The charitable thinking was that it’s only on the new models because they actually modified the power delivery circuitry to allow bypassing the battery for power. As in, a reasonable hardware limitation that prevents any older models from doing it.

The less charitable thinking is that it’s arbitrary software lock, which is unfortunately not entirely out of character for the Apple either 😅.

It works fairly well. A "daily driver" if you don't mind tinkering. Installed some basic dev tools, runtimes, and container workloads. You'll miss some QOL and efficiencies compared to macOS, and I couldn't quite get the trackpad to feel as good, but that's pretty par-for-the-course when it comes to running a non-macOS OS on a MacBook.

Since dual-boot is the default install option, doesn't hurt to carve other some space for Asahi and give it a whirl. You're intended to be able to use both on the same system as needed.

Alternatively, this just means it will keep draining/charging to keep it at a steady 80%, with the battery still fully involved with providing power to the phone.

I’ve been using AlDente for awhile:

https://apphousekitchen.com

Good feature set, some cool visualizations of charging activity (as cool as watts going into a battery can be…). Been very happy with it so far, keep my laptop at 80% pretty much all the time (mostly docked).

I appreciate the small tweaking and tuning you perform as the rounds progress. A bit more tinkering than others in the genre. Some nice, light decision making until you get a good snowball going on. Hard to feel overrated when < $5 :)

Absolutely! I welcome it in any case due to using MagSafe stands throughout the day.

You’re right that batteries can’t be both in a “charging” and “discharging” state at the same time. However, a workload drawing 1 A from a battery and a charger supplying 2 A leads to net gain of 1 A, aka “charging”.

It isn’t both charging and discharging, it’s just in a state of charging, despite the workload it’s performing. Likewise, the battery can provide 2 A while only being charged 1 A, leading to a state of discharging.

So, a battery can totally power a device while simultaneously being charged, which I believe is how iPhones currently operate. The battery is always in the power path. Willing to be wrong, that’s just my current understanding.