The second beta of macOS 10.5.5 has been released. AppleInsider took a look at the new Battery Health Management feature.

Apple has made privacy a tentpole of this new Battery Health Management feature. The company says that all charging data is kept on-device unless the user opts-in to sharing anonymous analytics data with Apple. Finally, Apple is enabling the Battery Health Management feature by default, but users can turn it off by unchecking a new Battery Health Management box in System Preferences, under the Energy Saver category. This is similar to the Battery Heath features that have come to the iPhone over the last two years. On the iPhone, Apple allows users to manage their Battery Health and capacity, and disable performance throttling caused by reduced battery capacity. iOS 13 also quietly added a new Optimized Battery Charging feature, which aims to extend the lifespan of your iPhone’s battery to reduce how often the battery stays at 100% charge.

Google is reducing the video quality offered by its Nest Cams, Techcrunch reported. It joins the list of companies including Apple, taking measures to help to free-up bandwidth during the coronavirus outbreak. Indeed, Google-owned YouTube has begun showing videos in Standard Definition by default to this end.

In an email to users, Google says it is temporarily lowering the video quality of Nest Cams in an effort to limit how much bandwidth each camera uses and, in turn, “conserve internet resources.” The adjustment is rolling out over the next few days, and Google says anyone who has their quality settings adjusted will get a notification in the Nest app… While Nest cameras aren’t inherently using more bandwidth right now than they otherwise might, each camera already used a good amount of bandwidth day to day. A Nest Cam IQ, for example, uses roughly 400GB of data per month at its highest settings; cutting this down to medium high shaves that down to 300GB.

One of the big discussions around Apple and Google’s partnership on COVID-19 contract-tracing apps is how they were actually going to get people to use them. Casey Newton of The Verge joined a call in which the firms explained that the important is the second phase – baking the technology into a device’s operating system so people don’t have to install a health authority app.

The companies said that by phase two of their effort, when contact tracing is enabled at the level of the operating system, they will notify people who have opted in to their potential exposure to COVID-19 even if they have not downloaded the relevant app from their public health authority. My understanding is that the operating system itself will alert people that they may have been exposed and direct them to download the relevant public health app. This is significant because it can be hard to get people to install software; Singapore saw only 12 percent adoption of its national contact-tracing app. Putting notifications at the system level represents a major step forward for this effort, even if still requires people to opt in.