battery VS BetterDisplay

Apple took this out of Mac OS somewhat recently. You can try to rely on their power management, but given battery decay is a common reason to buy a new machine I don’t trust them really.

If you have an Apple Silicon Mac I can recommend Battery [1]. It can keep your Mac at 80%, and even force discharge while plugged in to get there. It’s a CLI and status bar utility, I love it.

[1: https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery]

After trying Battery (https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery, it is Electron UI, big in size), I created batteryKid (https://github.com/alaneuler/batteryKid) with native Swift as a coding exercise out of curiosity.

Otherwise, some other things I like is keeping my battery at 80% with this app: https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery

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 on GitHub[0] for the explanation and this snippet[1] for easy use.

[0] https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery/pull/163

Another AlDente alternate (which I use already) is Battery.

I just keep the charge always under 80% https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery

But not sure if its the same utility I use https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery Both commands: battery adapter off

Anyways, al dente didn’t do the job for me. I found this https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery it also discharges and keep it to whatever percentage you feel comfortable with with. So now it’s always on 80, which I prefer.

https://github.com/actuallymentor/battery free and does the same

> the 4K monitors the author recommends are not good for macOS due to them not supporting native retina scaling above 1080p

Is this true even with the help of 3rd party apps?

My 3840x1600 ultrawide has that problem using the native screen resolution tools but I can get it to full-res HiDPI using BetterDisplay [0].

[0] https://betterdisplay.pro/

2. "BetterDisplay" for better scaling quality on bigger screens, especially if you have a 4k ultrawide. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

It isn't a device, it's a software tool. It doesn't make the monitor magically 2x the resolution; it can trick macos to render onto a 5k buffer and then downscale the output to the physical display so it looks not-broken.

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

I'm not saying that it'll make 4k look good. I'm saying macOS is unusable on native resolutions - everything is either too small or too blurry, so a 4k display won't do me any good. 25x14 is the sweet spot for me, but I guess Apple decided I'm holding it wrong.

Download BetterDisplay (free to try, $18 for Pro, and well worth it IMO): https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

This article is very good to explain this ppi thing https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ also an extra app can make some monitors display sharper (hidpi) https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

It can be found here: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

So I installed the Better Display 2 app [link] , enabled HiDPI 1280x720, and suddenly everything looked both extremely sharp and in a good size. Judging by the size of the screenshot, it mimics Retina 2560 × 1440 and scales it down 2x to 1280x720, making it HiDPI. I can totally recommend you to do as I did.