AlDente

AlDente is a macOS menu-bar utility from AppHouseKitchen that lets you cap your MacBook's battery charging level, protecting lithium-ion cells from the degradation that comes with constantly sitting at 100% while plugged in.

What is AlDente?

AlDente is a battery charge limiter for MacBook. It intercepts the charging process at whatever ceiling you choose — most people land between 60% and 80% — and holds it there, preventing the perpetual top-up cycle that quietly kills battery capacity over years of desk use.

The core problem it solves is a well-documented quirk of lithium chemistry: cells age faster when stored fully charged. Apple's own Optimized Battery Charging helps at night, but it doesn't give you direct, persistent control over the hard limit. AlDente does. Set it once and forget it; your MacBook charges to 75% and stays there whether it's plugged in for an hour or a week.

What does AlDente do best?

AlDente's single strongest trick is its rock-solid charge cap — but the free tier alone makes it worth installing. Beyond that, the paid Pro tier layers in a feature set that genuinely changes how I think about battery care.

• Charge Limiter — the headline feature; set any target percentage and the app holds it.
• Sailing Mode — when the MacBook is already above your cap, it runs entirely from the power adapter and stops drawing from the battery altogether, so the cells aren't kept in a high-voltage holding pattern.
• Heat Protection — automatically pauses charging when the battery temperature climbs, because heat and high charge are the two fastest ways to shorten lithium lifespan.
• Discharge Calibration — schedules a controlled discharge-and-recharge cycle to keep the battery percentage reading accurate.
• Menu-bar live stats — glanceable voltage, temperature, cycle count, and charge flow direction without opening System Information.

Where AlDente wins over Apple's own Optimized Charging is in explicitness. You choose the number; the system obeys. There's no ambiguity about whether the optimization kicked in or when it might charge to full.

Is AlDente free?

AlDente has a genuinely useful free tier: the charge limiter itself — the core reason most people install it — costs nothing. The Pro upgrade, sold as an annual subscription or a one-time purchase through the AppHouseKitchen website, unlocks Sailing Mode, Heat Protection, the Discharge feature, detailed statistics, and several quality-of-life extras.

For a MacBook that rarely leaves the desk, the free tier may be all you ever need. I ran it free for several months before deciding the Sailing Mode and heat monitoring were worth the upgrade for a machine that logs eight-hour plugged-in sessions every day.

Who should use AlDente?

Anyone whose MacBook spends the majority of its life connected to power. That includes remote workers with a permanent desk setup, developers running long builds on AC, and students who basically treat their laptop as a desktop. If your MacBook's battery is regularly at or near 100% for hours at a stretch, AlDente is one of the highest-leverage things you can install for the long-term health of a machine that costs a significant amount of money.

If you're constantly mobile — unplugging at 8 a.m. and using battery all day — AlDente is less relevant; your usage pattern naturally keeps the battery cycling rather than sitting full.

What are the best AlDente alternatives?

The closest competitor is Battery Toolkit, a free and open-source option that covers the basic charge-limit use case with a no-frills interface. coconutBattery overlaps on diagnostics and cycle-count visibility but doesn't actively limit charging. Apple's built-in Optimized Battery Charging (System Settings → Battery) is the zero-install option, but it learns your schedule rather than giving you a hard cap, which makes it less predictable for irregular work patterns. AlDente sits in the middle: friendlier than a terminal-based smcFanControl-style hack, richer than Apple's native option, and actively maintained with new features.

How does AlDente compare to Apple's Optimized Battery Charging?

Apple's built-in feature is better than nothing — it delays the final charge surge until shortly before you typically unplug, reducing time spent at 100%. But it's opaque: you can't set a hard ceiling, you can't see the real-time battery temperature, and if your schedule is irregular it often guesses wrong. AlDente gives you deterministic control. You say 75%, you get 75%, always. That predictability is the whole point for power users who want to own the decision rather than delegate it to a machine-learning heuristic.