Is there a Mac software that saves battery life?

I had a samsung and it had an option to let the battery charge only upto 80% which would preserve its battery life. Is there such a function downloadable for both Mac and Windows?

 

I don't know if there is a program for that but the MBP itself won't let the battery fully charge under OS X (I am sure the same is true in bootcamp). So you don't need a third party program as that functionality is built-in.

 

So does that mean that even when it says 100% it is not fully charged?

 

That is not the same thing. I do understand the OP, as my Vaio does have this built in in the vaio control panel.

You can try searching the app store, but apple by itself doesn't allow it. You should guess from the fact that the battery was moved inside with the unibody design that apple intends to make big bucks replacing batteries.

 

So not letting it fully charge is not the same thing as what the OP is asking for? Granted, it doesn't stop at 80% but the system does not fully allow the battery to completely fill up.

Correct. From my experience, it is normally around the 93-95% full but the battery indicator in OS X shows it as being 100%.

 

No, the battery is fully charged at 100%.

I think you're slightly misusing terminology. You're looking to maximize your battery health. To get the most battery life (battery runtime) out of your battery, you would want to charge it up to 100%.

To optimize your battery health, you need to go through a full battery cycle once a month, at minimum. You also need to keep it in room temperature. If you can achieve these requirements, your battery should last for the number of cycles for which it is rated. Newer apple laptops are designed to last up to 1000 cycles. The battery will most likely not last much longer than about 5 years regardless, so you can go through a full charge / discharge cycle slightly less than once a day or so without hurting the battery.

Examples of 1 full battery cycle:

Example 1: from 100% charge, discharge to 0%, then charge to 100%.
Example 2: from 60% charge, discharge to 40%, and charge back up to 60%. Repeat 4 more times.

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There is nothing about keeping the battery below 80% charge to maximize its lifespan.

 

masterchef341 has got it exactly right. Here's the skinny from the horse's mouth:

https://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

 

Lithium Polymer should never be charged to full capacity. And it should never be drained completely in order to prolong the life span on the cells.

 

The thing about the full battery discharge is technically very harmful from a hardware perspective, but somewhat "necessary" from a software perspective to keep things calibrated properly (e.g. keeps estimated battery life accurate).

You should not fully discharge it unless you're getting clearly false readings.

 

If you're looking to increase your battery life, there have been a few programs in the news lately that suspend certain services (Safari windows, Flash, etc) to improve battery life on portables:

BatterySqueezer Extracts Extra Life from Your MacBook's Battery

To be honest, your best bet is just keeping brightness down, disable Bluetooth when not using it, and keep an eye on runaway processes. I use a menu bar CPU metering app (iStat menus) to keep an eye on my processor usage. There are some apps that keep polling the internet (Dropbox, for example) that reduce my battery life a bit, so I usually keep DB off unless I'm working with files in it.

 

For the record, my 2009 MacBook Pro rarely if ever comes off AC, and has a cycle count of (2). The battery still holds 99% charge.