MacBook – Catalina Notes.app draining battery

batterycatalinamacbook pronotes.app

After upgrading to Catalina, I noticed that my MacBook Pro (13" with touchbar) would go from 100% battery to nearly zero in just about 30 minutes. The fans would be running like crazy. Using Activity Monitor, I tracked the culprit down to Apple Notes:

activity monitor

What the heck is going on here? Any idea how I can resolve this? I should also mention that this is reproducible every time… just open up notes and the fans will start going berserk.

UPDATE 1: I just installed the October 15 Supplemental update for Catalina, and there's no difference.

UPDATE 2: Booted into safe mode (hold shift at start up) and this was still the case. Energy Impact of Notes.app spiked to 300+ right away.

UPDATE 3: I reset SMC and PRAM/NVRAM. No difference.

Best Answer

All seems to be resolved by toggling off and then back on the iCloud sync for Notes (In Catalina, this is found in the Apple ID section of System Preferences):

apple id

  1. Turn off Notes iCloud sync
  2. Turn it back on
  3. Open Notes.app
  4. Be momentarily terrified because all your notes have vanished
  5. Watch as they trickle in from iCloud

Running Activity Monitor now lists Notes as barely having any energy impact whatsoever. Hooray!

BONUS: Back Up Your Notes

I was reluctant to try this method because I was terrified that I would introduce some sync problem and wipe out my notes. As Apple provides no easy way to make a local backup/export of your notes, I felt that this was a reasonable worry.

Eventually, I found this little utility that makes .txt files (with HTML inside) of all of your notes (WARNING: it omits any images or attached files). It ain't great, but it worked and helped to put me at ease.

Apple also provides a way of downloading your iCloud data on their Data and Privacy site… which I initiated, but have yet to receive the download link. According to Apple, this could take up to 7 days.

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