How to see the status of your Mac’s battery

MacBooks excel when it comes to battery life. After a while, however, the battery may start to lose steam: here's how to check its health

One of the strong points of Apple laptops is, without a shadow of a doubt, their battery. Whether it's a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro, it doesn't matter: every single charge guarantees an autonomy of over 10 hours of use (which becomes 30 days if the PC is left on standby).

Most MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, depending on the model, are equipped with batteries that guarantee up to 1,000 charging cycles. In short, while "consuming" one charging cycle per day, the MacBooks' battery will continue to perform well for at least three years of use. With a little attention, then, it will be possible to maintain the battery in a good state of health for a period of time even longer. This doesn't mean, however, that the battery will have eternal life: after a while it will still start to lose some of its shocks, up to the point of forcing us to buy a new laptop.

If you have any suspicions and you want to check if the Mac battery has reached the end of its life cycle, there are some tricks that will allow you to find out.

How to check the charging cycles of a Mac laptop

The first thing to do to see the status of the Mac battery is to check the charging cycles made over time. To do this, you will need to access the system menu by clicking on the bitten apple icon in the top left corner and select "System Information". From here choose the Hardware section and then click Energy: on the right side of the screen you'll see all the most important information about your MacBook's battery.

Just look for the item "Battery condition information": in correspondence you'll find the number of completed charging cycles and a "summary" evaluation of the battery's health status (you may find written "Normal" if the battery is new or "Change as soon as possible" if it has already given its best). The Cupertino company's laptops also have an alternative method of checking the battery's integrity status: just press the "Option" button and click on the battery icon in the menu bar.