For years, Apple has put a lot of effort into providing users with ways to extend their iPhone’s battery life. But while iOS slowly introduced more battery-management features for iPhone, Apple’s other big battery-powered device, the MacBook, was left behind.
Lately, that’s changed. Today, Apple’s laptops, particularly those running macOS 26, offer numerous battery and charging management features that aim to keep your MacBook’s battery lasting as long as possible. Best of all, they work whether you have the most powerful MacBook Pro or Apple’s most affordable laptop, the MacBook Neo. Here’s how to extend battery life:
Turn on Low Power Mode
If you find that your MacBook battery level is low, and you’re without your charger, the quickest way to conserve power (and keep working) is to enable Low Power Mode. With this mode enabled, your MacBook will instantly reduce its energy consumption.
It does this by lowering the CPU’s performance, reducing your display’s brightness, and limiting background tasks, such as checking for new emails. Many people worry about Low Power Mode’s effect on CPU performance, but unless you’re rendering advanced graphics on your MacBook, you shouldn’t actually notice much, especially if you’re doing general tasks, such as emailing, web browsing, and using general office apps like word processors and spreadsheets.
The fastest way to enable Low Power Mode is to select the battery icon in your Mac’s menu bar, then click “Low Power.” Alternatively, you can actually choose to have Low Power Mode always enabled by clicking the Battery section in the Settings app and then selecting “Always” from the Low Power Mode dropdown menu.
Limit your battery’s maximum capacity
It might seem counterintuitive to limit how fully your battery can charge if your goal is to retain the best battery life possible, but it can work.
Batteries are chemical products, and the chemicals inside them age over time. As they age, they become less able to store as much energy as they originally could, known as their “maximum capacity.” This means that, eventually, your battery may not have 100% of its original capacity (my two-year-old MacBook’s maximum capacity is currently down to 90% of what it used to be). When this happens, your battery will last for fewer hours each day than it originally did.
But you can potentially slow this chemical degradation in your battery by using the MacBook’s “Charge Limit” feature. By limiting your battery’s total charging capacity, you can extend its overall shelf life—wise if you plan to keep your MacBook for a long time. This works because your battery spends less time charging to full, which reduces the heat load it experiences (heat degrades a battery’s chemicals faster).
You can choose to set your MacBook’s battery charging capacity to anywhere from 80% to 100% by clicking the Battery section in the Settings app, then clicking the “I” button next to “Charging,” and then dragging the Charging Limit slider to your preferred level.
Optimize your battery’s charging
Apple offers another way to maximize your MacBook’s overall longevity: a feature called “Optimized Battery Charging.” While charging your battery to 100% each day ensures, for the short term at least, that your MacBook lasts as long as possible on that day before it runs out of power, always keeping it at 100% capacity when you don’t even need it actually wears it down.
Optimized Battery Charging aims to combat this while still ensuring that your MacBook is charged to 100% when you need it by using AI to learn your usage and charging patterns. With Optimized Battery Charging enabled, your MacBook will charge to 80% and then pause, not continuing to 100% until just before you need it. Doing so helps your battery age more slowly.
To turn on Optimized Battery Charging, go to the Battery section in the Settings app, click the “I” button next to “Charging,” and then toggle the Optimized Battery Charging switch to ON (blue).
Find out if you’re using a slow charger
Finally, our ability to work on the go can be hampered if we plug our MacBook in to charge, only to discover, often hours later, that the battery level has barely increased. This slow charging is often the result of using a (usually older) charger with a maximum wattage much lower than what your MacBook can actually support.
Thankfully, you can now easily see if your MacBook is using a sub-optimal charger: Go to the Battery section in the Settings app, and above the Battery Level graph, look for the words “Slow Charger” in orange. If you see them, consider upgrading to a faster charger (one that supports higher wattage). Doing so will greatly shorten the time it takes to charge your MacBook.
To find out how many charging watts your MacBook can support, check out Apple’s support page here.
