MacBook Air Battery Life

[ds.]

I've had the M2 MBA Base model for a couple days now, and it seems like the battery life is significantly shorter than what it should be. I'm going from 100% to 80% in just over 20 minutes. The laptop seems to get fairly hot on the bottom side well. I was just browsing some webpages, had a YouTube video playing, and iMessage running, so nothing too intensive at all. Screen brightness is about halfway up, and I had my AirPods connected with bluetooth. Is there any way I can see if there's something running in the background that would cause the laptop to run so hot and the battery to drain so quickly? I've only ever been on windows before, so i'm not too familiar with MacOS. I'd like to try and diagnose it myself first to see if i can potentially find the issue, rather than take it in to the Apple store.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Toutou]

Yes, use Activity Monitor, sort processes by CPU usage, and you should be able to see what’s wasting power. The laptop shouldn’t really get noticeably hotter when browsing or watching YouTube.

 

[ds.]

Yes, use Activity Monitor, sort processes by CPU usage, and you should be able to see what’s wasting power. The laptop shouldn’t really get noticeably hotter when browsing or watching YouTube.

Thanks, that seems to have helped.

I checked and it looks like "chrome_crash_handler" was running and using nearly 300% of the CPU, not sure how the math works, but force quitting it seems to have fixed the problem for now, let's see if it stays like that.

Any idea as to what caused this? I don't have chrome installed on the computer, I use firefox. The only other apps I've installed so far would be WhatsApp and Notion. Is this just a bug that happens, or is there something I can do to prevent this from happening again?

Thanks.

 

[jdb8167]

Yes, use Activity Monitor, sort processes by CPU usage, and you should be able to see what’s wasting power. The laptop shouldn’t really get noticeably hotter when browsing or watching YouTube.

I’d add that make sure you are viewing all processes and not just those of the current user.

 

[Toutou]

The only other apps I've installed so far would be WhatsApp and Notion.

You'd be surprised to learn that you actually do have (almost) Chrome on your computer. WhatsApp (and from a quick google search, Notion too) on the desktop uses Electron, a technology that allows web apps written with web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to be bundled and installed as desktop apps, where they run in an instance of Chromium (essentialy Chrome without the Google stuff). An Electron app like WhatsApp is literally a webpage running inside a legit web browser, but without any browser UI.

I'm not saying that your "chrome_crash_handler" is the culprit, but unless you do have Chrome installed, then Chromium inside those Electron apps is the closest thing.

If it happens again, you could further investigate by switching Activity Monitor from the default list-view to a tree view of processes, please search your menu bar for an option that says "All Processes, Hierarchical".
Then just find the CPU-eating process and go up the hierarchy and should get to the app that spawned the crash handler.

 

[ds.]

You'd be surprised to learn that you actually do have (almost) Chrome on your computer. WhatsApp (and from a quick google search, Notion too) on the desktop uses Electron, a technology that allows web apps written with web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to be bundled and installed as desktop apps, where they run in an instance of Chromium (essentialy Chrome without the Google stuff). An Electron app like WhatsApp is literally a webpage running inside a legit web browser, but without any browser UI.

I'm not saying that your "chrome_crash_handler" is the culprit, but unless you do have Chrome installed, then Chromium inside those Electron apps is the closest thing.

If it happens again, you could further investigate by switching Activity Monitor from the default list-view to a tree view of processes, please search your menu bar for an option that says "All Processes, Hierarchical".
Then just find the CPU-eating process and go up the hierarchy and should get to the app that spawned the crash handler.

Ah okay, that is really useful to know.

Everything seems to be working fine now the past couple days after I ended the chrome crash handler process. I believe there was an issue with Notion crashing when I first installed it, so that may explain things.

I will definitely keep an eye out if it happens again and check activity monitor in detail.

Appreciate all the help!

Thanks.