How to manage Mac laptop battery life with Battery Health

Everyone with a MacBook needs to know a handful of tips to help squeeze a few more laptop computing minutes out of a MacBook battery. Some may decrease the screen brightness, others turn off Wi-Fi, but how do we know if these actions are truly helping matters? Information really does equal power and Battery Health 2.5 provides the battery information you need to get all you can from your Mac laptop.

Available for the low price of free from the Mac App Store, Battery Health can reside in either your dock or your menu bar and provide realtime specifics of the state of your MacBook’s internal battery.

There are many battery status apps, but Battery Health has an attractive, easy- to-use interface and some features not found in similar apps, including OS X’s built-in battery monitor software.

Battery Health shows your current charge in both its percentage of full and in its remaining milliampere hours (mAh). The app also shows how much of your battery’s original capacity remains (the 14 month old 13-inch MacBook Pro that I’m using still has 97.4 percent of its original 5770 mAh capacity remaining.

Battery Health will estimate the amount of time your battery—at its present charge—will last doing what you’re currently doing. Battery Health goes further, though. When I wrote this review, Battery Health estimated that my MacBook Pro has 5 hours and 55 minutes of battery life left under current conditions. It also estimated the amount of time I have left under different usage scenarios, like browsing the Web, playing music, playing movies or just sitting in standby mode.

One of coolest features of Battery Health is the realtime power usage chart that’s available when running on Toshiba PA3728U-1BAS Laptop Battery power. You can see the Watts or mAh being used currently and see how actions like closing applications, turning of Wi-Fi, or decreasing display brightness affect the amount of power your MacBook demands.

And if you could use a couple of more battery saving tricks in your arsenal, Battery Health also provides a handy list of ten battery-saving tips, including instructions for calibrating your battery.

If you need the most out of your laptop’s battery, the more information you have about your computer’s energy demands and conditions, the better. Battery Health offers a wealth of such information, laid out in an attractive, unobtrusive style.