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Battery & Energy • Published 2026-09-28 • Updated 2026-10-18 • 7 min read

How to Measure Mac App Energy Use: A Repeatable Guide

This page provides a repeatable way to observe Mac app energy use. It includes no NotchDock battery benchmark or Swift-versus-Electron result because no reproducible measurements are available here.

What Activity Monitor can tell you

Activity Monitor’s Energy pane reports each app’s Energy Impact, a relative measure of current energy use, and on laptops a 12 hr Power average covering the last 12 hours or time since startup. These are useful observations, not a controlled battery-life comparison. See Apple’s guide to Activity Monitor energy columns.

Set up a fair comparison

  1. Record the Mac model, chip, memory, macOS version, app names and versions, and whether each app is a release build.
  2. Choose one workload that represents your use, such as idle with the same document open or a defined repeated task. Write down the exact steps and duration.
  3. Start each run from a similar battery charge and temperature. Keep display brightness, network conditions, peripherals, Low Power Mode, and other open apps the same. Note unavoidable differences.
  4. Run each app separately under the same conditions. Repeat each run several times and alternate the order to reduce order and warm-up effects.
  5. Record starting and ending battery percentage, elapsed time, Activity Monitor Energy Impact observations, and any visible background work. Save timestamps or screenshots with the notes.

Report observations without overstating them

Publish the raw runs and summarize the range or median only after collecting the data. Name the exact apps and versions tested; “Electron apps” and “native apps” are too broad to stand in for specific comparators. Battery percentage is coarse and affected by workload, display, radio activity, battery condition, and the rest of the system. Do not convert one short session into an all-day battery-life claim.

We have not run or documented a reproducible NotchDock-versus-comparator battery test for this page, so it makes no comparative result claim. NotchDock’s implementation language alone does not establish energy consumption.

Record sheet

For each run, capture: date and time; Mac model and macOS; app and build; workload; run order; start and end charge; duration; Activity Monitor columns observed; other conditions; and notes about interruptions. Keep the raw observations with any later summary.