input device is disconnected from Bluetooth but charged via USB on the same computer.
- The notification feature to show a warning when an AC adaptor is connected for a long time has been removed. With new systems that support optimized charging, enforced PowerNap, and third-party applications with a smart "charge inhibit" feature, it can no longer be estimated reliably whether prolonged charging in an operating computer would actually harm the battery, so the warning no longer makes sense.
- Added new feature to avoid a technical defect of specific versions of macOS where a monitored battery of a connected Bluetooth device from Apple can be shown with changing representations for the device's serial number, sometimes being replaced by a Bluetooth address. Battery Monitor will try to show the correct data as soon as it could learn the relationship between address and number for the affected device.
- Fixed a problem where adding or removing specific Apple Bluetooth input devices could not be tracked live. A restart of the app may have been needed to update the Bluetooth window for the affected devices.
