MacOS Catalina 10.15.5 has received a mode to extend the battery life of Macbooks. A finder bug has also been fixed.

Apple has released a new version of its operating system with MacOS Catalina 10.15.5. The new MacOS is supposed to intelligently manage the charging of the battery with a view to a longer battery life. Until now, this was only available for the iPhone with iOS, but not for Apple’s desktop operating system.

The function is designed to prevent chemical aging of the battery. The computer is not throttled. The so-called Battery Health Management from MacOS rather aims to monitor the temperature of the battery and the charging pattern in order to reduce the maximum charge depending on use. The function can also be deactivated to extend the runtime.

Battery health management is only supported on Macbook Air and Macbook Pro models that have Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Apple also fixed a bug that occurred when copying large data in MacOS Catalina. The file manager, however, only got into difficulties when copying, when several 100 GB were involved, and crashed or became very slow.

Apple will presumably already be introducing MacOS 10.16 in summer 2020, even if only virtually at the WWDC developer event instead of at a large public event.

MacOS Catalina 10.15.5 can be downloaded and installed over-the-air.