Mac battery tools

Updated 23 August 2026 · every command on these pages was run in both zsh and bash on this machine before it was published. Who measures this.

Your Mac measures far more about its battery than it shows you. These three pages hand you the commands that print the rest, with a table explaining what each number means. None asks for a password, none installs anything, and nothing you type leaves the machine.

The three

Mac battery health checker
Your Mac stores two capacity figures and displays one of them, rounded. This prints both in milliamp hours next to the design capacity, along with the cycle count. It also labels the key that half the guides on the internet misread as health.

How many watts is your Mac using right now
Live power draw from the battery's own current and voltage. The reading has one genuinely strange property, which the page is mostly about: it looks broken exactly when it is the answer, and looks fine when it is not.

Your Mac's battery keeps a diary
Fifteen counters that have been running since the cells were manufactured: total hours, temperature extremes, the largest currents ever pushed. No battery app we know of displays them, and one of the fields is not even a number.

Why commands instead of a web form

A page cannot read your battery. Anything claiming to check your Mac's health in a browser is either asking you to paste output you had to fetch yourself, or guessing. Handing you the command is the honest version of the same service, and it leaves the output on your machine.

What a command cannot do is watch. Every recipe here is a snapshot, and most battery questions are about change over time: what the charge did overnight, which app moved the number, whether quitting something helped. That is the part WattMate exists for, and it is why these pages give you the reading rather than a sales pitch.

Questions people ask

Do any of these need my password?

No. All three read values macOS already exposes to any user. The one common tool that does demand administrator rights is powermetrics, and it says so plainly when you run it.

Will they work on an Intel Mac?

Partly, and the differences matter. Several keys hold different quantities on Intel than on Apple silicon, which is exactly why old guides give wrong answers on new machines. Each page says what changes.

Is anything written to disk or uploaded?

No. The commands read and print. Nothing is saved, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Why is there no tool for overnight wake-ups?

Because we already published that measurement rather than a recipe: who wakes your Mac at night names the services, shows the counting trap most guides fall into, and explains why our own first ranking had to be withdrawn.