Show Remaining Battery Life in the Mac OS X Menu Bar
I recently got a MacBook Air 11.6″ and while showing it to a friend they complained that they can’t see the remaining battery life with the press of a button like you can on the MacBook Pro. This is true, but what you can do is set the Mac OS X menu bar to show remaining battery life as either a time or percentage.
- Click on the Battery icon in the upper right corner
- Pull down to ‘Show’ and select ‘Time’ or ‘Percentage’
This provides you with a continuous update on battery life and works on any of the Mac notebook lineups. I find time remaining to be most informative.
You can also use the time remaining gauge as an indicator of a runaway process that could drain your battery life, like Flash in an inactive browser tab. I’ve been trying to achieve the 7 hour battery life but so far the highest I can hit on this MacBook Air is about 5 hours with light use.
Since I wasn’t very happy with the on-board battery indicator, I looked around a bit and found the great “SlimBatteryMonitor” that even indicates remaining charging-time:
http://www.orange-carb.org/SBM/index.html
This looks nice I will check it out, thanks
this is great, only want the percent since i like to have is minimal
i am really surprised if there any mac user who would benefit from this article. isn’t battery life the most basic thing that any mac user would have to know in the first place.
I use iStat Menus, that way I can show both time remaining and percentage.
……… And with iStat you can put the icon of the battery vertically, so it uses less space in your menu bar
I use iStats as well, since the icon is smaller (acutally customizable). I have it set to display remaining time if not plugged in (which is pretty accurate!), and the percentage if plugged in. I find this the most usefull setting. I’ve tried SlimBatteryMonitor as well, didn’t like the design.
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