How to see battery time remaining on a Mac

Where the time-remaining estimate went

For years, clicking the battery icon on a MacBook showed a line like “3:42 remaining”. Apple took it out in macOS Sierra 10.12.2, at the end of 2016. Its explanation at the time was that the estimate couldn’t be accurate: how long a battery lasts depends on what you do next, and a figure worked out from the last few minutes jumps around as soon as you open a heavier app or turn up the screen.

The Mac never stopped working the number out. It just stopped putting it in the menu. The percentage stayed, and so did the list of apps using significant energy, which is useful but doesn’t answer “will this last the flight?”.

Where to look in macOS

Activity Monitor. Open it from Applications → Utilities, or search for it with Spotlight, and click the Energy tab. The panel at the bottom of the window shows the remaining charge and, while you’re on battery, the estimated time remaining. The table above it ranks apps by Energy Impact, so the same window tells you what is using the battery.

Terminal. Type pmset -g batt and press Return. macOS prints the battery’s charge, whether it’s charging or discharging, and its current estimate, such as “4:12 remaining”. Just after you unplug, it may say “(no estimate)” until it has watched the battery for a little while.

System Settings → Battery. There’s no time figure here, but there are charts of the battery level over the last 24 hours and the last 10 days. They show how fast your battery really drops on an ordinary day of your own use, which is often a better guide than any single estimate.

How far to trust a time-remaining figure

Every time-left number, wherever you read it, is a prediction from how much power the Mac is drawing now. Unplug in the middle of a video export and it will look alarming; unplug while reading a web page and it will look generous. Either way it settles after a few minutes of steady use, and it moves every time what you’re doing changes. Read it as “at this rate”, not as a promise.

Some things move it more than people expect. Screen brightness is one of the biggest draws on a laptop. A video call keeps the camera, the microphone and the network busy at once. An app stuck working in the background — a browser tab running scripts, a sync that never finishes — drains the battery without anything on screen to show for it.

An older battery holds less. As a battery ages, its full charge holds less energy, so 50% on a four-year-old MacBook lasts noticeably less time than 50% did when it was new. System Settings → Battery has a Battery Health entry that tells you whether the battery is normal or needs service, and on recent MacBooks it shows its maximum capacity. For the cycle count, hold Option, open the Apple menu and choose System Information, then click Power.

Getting more time out of the battery

Low Power Mode. In System Settings → Battery, set Low Power Mode to Only on Battery. The Mac cuts its energy use to make the charge last longer, which can mean a slightly dimmer screen and a little less speed.

Turn the screen down. A notch or two of brightness is the cheapest extra time there is.

Find the app doing the damage. Activity Monitor’s Energy tab, or the list in the battery menu, shows which apps are drawing power now. Quit the ones you aren’t using — or have the apps you pick quit on their own after sitting unused for a while.

Mind what happens while it sleeps. A sleeping MacBook uses little power, but it keeps Bluetooth on, and headphones can connect to it in your bag. If that happens to you, turn Bluetooth off when the Mac sleeps.

Battery time in the menu bar with MacFixes

Opening Activity Monitor or Terminal every time you wonder is the opposite of a glance. MacFixes’ Menu bar readouts put the battery in the menu bar as a readout, and on battery it can show the time left instead of the percentage — the line Apple took out of the battery menu, back where you look.

The same fix can show CPU, memory and network speed next to it, in the order you choose, so when the time left suddenly drops you can see whether the processor or the network just got busy. It is the same fix behind CPU and memory in the menu bar, set up for a different question. It doesn’t show temperatures, and it needs no permission from macOS.

It’s still an estimate: like every time-left figure, it changes with what you’re doing. What changes is that you see it without going looking for it.

Permissions, and turning it off

More fixes macOS doesn’t give you

One of 47 fixes and 10 apps in MacFixes. Every fix · Every app · Something else your Mac won’t do? Request it.