Settings steganography
July 16, 2025 at 12:10 PM by Dr. Drang
Last week, I was going to be out with my MacBook Pro all day, and I wanted to make sure it was fully charged. I had noticed that it was typically charging up only to about 80%, and I assumed that was because Sequoia was doing some clever battery-life-lengthening thing. I wanted to turn the clever thing off so I could get the battery to 100% just for that day.
You will probably not be shocked to hear that I didn’t find the solution by simply opening System Settings and scanning the Battery panel—I had to do a Kagi search for it. It wasn’t that the toggle was buried several layers deep or that it was outside the Battery hierarchy. No, the problem was that Apple had put the toggle in a place where toggles—or any kind of control or data entry field—don’t belong.
Here’s the Battery settings panel:
The two popup menus in the Energy Mode section of the panel aren’t what I wanted, so I assumed the setting for turning off battery optimization would be found via the button down at the bottom of the panel. But it wasn’t in the window that appeared when I clicked it.
Well, I’ve already given away the secret with the red arrow in the first screenshot. You have to click the ⓘ button near the top right corner. That brings up this window with the toggle I was looking for.
Turning the toggle off brought up this further set of options:
Before I start complaining, let me say this final dialog box is nice. You can turn off optimized charging permanently if you want, but the default is to just turn it off for a day. The clear implication is that Apple thinks you should use non-optimized charging rarely, and it will help you turn it back on tomorrow if you forget.
Now for the complaint: none of this should be behind the ⓘ button. The “i” clearly means “information,” and when I click on it, I expect to be given information, not to give it. Just as you wouldn’t put toggles or other controls behind the ?⃝ button, you shouldn’t put them behind the ⓘ.
I know there’s always talk of Apple losing its way in user interface design. And that talk has been especially loud since the release of the xxxOS 26 betas. My Mastodon timeline has been filled with criticism of Liquid Glass and Alan Dye for weeks, and it’s tiresome to read the constant grousing. But then I run into this, and I need to do some grousing myself.