Battery charge question (80% or not 80%) ?

There is no need to micromanage your battery; holding it at 80% accomplishes nothing but shorter times between charging.

Turn battery optimization ON and let your Mac handle the battery's health. Charging to 100% is not a bad thing with modern batteries. In fact, you can keep it "on charge" 24/7 with no ill effects. 100% should be the goal of charging once optimization learns your habits.

98% is excellent.

IMHO and as an Macbook Pro owner since Jan 2008, what I see is normal proper performance.

ku4hx's term "eye candy" is a good one. Health's only real use is so Apple can determine if a battery should be replaced under warranty.

The problem is to some extent, math. "Health" as displayed is current full-charge capacity divided by the "design capacity." The latter is an AVERAGE of all batteries of that specification. That means some individual batteries will have actual new capacities that are more than the average and some less. I have an Macbook Pro whose "health reported as 102 % when it arrived from Apple.

So the "divisor" (design capacity) in the heath equation is not a constant. It varies from battery to battery.

Health is also seriously non-linear over time. How about some data? Data good; guessing bad.

Look at this one-year report from my 10-year old Macbook Pro whose original battery today is at 80 percent but still reports "normal" and provides decent runtimes:

Between June 5 and June 25 2022—20 days— "health" plummeted nine points, then recovered. 15 months later is still showing 80%.

So do you want to deplete your "worry account" on something that is so inexact? I'll save mine for more important worries.

Uninstall your third party battery management app. The MacOS manages the power/charging system very well.

Cycle count is essentially eye candy. If you left your MacBook on charge for a solid 10 years the cycle count would be very, very low. Maybe only 1 or 2 or so. But the battery would still degrade. And degradation is neither predictable nor linear.

21 cycles after nine months? That count sounds low. While I don't know how often you use your MBP, my new 15P is up to cycle count 13, battery setting's to 80%, and have had it since day one. My phone spends about 60% of its battery reserve each day. Safari is the most inefficient application, but I like it.

Allan Jones wrote:

So do you want to deplete your "worry account" on something that is so inexact? I'll save mine for more important worries.

That is an awesome way of expressing it!