The tech giant Apple released macOS Catalina 10.15.5 today, adding a new battery health feature and new FaceTime options. That battery health feature could extend the life of your MacBook’s battery.
The battery health management feature in macOS 10.15.5 is designed to improve your battery’s lifespan by reducing the rate at which it chemically ages. The feature does this by monitoring your battery’s temperature history and its charging patterns.
Based on the measurements that it collects, battery health management may reduce your battery’s maximum charge when in this mode. This happens as needed to ensure that your battery charges to a level that’s optimized for your usage — reducing wear on the battery, and slowing its chemical aging.
The new battery health feature will be turned on by default for new MacBooks that ship with macOS 10.15.5 or after you upgrade to macOS 10.15.5 if you’re using a MacBook that supports Thunderbolt 3 (which is any MacBook Pro released in 2016 or later or any MacBook Air released in 2018 or later).
macOS 10.15.5 will also let you turn off the feature in group FaceTime calls that changes the size of the portrait of the current speaker, adds controls to let you better calibrate the Pro Display XDR, and has other bug fixes and improvements.
macOS Catalina 10.15.5 is available now through the System Preferences application for Mac users. You can check the full release notes for today’s update below:
macOS Catalina 10.15.5 introduces battery health management in the Energy Saver settings for notebooks, an option to control automatic prominence of video tiles on Group FaceTime calls, and controls to fine-tune the built-in calibration of your Pro Display XDR. The update also improves the stability, reliability, and security of your Mac.
macOS Catalina 10.15.5 is available now through the System Preferences application for Mac users. You can check the full release notes for today’s update below:
Battery Health Management
- Battery health management to help maximize battery lifespan for Mac notebooks
- Energy Saver preference pane now displays battery condition and recommends if the battery needs to be serviced
- Option to disable battery health management
FaceTime Prominence Preference
- Option to control automatic prominence on Group FaceTime calls so video tiles do not change size when a participant speaks
Calibration Fine-Tuning for Pro Display XDR
- Controls to fine-tune the built-in calibration of your Pro Display XDR by adjusting the white point and luminance for a precise match to your own display calibration target
This update also includes bug fixes and other improvements.
- Fixes an issue that may prevent Reminders from sending notifications for recurring reminders
- Addresses an issue that may prevent password entry on the login screen
- Fixes an issue where System Preferences would continue to show a notification badge even after installing an update
- Resolves an issue where the built-in camera may not be detected when trying to use it after using a video conferencing app
- Addresses an issue for Mac computers with the Apple T2 Security Chip where internal speakers may not appear as a sound output device in Sound preferences
- Fixes a stability issue with uploading and downloading media files from iCloud Photo Library while your Mac is asleep
- Resolves a stability issue when transferring large amounts of data to RAID volumes
- Fixes an issue where the Reduce Motion Accessibility preference did not reduce the speed of animations in a FaceTime group call
Some features may not be available for all regions, or on all Apple devices.
Bijay Pokharel
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