Well that’s interesting…

I upgraded to the latest version of MacOs and immediately started noticing that my 7 hour battery was only lasting about 2 hours.

The computer was running warmer than normal too. In computers, heat equals lots of work and a lot less battery life.

It took a bit of digging but eventually I think I figured part of it out. The Mail application was sucking up 46% of all the CPU cycles. WOW!

While digging around I found that there were a ton of email account duplications. I suspect that this happened due to changes Apple implemented in the password system. Not sure about that. I’m led to this conclusion, by the fact that when I deleted one of the duplicate accounts both accounts were deleted.

The accounts appears to be linked in some way that was not obvious. i wonder if mail was hammering the servers, essentially checking for mail over and over again .

When I re-added the accounts, only one was added. So clearly there was something wrong.

So If you’ve been noticing that your computer is sucking up power after the upgrade to Monterey 12.3 check your email accounts. That may be where the problem is.

My machine is now lasting longer on a charge, but there’s still something running down deep in the bowels of the OS that is consuming a lot of CPU cycles. That’s going to take more time to identify. The machine is still running warmer than necessary given the obvious active tasks.

I’ll have to dig into the UNIX subsystems and see if I can figure that out. I might be successful, I might not.

You might be asking why I put myself through this… A valid question.

I adopt early because of the other half. Sometimes, they just can’t resist clicking upgrade when their computer says, “There’s an update…”

Adopting early allows me to at least have a fighting chance at fixing their machine when they start complaining about a problem.

I’ll try to update this post as I discover more.