“Many of the most modern Macs have processors which include a feature called Turbo Boost, this feature allows a processor to temporarily run above its standard clock rate when requested by the operating system,” OS X Daily writes. “Turbo Boost can accelerate the performance of a Mac (or a PC for that matter) but it can also lead to increased energy usage, meaning the Mac may run hotter and the MacBook battery may drain faster when it is activated. Accordingly, some advanced Mac users may wish to toggle this feature themselves, manually disabling TurboBoost when they wish to prolong battery life at the expense of general computing performance. Of course, you can also re-enable Turbo Boost, which is the default state on modern Macs.”
“To accomplish this task, we’ll use a third party Mac tool called ‘Turbo Boost Switcher for OS X’ that is compatible with OS X El Capitan but not MacOS Sierra (yet), this app also requires a modern Mac CPU like a Core i5 or Core i7,” OS X Daily writes. “he utility will load and unload kernel extensions to force TurboBoost to be disabled or back to the enabled default state through user interaction with a menu bar item.”
OS X Daily writes, “This utility is truly only intended for advanced users, if you are not comfortable with the idea of modifying kernel extensions and the ramifications of that, using uncertified third party software, nor the idea of intentionally slowing down a Mac by disabling hardware features, this is not for you.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve done this in the past and it has worked to eke out some extra battery life while on the road.
