My new MacBook Air is supposed to get 12 hours of battery life. Imagine my surprise when on my first trip away from the office the Mac’s battery lasted only seven hours.
Yo, wassup wit dat? I mean, I can understand being off an hour or maybe two from the advertised 12 hours, but just over half seems like an issue to me. As it turned out, my Mac had a number of power hungry applications that sucked the battery dry.
Shaming The Suckers
What Mac notebook users want and need is a way to get the most out of a battery’s life, but how can you help out if you don’t know which apps suck the most CPU juice?
You can add the iStat Menus app to get a list of offenders, known as battery shaming in tech lingo, but there’s also a free way.
In your Mac’s Application folder there’s another folder near the bottom that’s called Utilities.
Open it up and one of the first apps you’ll see is Activity Monitor, which monitors CPU usage, RAM usage, Energy usage, Disk storage usages, and Network usage.
Since the objective is to find out which Mac apps use the most CPU and therefore battery power, you’ll need to make some adjustments in Activity Monitor’s settings.
Click the View menu in Activity Monitor, and near the top you’ll see Columns. Select that and turn on Energy Impact and App Nap. Then, back to Activity Monitor and Click the Energy tab.
What you’ll see is a list of applications and the impact each one has on your Mac’s CPU and battery life.
That will give you a detailed view of which Mac apps are using the most juice. But there’s also an easier, faster way, but with less information.
Click on the MacBook’s battery icon in the Menubar and you’ll get a drop down which also lists which apps use the most significant amount of energy.
Activity Monitor helps you to shame the Mac app power suckers, but doesn’t do anything more than let you know which ones need to be monitored and which not to worry about.
