Battery Drain Insights A Mac shows which apps use the battery in three places: the battery menu, the Energy tab of Activity Monitor, and the Battery page of System Settings. None of them gives a percentage per app the way an iPhone’s Battery settings do. What a Mac gives you is a ranking, and a ranking is enough to find the app that matters.
Where does a Mac show battery usage by app?
| Where | What it shows | How far back |
|---|---|---|
| The battery menu in the menu bar | Apps using a lot of energy | This moment only |
| Activity Monitor, Energy tab | Every app with an Energy Impact score | Now, and an average of the last 12 hours |
| System Settings, Battery | The charge level and screen time, with no apps | 24 hours and 10 days |
Only the first two name apps. The third tells you when the charge fell, which helps you decide where to look.
How do I check each one?
- The battery menu. Click the battery icon in the menu bar. If apps are using a lot of energy, the menu says Using Significant Energy and lists them (Apple, What is the Battery Status menu on Mac?). If the icon is not there, turn it on in System Settings, Control Center.
- Activity Monitor. Open it from Applications, Utilities, and click Energy. Click the 12 hr Power column heading to sort by the average of the last 12 hours. To include programs with no window, choose View, All Processes.
- System Settings, Battery. Choose Last 24 Hours or Last 10 Days. The Battery Level graph shows the charge for every 15 minutes, and Screen On Usage shows how long the screen was on (Apple, View Battery Usage History on a Mac laptop).
Read the three together. If the charge fell while the screen was on, sort Activity Monitor by 12 hr Power and look at the top of the list. If it fell while the screen was off, the cause is the time your Mac was closed, which is a different search.
Why is there no percentage per app on a Mac?
Because macOS does not publish one. What it publishes is Energy Impact, which Apple describes as “a relative measure of the current energy consumption of the app” (Apple, View energy consumption in Activity Monitor on Mac). Relative means it ranks apps against each other. It has no unit, and it is not a share of your battery.
Apps from the App Store cannot fill the gap. We tested this while building Battery Drain Insights. From inside an App Store app, macOS refuses to give the energy counter for any program but the app itself. Even without that limit, the counter added up to 1 joule on a Mac that had really drawn 1,256, about 0.1% of the truth. So an app that shows a battery percentage for each app on a Mac is estimating it.
What should I read instead of a percentage?
Read the order, and read it over time.
- The 12 hr Power column is the most useful single figure macOS has. It smooths out the moment. An app that is first there has been working for hours.
- Energy Impact right now tells you what is busy this second. It changes fast, so watch it for a minute before you decide.
- The Preventing Sleep column shows Yes for an app that keeps your Mac awake. Sort by it once.
Two limits remain. Activity Monitor forgets after 12 hours, and it lists background programs under technical names, among everything else. The article on what Energy Impact means goes through the columns one by one.
Where Battery Drain Insights fits
Battery Drain Insights keeps the ranking for the whole time you are on battery, and for 30 days after. It lists background programs first when they did more than your apps, with plain names where it can find them. The figure beside each name is its share of the work, measured from processor time, next to the real reading of the battery.
It does not show a battery percentage per app either, for the reason above, and it says so on screen.
For the wider picture, see the guide Why is my MacBook battery draining so fast?
Sources
- Apple, What is the Battery Status menu on Mac?
- Apple, View energy consumption in Activity Monitor on Mac
- Apple, View Battery Usage History on a Mac laptop
- Our own test of the energy counter macOS keeps per program, made while building Battery Drain Insights in 2026