ASK
TECH SUPPORT & TECHSPLANATIONS
Our resident genius Howard Oakley solves your Mac and iOS problems
EXPERT ADVICE
Batteries & efficiency
SOME APPS LIKE Keka, the free compression utility, now give you the option of doing their work on the efficiency (E) cores of an Apple silicon Mac, where they take longer, but can use as little as 20% of the energy they would if run normally on its performance (P) cores. For a Mac notebook running on its battery, this can extend its endurance before it needs charging.
For other apps that lack similar controls, St. Clair Software’s App Tamer (https://stclairsoft.com) is worth a try, or the taskpolicy command with its –b option in Terminal for its tools. The worst thing you can do is to run a virtual machine (VM), as those are power–hungry and will run your battery down faster than running the same app normally. Low Power Mode will also help, as that slows the chip’s cores at relatively little cost to its performance.