A portable Mac has a crucial element that we must keep an eye on: the battery. One of the ways to do it is checking the battery cycles that our Mac has, a variable that tells us how much use we have given it and how much longer it can last. Because batteries wear out and have a finite life, although under normal conditions they last for many years.
It is a very similar situation to when we saw how to know the battery cycles of the iPhone. For Macs released in the last 6 or 7 years, Apple estimates 1,000 battery cycles before falling below 80% of its original capacity. Keep this in mind in case you can claim a replacement before the warranty expires.
How to know the cycles of my Mac battery quickly
The quickest way to check how many battery cycles your Mac has is via system report. To do so, just follow these steps:
- Click the apple in the menu and choose About This Mac.
- In the General tab we choose System Report.
- In the Power section, we will look for the Number of cycles section.
Next to it there will be a number, which tells us how many charge cycles does the battery of our Mac have.
How to know the battery cycles through Terminal
So far the quick version. For the most given to rummage in Terminal, there is a command that allows us to know the number of battery charge cycles. Just follow these steps:
- Press cmd + spacebar and type Terminal.
- Open the app that appears in the list or suggestion.
- Type the following “ioreg -l -w0 | grep Capacity” without the quotes and press enter.
- Find the text “CycleCountLastQmax” without the quotes.
There will be a number after this word that will be your Mac’s battery cycles.
Use CoconutBattery to find out Mac battery cycles
The third option falls on the third-party app CoconutBattery, free to download. Just download this appplace it in the Applications folder and open it to show us the load cycles of our Mac. The section that interests us is “Cycle Count”, where we will see the cycles below.
As we can see, throughout all the captures that we have detailed in this article match mac battery charge cycles to 50 cycles. Not bad at all for a MacBook Air M1 purchased in July 2021 and used almost daily ever since. At this rate, I will reach 1,000 cycles in about 9 or 10 years.
