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macOS · Menu bar

BatteryBuddy

The battery numbers macOS keeps to itself: cycle count, temperature, and how fast capacity is falling

Coming soon
Notify me when it ships

About BatteryBuddy

BatteryBuddy reads IOKit's AppleSmartBattery directly, to surface the figures macOS keeps out of sight: exact cycle count, battery temperature, live charge and discharge wattage, design capacity against current maximum, and health as the ratio of the two. A charge history chart drawn with Swift Charts is built to cover 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days from samples kept in a local SQLite file, with a second graph following max capacity as it falls week over week. Alerts are set to fire when health drops under 80%, temperature passes 35°C, or the machine has sat plugged in at 100% for too long.

Who it's for

MacBook users who want to make a battery last longer, working from real numbers.

What it does

  • Battery health %, cycle count, and temperature
  • Real-time charge/discharge wattage
  • Design vs current max capacity in mAh
  • Charge history chart (24h, 7d, 30d) via Swift Charts
  • Health trend graph showing capacity decline
  • Alerts for low health, high temp, and overcharging
  • Menu bar display: % only, % + health, or icon only

Behind the build

IOKit's AppleSmartBattery exposes dozens of keys that macOS never surfaces in System Information.

The tricky part was calculating real-time wattage from InstantAmperage × Voltage (both raw values from the SMC), and storing 5-minute samples efficiently in SQLite without bloating the database over months of use.

Information

Runs on
macOS · Menu bar
Status
Coming soon
Requires
macOS 13+
Source
Not public
Telemetry
None
Built with
Swift & SwiftUI
Stack
SwiftUIIOKitSQLiteSwift Charts

Works well with

  • Carbon

    BatteryBuddy tracks battery health, Carbon tracks energy consumption

BatteryBuddy is on the way.

Planned and in progress. Leave an email and you'll hear when it's out.

Tell me when it ships

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