Ampere, open-source battery charge control for Apple Silicon Macs

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Ampere — Smart battery manager for Apple Silicon Macs

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Download<br>Buy

For Apple Silicon &middot; macOS 14+<br>Take charge of your battery.

Ampere lives in your menu bar, watches every watt, and keeps your<br>MacBook&rsquo;s battery in the healthy zone — so it ages years slower.

Buy a license<br>Download free

brew install --cask az-code-lab/taps/ampere

Version 0.0.56 &middot; Free to try &middot; One‑time license, no subscription

Charging to 70% — then holds

94% health &middot; 61 cycles

Everything your battery<br>wants you to know.

And every control it wishes you had. All two clicks away, all the time.

Live power telemetry

Adapter, battery, and system wattage. Voltages, currents, temperature, cycles, health, battery age — a dozen readouts, always current.

Charge bounds

Pick a healthy range like 40–60%. Ampere charges at the bottom of it, holds in the middle, and stops at the top. Automatically.

Micro-charge prevention

No fragmented top-ups — even across restarts. Between bounds, charging stays off until you ask, so every cycle runs full: lower to upper.

Charge & discharge on demand

One toggle tops you up to the upper bound. Another actively drains down to it — even with the charger plugged in.

Survives anything

Bounds and in-progress charges resume after a relaunch. If Ampere is ever force-killed, a watchdog restores your Mac&rsquo;s defaults within seconds.

Verified in-app updates

Update right from the panel. Every download is verified against the Homebrew cask&rsquo;s SHA-256 and Apple&rsquo;s code signature before install.

Live menu-bar icon &middot; hover for status<br>Sleep-safe charging<br>Pinnable panel<br>Launch at login<br>Periodic health checks

Built around<br>the healthy zone.

Lithium-ion cells age fastest parked at 100% or drained near empty.<br>Ampere keeps yours cruising in the band you choose — and never<br>wastes a charge cycle getting there.

Below your lower bound Charging starts, and runs all the way to the top of your range — closing the lid won&rsquo;t cut it short or overshoot it.

Between bounds Ampere holds steady. No charging until you ask — or you dip below.

Above your upper bound Charging stays off — or actively discharge back down, even on AC power.

Auto charge

40%

60%

0%25%50%75%100%

Charging — holds at the upper bound

Safe by design.<br>Reversible by default.

Ampere touches low-level charge controls, so it&rsquo;s built to leave no trace. Curious how, exactly? Read the full technical details &rarr;

Quit = clean slate

Closing Ampere restores every system default — charging, sleep, everything. Crash or force-kill? A root watchdog daemon cleans up within seconds.

A helper you can trust

Charge control runs through one tiny root helper, pinned to its SHA-256 digest in sudoers. A swapped or tampered binary is simply refused.

Always double-checking

Health checks continuously verify the hardware state matches what you asked for. If anything drifts, Ampere warns you and turns its icon orange.

Open source

MIT-licensed on GitHub. Read every line that touches your machine — or build it yourself. View the source &rarr;

Up and running<br>in a minute.

Install

brew install --cask az-code-lab/taps/ampere

or download Ampere.dmg and drag it to Applications.

Grant admin once

Ampere installs its charge-control helper with a single password prompt. That&rsquo;s the last one you&rsquo;ll see until the helper itself updates.

Set your bounds

Turn on auto charge, pick a range, and forget about it. Your battery takes it from here.

One license.<br>Yours forever.

Free to download and try for as long as you like. Buying a license registers your Mac and supports development.

Ampere License

$…one‑time

One key registers one Mac — move it to a new machine anytime

Key delivered instantly on screen and by email

Free updates, right in the app

14-day money-back guarantee

Macs

&minus;

Name

Email for your keys

Keys are delivered to this address and can only be registered with it — double-check it.

Buy now<br>Pay with PayPal

Secure checkout by Stripe or PayPal &middot; Apple Pay, Google Pay & cards

Questions, answered.

macOS already has a charge limit. Why Ampere?<br>The macOS limit is a ceiling only, and it only goes from 80% to 100%. A ceiling parks the battery at the limit for as long as you stay plugged in, and time spent resting at a high charge level is what ages lithium-ion fastest. Apple&rsquo;s own guidance for long-term storage is around 50%, a level the built-in limit can&rsquo;t reach. Ampere holds a range instead: you choose both ends of the band, say 40 to 80%. Charging stays off while the battery drifts down to the lower bound, then runs one whole pass back to the upper. The battery lives at a lower average charge, in fewer, fuller cycles, in whatever band you choose. Set it once and stop thinking about the battery.

Which Macs does Ampere support?<br>Apple Silicon Macs (M1 and later) running macOS 14 Sonoma or newer. Intel Macs use different charge-control hardware and...

ampere charge battery rsquo charging apple

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