Recent reports from users show that macOS is facing a big Sur battery drain issue. One user complained, “Spotlight has been using significant energy for over a week or so now, draining my battery and making it super hot. Does anyone know why and/or how to stop it?. The issue makes the fan of the device to move faster in order to secure the device from heating up and causing a potential safety hazard.
macOS big Sur update is causing a battery drain issue
One user said, “today I have upgraded to macOS big Sur. however, there is a significant battery drain after this upgrade. The battery drains in 1 hour after this upgrade. how this issue can be solved. my device is a 2018 MacBook Pro.” The issue seems to be faced by users all around the globe, the heating caused by the spotlight makes the fan of the device move faster.
Another user said that they had been experiencing the same issue with their Mac Pro 2020, they said within an hour the battery drops down from 100% to just 20%. The device also tends to heat up, making the fan work faster. Another user replied to this by saying, “I spoke with Apple customer care and they said that it is normal after the upgrade to Big Sur because of Spotlight. the app starts to make new indexing of the system (disk). It could take one or two days. After that, the battery drain should return to normal.”
Possible fixes to tackle the problem
Here are a few ways to fix the issue:
- Reboot, you can do this to try and resolve your battery issues. Rebooting your Mac resets the entire system.
- Activity Monitor: You should keep an eye out for processes that happen to consume a significant amount of resources. Sometimes there is just one process that is the culprit responsible for all problems being faced by your device. In order to assess the processes on your computer, you should look at Activity Monitor.
- Spotlight Search Indexing: One of the features that can take some time to fix after upgrading to a new macOS happens to be indexing via Spotlight search. Spotlight is able to detect find apps, documents, and other files on your computer for you. If you notice that that spotlight app is using a significant percent of your CPU power, you have a few options to tackle this issue:
- Let it finish. This may take somewhere from a day or two maybe if you’ve freshly upgraded but let the process finish.
- Disabling some of the Spotlight search categories will help with the issue. To do this, go to System Preferences and then click Spotlight. Then proceed to uncheck some/all of the categories.
