MacBook Pro Overheating after Catalina

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250721214?answerId=251398215022#251398215022

I was having the same issue on my macbook pro 2016 touch bar computer. I was able to speak with a Apple Help Support Rep. and after explaining the situation they recommended a System Management Controller (SMC)reset. IT MADE A HUGE DIFFERENCE. I can actually leave my computer on my lap now.

see the link below for the procedure.

hope this helps

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

I HAD the same issue. I upgraded to macOS Catalina on October 15th 2019 and I started experiencing overheating issues and my macbook pro slowing down. I took my Macbook Pro to the Genius bar on October 21st 2019 and the technician opened it, cleaned the fan, and didn't find any issues when he ran their extensive hardware diagnostics program for cooling issues.

We decided to wipe the Macbook pro and install macOS Mojave. That fixed the issue so far, my Macbook Pro hasn't overheated and I've been using it consistently for a couple of hours. (fyi..It used to overheat in less than an hour of use)

The issue is macOS Catalina. You're better off downgrading your macOS to something more stable and waiting until Apple can provide fixes to their newfound issues with macOS Catalina.

Same problem with fan running constantly and overheating after Catalina update. Here's what I think is going on. Activity monitor shows a program called photoanalysisd using up for 100% of the CPU time. Quick search shows that this is the program that goes over all your photos to analyze facial recognition. If you open Photos and click on "Faces" you can see a count of the number of photos analyzed and how many are pending. Note that if you open Photos, the photoanalysisd program disappears from Activity Monitor for about ½ hour. Fan stops and all is normal until it opens again. It will only be working in the background when you do NOT have Photos open and are plugged into power. It took my Mac Pro 2012 about 3 days to complete the job with my 15,000 photos...be patient.

I had the same problem the instant I upgraded to Catalina. The fan was running full tilt without any software running.

I contacted Apple – they advised clearing out files from the library (StartupItems, LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemon). There were a couple of cached DropBox-related files plus an old Apple one, I deleted them, restarted and the problem has gone.

I've since reinstalled DropBox and so far, the problem hasn't recurred.

Hi.

I have done the PRAM and SMC thing. But it seems that location services was the culprit. So, I disabled the non essential ones, and the overheating seems to be gone. Also disabled the maps location, since I noticed it was triggering all the time.

I had a similar problem with Parallels. I had merely thought the new version would improve performance, but it turns out that the old version caused problems. So I'm going to describe what I did. Also many CPU intensive tasks are launched by other programs, so merely doing a force quit will cause them to start up again.

The first thing is to open Activity Monitor, click on the CPU tab, and then click on the column marked "% CPU". If the tasks with highest CPU don't appear at the top, click on the column again.

In my case, I had four tasks marked BSDTAR at the top, with each using about 100% of a processor. (There are multiple processor cores, so the total CPU usage can be much more than 100%.)

I double clicked on the row at the top. This caused a small window to pop-up with the name of the process group, the parent process, and the user. It listed BASH as the parent process. Since neither BSDTAR or BASH was helpful, I clicked on the parent process.

The window now changed to show BASH as the process group and Parallels Toolkit as the parent process. This told me that Parallels toolkit was the problem. Since an update was available for Parallels, I purchased, downloaded, and installed the update. I then shut down the computer, waited 30 seconds, and then restarted. The parent process of Parallels Toolkit had been LAUNCHD, indicating that the program was started at boot time.

When the system finished booting and I logged in, I opened Activity Monitor and the four BSDTAR processes were gone.

If I had just killed the BSDTAR jobs, they would have simply restarted the next time I booted the system.

***

Other suggestions

Close all applications before shutting down the system. If a process is hung, it may not restart correctly after a reboot.

If the problem is with WiFi, go to the Security & Privacy option of System Preferences, go to the TCP-IP tab, and click on the Advanced button. If you delete entries from the list of access points (using the + and - buttons) for the networks that are giving you problems. The entry will be regenerated when you try to log back in, and this may fix the problem.

Safe reboot is a good way to clear problems. Close all the applications before you try the safe reboot.

If you open the Console application (/Applications/Utility/Console), you can look at the System Log. This may contain useful information.

If you see something about the volumes named Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data, this is normal. Catalina has changed the structure of the root device.

If you see a list of disk usage by file type, remember that the names of the types do not represent actual directory or file names. If you see something marked as Other with over a hundred gigabytes, this is normal. It is actually part of the operating system files.

Suggestions are all in the 13 pages of answers.

eg

reset SMC and NVRAM

boot into Safe Mode then back into normal mode.

update all web derived apps like Dropbox that require manual updates

Remove all antivirus and booster/cleaner programs

Remove all items from Login items until you discover which one or more is running amok.

Use Activity monitor and sort on highest CPU to identify culprits.

Allow 3 days for photoanalysisd to reanalyse your photo library.

