Which app is draining your Mac's battery?

Quickest: the battery menu

Click the battery icon in the menu bar. If any app is using a lot of power, macOS lists it under Using Significant Energy. If the section isn’t there, nothing is unusually heavy right now.

This only shows the worst offenders at this moment. For more detail, use Activity Monitor.

Activity Monitor’s Energy tab

Open Activity Monitor and choose Energy. The useful columns:

Column	What it tells you
Energy Impact	Current power use, relative. Sort by this first.
12 hr Power	Average impact over the last 12 hours (laptops only). This finds the app that’s been draining you all day, not just this second.
App Nap	Whether macOS is allowed to throttle the app when it’s hidden. “No” for a background app can mean extra drain.
Preventing Sleep	“Yes” means the app is keeping your Mac awake.
Requires High Perf GPU	On Macs with two GPUs. Not relevant on Apple Silicon, which has one.

Sort by 12 hr Power to find the long-term drain. An app you barely use that sits near the top is the one to look at.

From Terminal: top and powermetrics

top has a power column, a similar relative score to Energy Impact:

top -o power -l 2 -n 10 -stats pid,command,cpu,power

The first sample is always empty, so -l 2 takes two and you read the second.

For more detail, powermetrics reports per-process energy and the chip’s actual power draw. It needs sudo:

sudo powermetrics --samplers tasks --show-process-energy -i 5000 -n 1

This samples for 5 seconds and lists each process with its energy impact, CPU time and wake-ups. To see how many watts the chip is using:

sudo powermetrics --samplers cpu_power,gpu_power,ane_power -i 1000 -n 5

Look for CPU Power, GPU Power, ANE Power and Combined Power in milliwatts. An idle Apple Silicon laptop often draws well under a watt for the chip itself; several watts at idle means something is busy. Apple notes these values are estimates, useful for comparing, not lab measurement.

What the usual culprits are

• Browsers. One tab with video, a game or a heavy web app can dominate. Chrome’s Window › Task Manager shows per-tab cost.
• Electron apps. Slack, Discord, Teams, Notion and many editors are browsers underneath and keep running when hidden.
• Dev servers and watchers. node, vite, tsc --watch and test watchers poll files and rebuild. Close the ones you aren’t using. Leftovers from closed terminals keep running too.
• Docker. The VM keeps running even when no container is busy. Quit Docker Desktop when you don’t need it.
• Sync and indexing. iCloud, Dropbox, Spotlight (mds_stores) and Photos analysis are heavy for a while after big changes, then calm down.
• Screen. At full brightness the display can use more power than everything else combined. It doesn’t show up in any app list.

What to do

1. Quit the app if you don’t need it. Hiding it isn’t enough for most apps.
2. For apps you need, check their settings for background sync, auto-play and hardware acceleration options.
3. Check what prevents sleep: pmset -g assertions. See why won’t my Mac sleep.
4. Turn on Low Power Mode in System Settings › Battery when you’re away from a charger.
5. If battery life is still short with nothing heavy running, check the battery itself: check battery health on a MacBook.

Seeing it live

Stat Space shows power in watts for the CPU, GPU and Neural Engine, and its Battery tab lists energy by app right now, with helpers grouped under their app so Chrome is one row. You also get live charge, power flow and a 24-hour and 7-day battery level chart. All of that is free.

Pro adds battery drain since unplug: each app’s share of the energy used since you took the charger off. That answers “what ate 40% this morning?” after the fact, which Activity Monitor’s 12-hour average can’t do as precisely.