Apple released a few hours ago the fifth update for Catalina: macOS 10.15.5. In this version, new features as interesting as improvements in battery health management, FaceTime options and various bug fixes arrive.
Battery health and various bug fixes
The main novelty of this version is the new battery health option that is introduced in the system. With this tool, the system, dynamically based on various measurements, can decide to charge the battery up to less than 100%. By doing so, although the time of use of the computer may decrease slightly, it helps the battery to be charged at an optimal level for use, reducing its deterioration and slowing down its aging.
Apple explains it in a support document:
Using the measurements taken as a reference, battery status management can reduce the maximum battery charge when in this mode. This will occur whenever necessary to ensure that the battery is charged to a level optimized for use, thereby reducing its deterioration and slowing chemical aging.
In addition to increasing long-term battery life, the battery condition management feature also reduces the time the Mac runs on a single battery charge when capacity limits are applied. If your priority is for the battery of your Mac laptop to have the maximum autonomy before recharging it, you can disable the function.
There are other interesting news coming to this version of macOS. For example, the adjustment that allows FaceTime to show all the video windows of the same size during a Group Video FaceTime call or the calibration of the Apple Pro Display XDR screen that now allows adjusting the white point and luminance according to our needs.
As for bug fixes and other small improvements this version of macOS brings the following:
- Improved a bug that prevented Reminders from sending recurring reminder notifications.
- Fixes a bug that could prevent you from entering your password on the login screen.
- Fixes a bug where System Preferences kept showing a notification even after installing an update.
- Resolves an error where the integrated camera could not be detected correctly when you wanted to use it after using it in a video conferencing app.
- Fixes a bug on Macs with the T2 security chip whereby internal speakers could disappear from the output device panel in Sound preferences.
- Fix a stability bug with uploading and downloading files to iCloud photo library when mac was idle.
- Resolves stability error when transferring large amounts of data to RAID volumes.
- Resolves an error where the Reduce Movement option in the Accessibility panel did not slow down the animations of a FaceTime group call.
As we can see the list of improvements and corrections is quite extensive. Probably macOS 1.15.5 will be the last or penultimate major system update before the arrival of its successor that we will meet in just under a month at WWDC on June 22.