This guide will show you exactly how you can determine and continue to monitor the health of the battery in your Mac laptop (MacBook, MacBook Air & MacBook Pro).
Using coconutBattery, a free program from Coconut Software, you can watch as your battery performance gets worse over time – and get detailed info about your battery in general. This is the same app we use to monitor the battery health of your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
Download coconutBattery here. Unzip the downloaded file and then drag coconutBattery.app to your Applications folder to install it. Launch it from there. Note: if you’re running an older version of macOS (10.7 to 10.11), visit the coconutBattery home page and scroll to the FAQ section. The last item in the list has the location of earlier versions of the app that you can use.
The main window is very self-explanatory – the Current Charge and Full Charge Capacity indicate the current state of your battery. The Design Capacity indicates the level your battery “should” be at when it leaves the factory. You can also get information on when your battery was actually created, how many times it has cycled from full to “needs to be charged”, and the battery temperature.
If you click the Battery Info… button even more info will be revealed.
Select the History tab at the top and you can see how your battery has changed over time.
Click the Open History Viewer button for a very detailed list of the health information of your Mac laptop battery over time.
One of the features you may find helpful if you want to keep a very close eye on your battery health is to have it run all the time and reside in your main Menu Bar. With the app still open, select coconutBattery from the Menu Bar and then Preferences… from the pull-down list. In the Preferences window, place a check in the box labelled Run coconutBattery in the background and show information in the Menu Bar
This will add a new battery icon to your Menu Bar. Click it and you’re presented with more information than the default/built into macOS battery notification item in your Menu Bar.
One other thing that shows just how much thought was put into this app – if you select Print, a very nicely organized template will appear with all of your battery information ready to be printed.
There’s a ‘plus’ version of coconutBattery that you may be interested in as it has even more features.
Nice find. A must for any ibook or mac book owner.
After consulting CoconutBattery – I definitely need a new battery. Bleah…
I definitely need to check this program out, because my MacBook battery (about a year and a half old, now) is getting worse and worse at holding a charge.