EnduranceLite

A macOS menu bar utility that stretches laptop battery life. Inspired by Endurance — not affiliated with Magnetism Studios.

EnduranceLite watches your charge and, when you hit a threshold you choose, turns on a low-power session: native macOS Low Power Mode, paused browsers, paused background services, sleeping energy-hungry apps, and hidden background windows. Display dimming is left to Apple's Low Power Mode.

Features

Measure	What it does
Slow Down Processor	Enables macOS Low Power Mode (Apple Silicon equivalent of disabling Turbo Boost). Asks for an administrator password once.
Pause Web Browsers	SIGSTOPs Safari, Chrome, Arc, Firefox, Edge, Brave and helpers. Click the browser to wake it; tabs stay put.
Pause Services	Pauses Photos analysis, updaters, cloud helpers, and similar background maintenance.
Monitor Expensive Apps	Watches CPU and sleeps apps that stay hot in the background.
Hide Background Apps	Hides apps that are not in front so macOS can throttle them.
Dim Screen	Does not drive brightness. macOS Low Power Mode's built-in display savings apply only while Low Power Mode is on.

Trigger: Ask, Always, Never, or On Unplug, at a battery percentage you pick (default 70%).

Lives in the menu bar. Opens a SwiftUI settings window (the original Endurance pane lives in System Settings; this app is a standalone window instead). Low Power Mode survives sleep, lid close, and unlock — status is restored instead of reset.

Requirements

• Apple Silicon or Intel Mac, macOS 14 or later
• Apple Development signing identity (the project is set to team 45PVRUCTSQ)

The app is not sandboxed. Pausing other processes and calling pmset cannot work inside the App Sandbox.

Build and sign

./scripts/build-and-sign.sh

That produces a Release build, signs it with your local Apple Development identity, and copies it to /Applications/EnduranceLite.app.

Or open EnduranceLite.xcodeproj in Xcode and run.

Notes

• Native Low Power Mode needs root (pmset). The first time Slow Down Processor runs, macOS shows an administrator password dialog once. EnduranceLite installs a sudoers rule for /usr/bin/pmset only, so later toggles do not ask again. Uninstall removes that rule.
• If you force-quit EnduranceLite while apps are paused, they stay frozen. Continue them from Activity Monitor, or run killall -CONT "Google Chrome" (swap the name).
• Developer tools (Xcode, Cursor, Grok, Terminal, etc.) are never auto-slept.
• This is a personal-team signed build, not notarized. First launch from Finder may need Right Click → Open.