Pages drains battery and heats up MacBook (M4 Air, 26.2)

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Level 1

12 points

Pages drains battery and heats up MacBook (M4 Air, 26.2)

Why does pages heats up my MacBook (26.2, M4 Air) and drains my battery so fast?

I installed it today, opened a .docx document, then i felt the laptop became more and more warm overtime. After some digging in forums i found that it could help if i save the document in pages format in the icloud folder and it did helped! --until the next sleep-wake cycle.

In Activity Monitor i can see like 1000-1500 power usage for the app.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 26.2

Posted on Dec 16, 2025 5:47 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,248 points

Dec 16, 2025 7:17 AM in response to g1zi0xe

The M4 MacBook Air has no fan, so it will get warmer with your usage window. More concurrent apps, will beget warmer MacBook Air and larger battery drain. Warmer still if you have put a protective case on it or some designer wrap — since it uses radiant cooling through the aluminum case.

You consumed more battery opening and converting that Word document than you would by just opening a Pages document. Saving to any cloud location uses more battery because now you are transmitting data over the Internet which involves the Wi-Fi chip and takes longer than a local drive save.

The size of documents that you open in Pages and whether they contain images or not may also wake up your GPU which takes even more energy to display those images in Pages.

There is nothing anyone here can do about your M4 MacBook Air heating and battery drain that you cannot resolve yourself with trial and error. I personally do not use Activity Monitor and I have been using Macs for a very long while.

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Answer 2

g1zi0xe Author

Level 1

12 points

Dec 16, 2025 8:16 AM in response to VikingOSX

Sorry if i was misunderstandable! (and thanks for your help :) )

The pages app seemed to be stuck or something, it constantly used 25-50% CPU and a lot of battery power for keeping open a one-page black and white text document without any crazy formatting. (it is a CV after all)

I think it isn't normal for a text editor to demand more power than some of my games, heck even a full-fledged IDE for Rust development from Jetbrains is lighter on it than a text editor. See my frustration?

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Answer 3

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,248 points

Dec 16, 2025 8:23 AM in response to g1zi0xe

Pages is not a text editor. BBEdit, MacVIM, or even Sublime Text are text editors. Pages is a large and complex word processing application. I do not use JetBrains products for anything since I do not wish to have JAVA installed on my Mac to support their IDE.

A one-page CV opened in Pages should not be using 25-50 % of your CPU resources. Right now, I have a 180-page Pages document open in Pages and it is showing between 0.3 - 0.7 % of CPU.

Shut your Mac down (not Restart). Reboot. Press and hold the shift key while launching Pages. Open your CV and review the Activity Monitor usage.

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