Following the steps outlined in this guide you’ll be able to monitor the battery charge of your iPhone or iPad right from within your Mac. You’ll even get a notification when a battery is running low.
Using the fantastic Batteries for Mac app you’ll be able to monitor the battery levels from the Today panel in the Notification Center of your Mac. If you’ve visited Simple Help before, you’ll know we typically prefer to utilize free and/or Open Source software. Batteries for Mac is neither, but it’s very reasonably priced at $5 – and we’re big fans of supporting truly great software. There’s a 14 day completely free trial, so you’ll have two weeks to decide if you want to buy it. Update: if you’d like a (currently) free alternative, try out iBetterCharge.
- Head over to the Batteries for Mac home page and download the .tar.gz file (which is very much like a .zip file) – just double-click it and the Archive Utility will open and extract the Batteries.app file. Drag that file to your Applications folder to install Batteries for Mac.
- Make sure that your iPhone and/or iPad is configured to allow WiFi sync in iTunes (macOS Mojave) or Show this device when on Wi-Fi in Finder (macOS Catalina) and that your iOS devices are on the same WiFi network as your computer.
- Now launch Batteries from your Applications folder. There isn’t very much to it – just make sure to check the Enabled box next to Notifications. Then place a check next to each of the devices that you want to monitor and if you’d like to be notified when that specific device is running low on power. When you’ve adjusted your preferences to suit you, exit out of this window.
- Click the Open Notification Center button from the very upper-right corner of your screen.
- Select the Today tab.
- Click the New button at the bottom of the panel.
- Locate the newly added BATTERIES item and click the ‘plus sign’ (see screenshot below) to add it to your Today screen.
- Use the ‘3 dashes’ icon to drag the newly added panel up or down until you find the location where you’d like it to reside.
- Click the Done button.
- Ta-da! A dedicated section of your Today panel will now contain the battery percentages of your devices. If a particular device is charging at the time, it’ll have a small ‘lightning bolt’ icon next to it.
- As soon as one of your devices hits 20% remaining in the battery charge, a notification will pop up on your Mac.
If you’re concerned about the overall health of your iPhone or iPad battery, check out this guide.