Did you try turning off "voice control"? (System Preferences > Accessibility > Voice Control > OFF) I had the same problem with continuous fans on my MacBook Pro 15" retina display Mid 2014. I had the same report on Activity monitor, where it was the only app taking up a big chunk of usage. So I tried different things and accidentally found that when I turned "voice control" off (it was annoying me) and after a second or two, the fans turned off. Quiet as a mouse. Wifi was on, so that wasn't the problem my set-up. Weird that when I updated to Catalina, the default set "voice control" to on.

So, people are still having this problem.

Here's what I think is probably the simplest solution:

1. Open Activity Monitor (search that name to find it)
2. "% CPU" is the default selection so you probably don't need to click it. You should see the largest CPU users at top of list. (Central Processing Unit of your computer)
3. If any of those at the top are using more than about 15% CPU, click on them to select them.
4. Then, in the upper left corner of the Activity Monitor panel, there is a button with a small gray octagon with an "X" in it. Click that to delete the selected items. That should fix the overheating problem.
5. You may need to reopen some applications you were using. If you're using older applications and the overheating comes back, you may need to update or replace them with something newer.

That's what I did and it cured the overheating completely.

MBP 15" early 2013, Catalina 10.15.3

I had the exact same problem and was convinced it had to be Catalina. My machine, a new MacBook Pro about a year old, had zero issues before the upgrade. I worked with Apple support and we verified the machine was running fine. We did all the normal reset things you see here in the support community. This narrowed it down to an application causing the problem.

That is exactly what my issue was. I found out that the version of Vmware Fusion 11.1.1 did not support Catalina. I updated to the newest version 11.5.3 and my problem with the fans running constantly and the machine getting very hot is completely resolved.

Excuse my vocabulary. But the fact is that the "fixes" of cleaning up smc and all do not work. There are no changes besides the OS version and there are no rogue programs using the cpu more, no malware and nothing new. Just the bare OS after normal startup.

And the fact is that Catalina somehow uses the cpu more or something and it heats considerably more. The laptop then uses a lot more battery to power up the fans and the battery life drops considerably.

Those are facts and I am not asking for help about it, I am giving my personal experience based piece of advice - downgrade back to Mojave.

After doing so myself the overheating is gone and the battery life is back to normal.

Just an update after some time playing with it and versions:

Catalina got a bit better with the latest upgrade, but it was still all the time around 60C and fanning almost 2000 rpm. Battery life was limited to 3~4 hours.

I downgraded again, this time to High Sierra. It is too close to end of life so I will probably upgrade to Mojave enventually.

In high Sierra I have less fancy stuff in the OS but it is still really functional, the laptop runs extremely smooth compared to my last experience with both Catalina and Mojave. This is not because it is a fresh install because so was Mojave. I recovered all my data from a rsync backup and reinstalled apps one by one. Learnt from the mistakes and will now keep a timemachine backup before every upgrade.

On High Sierra:

Working temp is 44~48C, fans spin ~1200rpm, battery lasts about 7 hours (this is a mid-2013 model so i'd say the battery life is still quite decent, over 50% of the original battery life on a 7 year old machine)

On Mojave:

Working temp 50~54C, fans spin ~1500rpm, battery lasts about 5 hours.

On Catalina:

Working temp 60-62C, fans spin ~2000rpm, battery lasts about 4 hours.

I understand every new OS version brings more features and probably extracts more from the hardware, and this strain is reflected in temp and battery life, but given the current hardware specs, I wonder if it is really worth it going up the OS ladder.

I for now will hold onto High Sierra until it becomes no longer supported. My only limitation so far has been a very outdated Xcode version but that's not really affecting my work with it.

Leaving this info here for reference. I am now seriously considering a replacement battery (no longer directly available from Apple, sadly) and have it almost new for some 100 usd.

Was that a fresh install or a clean install with only the OS and none of your apps and data?

Activity Monitor - CPU %

What is using the high percentage? If it is photoanalysisd then it will settle down

If is as a third party app you need to remove or update

If ir stops when you disconnect wif you need to look at unnecessary icloud connections

These were the main "fixes" you didn't mention.

Fix worked for me: turning off iCloud Drive

I had this exact same problem here too when I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina. Fan running like a jet engine, even when the Activity Monitor showed low CPU usage. Mid-2012 MacBook Pro, 16 GB memory. Same problem with all Catalina updates (currently 10.15.5). It was so bad it basically made the computer unusable for me- I was considering downgrading, which would have been a real pain.

I saw a post in here suggesting to try turning iCloud Drive off (System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud). Fortunately I didn't use iCloud Drive much so this was not a loss for me.

I tried it, and after a restart it worked like a charm. I finally have my computer back. Thanks for the suggestion!

Note: At the same time I also turned of iCloud services such as Photos, News, Stocks etc as I didn't use them. I didn't split-test these changes so it's possible turning off the latter services would not be necessary. Probably just turning off iCloud Drive is enough. If you don't use iCloud Drive, this is an easy fix.

Thank you! :)