FYI, on Apple Silicon Apple included a firmware-level "hard-switch" to limit the charge to 75/80% only. It was discovered by marcan while working on Asahi and in my experience it's much more convenient than the built-in ML-based solution (and also less hacky and bloated than AlDente).
See this discussion [0] on GitHub for the explanation and this snippet [1] for easy use.
This solution also works while the laptop is sleeping, the only limitation is that it doesn't survive reboots.
I use the paid version of an app called Al Dente [1] to set the battery charging level to a specific limit. The app has a free mode. It has more features than what I stated, and works on Intel Macs and Apple Silicon Macs (limited only by what the underlying hardware allows).
I don't know if they changed this, but I think AlDente follows a polling approach where it periodically checks the charge level and enable/disable the charging accordingly. Such solution is more hacky and it also could cause some sleep-related issues.
The SMC key discovered my marcan is nicer because it enables the same functionality without having to poll anything, as it's built into macOS.
Furthermore, I don't care about all the extra stuff they have put into AlDente, I just want to keep my battery at 80%.
There’s a free version that allows you to limit the charging to a specific level. I found this app useful over the years and I bought the lifetime license when it was on a sale. Otherwise I wouldn’t have paid for it since I don’t like the idea of subscriptions either.
My older intel based macbook pro has started to tell me i use it mostly plugged in and won't charge higher than 80% on its own. There's also a 'charge now' button.
I'm not even on a recent Mac OS, it's still on Monterey. No extra apps to handle battery.
Of course, it doesn't look like a hard limit, but something triggered by usage patterns.
My problem with the built-in charging limiter is that if you are not extremely consistent in your usage patterns (I am not), it basically never kicks in.
I much prefer a manual solution.
It would be very easy to implement in software. Just display a green and yellow/red bar on the battery status icon and allow for people to say full is 80%, empty is 20%. Or something.
For me it is well worth going from charger to charger (they are everywhere, especially if you put some wireless chargers here and there) if that means the phone can still do a full day after 5 years.
I generally use phones until they stop working. I'm into my 3rd year with my iPhone 12 mini, the phone is still super fast, takes great pictures and still feels like "my new phone".
I think I'm going to adopt the same strategy as you, since apparently nobody can actually show any meaningful proof of widespread hacks happening..
I must also say that if I feared being a specific hackers' target, I would probably make many different choices in how I use computers/the web, other than upgrading my phone :)
Yeah Apple do it right on their machines, at least the laptops. There is no excuse not to do this for other vendors but it costs fractionally more so they push the risk on to the users.
I completely agree. My phone lost official LineageOS support last year but it still works fine and I cannot justify throwing it away to replace with a new expensive device full of features I don't give a damn about.
Probably I'm just stupid but I'm going to keep using it until it breaks.
AdGuard for Safari is probably the best option right now, but I really don't like the fact that it ships as a fat electron app..
Hopefully someone will fix uBOL's small incompatibilities
I use Safari as my primary browser, only for its tab groups implementation. In my opinion they just nailed it, I think it's much better than the Chrome one.
I would really like to switch to Firefox as I prefer it in every other way, but I don't think I will move until they offer a robust native tab group implementation (I've tried Simple Tab Groups but I don't want to rely on a hacky extension for such a core functionality).
There's Colima[0], but in my experience it still isn't as stable as Docker Desktop. It also isn't any faster and I doubt any competing software will be, since the best way to virtualize Linux on macOS right now is to use Apple's Virtualization.framework with VirtioFS which is exactly what DD (and Colima) is doing.
On a personal note, I find the menu bar icon useful to see whether the VM is running and to pause/resume it (a functionality that none of the alternatives have).
[0] https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery/pull/163