I don’t believe you can directly relate them to one simple unit, because they are from an arbitrary formula of multiple factors. If my recollection of the developer presentation slide on App Nap is correct, they are an abstract unit Apple created to represent several factors related to energy usage meant to compare programs relatively. The most precise description I have found says the following. Enough so that various other people have wondered what it means. The higher the number, the more impact an app has on battery power. The Energy tab of Activity Monitor displays the Energy Impact of each open app based on a number of factors including CPU usage, network traffic, disk activity and more. Other Apple documentation says the following. Lower numbers are better.Īvg Energy Impact: The average energy impact for the past 8 hours or since the Mac started up, whichever is shorter. The Activity Monitor documentation says the following.Įnergy Impact: A relative measure of the current energy consumption of the app. There are no units given for “Energy Impact” or “Avg Energy Impact”. The following screenshot shows the Activity Monitor’s “Energy” tab. In this blog post I use a combination of code inspection, measurements, and educated guesses to hypothesize how it is computed in Mac OS X 10.9 and 10.10. However, despite its prominence, the exact meaning of the “Energy Impact” measure is unclear. Apple support documentation specifically recommends it for troubleshooting battery life problems, as do countless articles on the web. It is well-known and its “Energy Impact” measure (which was added in Mac OS X 10.9) is often consulted by users to compare the power consumption of different programs. Activity Monitor is a tool in Mac OS X that shows a variety of real-time process measurements.

Mac cpu monitor