Changelog

Mac

1.2.26 — One night, counted once

A same-day fix to the sleep drain report in 1.2.25.

• The same night could be recorded several times. macOS keeps roughly a week of power history and then discards the oldest, so the record of a long sleep can lose its own beginning. ThunderVolt was reading the next line it found as the start, which gave that night a slightly later start time every few hours — and each one was filed as a separate sleep. A night whose true beginning is no longer on record is now left out rather than guessed at.
• Your stored sleep history is rebuilt from scratch on this update, because the affected entries cannot be told apart from real ones after the fact. Up to a week of history is re-read automatically.

The displayed figures were never wrong — the most recent sleep, which is what the card shows, was always a real one.

Mac

1.2.25 — What it did while you weren’t looking

Thirteen releases since 1.2.12, gathered into one update. Most of the work went into features that run unattended — and into finding the places where they failed without saying so.

New

• Sleep drain report. macOS records every sleep, every wake and the charge at each one, and gives you no way to read it. ThunderVolt now turns that into a single line on Overview: how much charge your last sleep cost, at what rate, and what kept waking the Mac. It appears only when the night was worse than normal — a card that says “fine” every morning is one nobody reads.
• Travel charging plans a top-up around a flight in your calendar, and now says which event opened the window — and why, if it closes one early.
• Calibration runs as a five-phase automated cycle with real progress instead of a bar that was always full.
• Ecosystem shows every device, when each was last seen, and which sync path is actually carrying the data. Devices can be renamed.
• Battery Care replaces the old “AI Coach” with five stressor rows, each tied to a reading the app genuinely has.

Things that were silently not working

• Calibration could hang in ten different places, each one leaving the charge limit where the run had moved it. All ten now resolve or report.
• Scheduled rules could strand a limit, fire on the wrong weekday, or be held by the app while the daemon that enforces them never evaluated them.
• iPhone and Apple Watch published the Mac’s battery as their own when relaying a reading.
• Power flow reported the adapter’s rating rather than the power actually delivered, which made System Load fiction whenever you were plugged in.
• Bluetooth sync never answered a read request — the wrong callback was implemented, so the transport looked connected and carried nothing.
• Sync errors were invisible. They now surface with the reason attached.
• A background check ran as root and could hang forever reading a large system log, quietly stopping charge-limit enforcement until the next restart.

Security

• A full audit this release. The sign-in page now carries the same content-security policy as every other page on the site; the daemon’s subprocess handling was rebuilt so no system command can stall it; and a privileged helper no longer runs a command that could wait on input.
• Fixes from the previous audit — the sign-in redirect whitelist, fail-closed local sync encryption, and signed update checks — are all still in place and verified.

Honest note: the sleep drain card has been verified against real logs on real hardware, but has not yet been seen rendering a bad night, because no night on the test machine has been bad enough.

Mac

1.2.12 — Say what you mean

Every readout in ThunderVolt was checked against the code behind it. Where a label claimed something the app could not actually know, the label changed — or the feature behind it did.

Numbers that were never measured

• Battery health on iPhone and Apple Watch showed a placeholder 94% — and described it as “your Mac’s battery retains 94% of original capacity” — whenever no reading had synced yet. It now shows “—” until a real reading arrives.
• The replacement forecast could produce a confident 60-month estimate from a perfectly flat health history, because floating-point noise in the trend line read as decay. A decline now has to be measurable before any forecast appears.

Labels that described the wrong thing

• The menu bar’s Cycles tile said “from IOKit” while printing a dash. It now shows your real cycle count, out of the 1000 Apple rates the pack for.
• Thermal said “all sensors”; it is one system pressure level, and now says so.
• The heat notification promised an alert “when the battery exceeds 45°C”. It actually fires when macOS reports serious thermal pressure and charging pauses — which is what it now says.
• Cycle Milestone offered notifications every 100 cycles. Nothing ever sent one. The switch is gone.
• Settings claimed limits sync “via pmset” and that ThunderVolt “owns BCLM”. Neither has been true on current macOS and current Apple Silicon firmware.
• The hidden SMC diagnostic reported “SMC: Not accessible” on perfectly healthy Macs, because it probes a key that no longer exists on modern hardware.

Controls that could not do what they offered

• The discharge progress bar was always full. It now measures the actual drop.
• The four charge profiles were switches that ignored being switched off. They are a single choice now, shown as one.
• The MagSafe LED switch was live on Apple Silicon, where the write always fails. It only appears on Intel Macs.
• The Storage schedule preset could be created but never edited again.
• The charge limit slider in Settings was capped at 80–100% in the default mode while every other surface offered 20–100%. It is 20–100% everywhere now, and tells you when macOS is holding a different limit than the one you asked for.

Clearer about what is happening

• Nothing used to explain that charging stops entirely when your Mac gets hot. The dashboard and menu bar now say so.
• Calibration previewed a three-step plan and then ran a four-phase one. The preview matches the real procedure, including the 60-minute rest at full, and the time estimate reflects it.
• Discharge to target no longer promises a plugged-in drain macOS can override; it says it may ask you to unplug.
• One name per feature across Mac, iPhone and Watch: Charge Limit, Recharge Buffer, Advanced Control Mode, Smart Context, Degradation Rate.

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Earlier releases

Release notes were not published for versions before 1.2.12. Rather than reconstruct them after the fact, this page starts here and every release from now on is recorded as it ships.

Running an older build? ThunderVolt checks for updates on its own, or you can always get the current version from the download page.