M1 MBA idle drain

[rekto2w]

Hi,

I've had my M1 MacBook ever since August, and in the first month, it would drain like 1-2 maybe 3% overnight. I always have all apps running like, Safari with multiple tabs, Spotify, Messages, Xcode etc. However, ever since a few weeks, it has just been draining like crazy when not in use. I tried closing all apps and letting it idle then - same result, I tried not even logging in an account (staying on the Lock Screen after booting up) - same result. Yesterday I completely reinstalled Big Sur and let it idle from 92%

8 hours later, it is at 75% This is a 23% loss overnight! That's terrible! What's even worse, when I come to use it later in the day, it would be at about 50-60% and it's like I've been using it the whole time.

I took some screenshots of the usage history and activity monitor but I really don't see what's causing the issue.

If you guys have any idea what's going on, I would greatly appreciate it. If not, to the Apple Store it goes.

 

[Wackery]

I get that too, where it’s fine for like 4 days, then it drains all at once on the next day

 

[Significant1]

I bet it is xcode. When I played with it 3-4month ago, on first launch in the ios simulator in xcode 13 beta it would leave a process consuming cpu. As far as I can recall, it was enough for me to kill that process without any sideeffect and continue using xcode.

 

[yitwail]

I bet it is xcode. When I played with it 3-4month ago, on first launch in the ios simulator in xcode 13 beta it would leave a process consuming cpu. As far as I can recall, it was enough for me to kill that process without any sideeffect and continue using xcode.

Well, this is an old topic but it's something I only discovered this morning, so might as well pass on my findings in case anyone's still interested. I noticed CPU usage was quite high on my M1 MBA, and turns out spotlight was the culprit, even though I've had the MBA for over a week, so spotlight indexing should have finished long ago. So I did a lot of googling, and turns out iOS simulator is the cause. Luckily, this article has the fix:
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/683277

If that's tldr, you just execute these commands in terminal:
cd ~/Library/Developer/CoreSimulator/Devices find . -name com.apple.suggestions.plist -exec plutil -replace SuggestionsAppLibraryEnabled -bool NO {} ";"