high cpu usage even without apps running

Good morning Brookeboh, and welcome.

Please start your own new thread. Many experienced helpers here ignore what are called "threadjacks," especially of very old threads. Too hard to manage the information when multiple people are asking questions in the same thread---someone usually ends up getting the wrong information. Also, "exact same issue" seldom proves to be the case.

When you repost be sure to include a full description of your MacBook Pro including the all-important sub-model (Ex: "13-inch Mid 2012") and the Mac OS version it is running. Both are available by choosing "About this Mac" from your "Apple" menu (left end of menubar. For example, mine looks like this:

I look forward to seeing your post.

Hi John,

Appreciate this thread is super old, but on the off chance you see this, I had the exact same issue, however when opening in safe mode the problem went away. Any ideas what that could mean or how I could resolve it? Thanks :)

What did you do to fix this issue?

Im experiencing exactly the same thing. The CPU is around 80% usage but not software is opened. What causes this?

Anybody who can answer me please? Im really desperate :(

If you are desperate, read the previous posts about tagging onto old threads causing delays in getting help and start you own thread. Provide all the tech details available about your model, sub-model and OS version.

Me to. I think it's the new software update. I just installed it a few days ago and today my mac became really slow. I went to the system activity and my kernel_task was at 130%.

I think we just need to wait for the next update....

hey there! i don't think so... sometimes it works correctly and sometimes this issues appears.

What i have tried is turn my Mac on in safe mode and this way the computer works correctly, although you are going to have the sound disabled. But at least it will work correctly.

Good luck

Thanks so much Allen, much appreciate the advise, as i'm sure you can see i'm very new to all this and not a techy at all!

Ticket here if you wanted to see CPU usage super high but no apps running 🙂

When you viewing Activity Monitor, switch to All Processes as opposed to My Processes. The system is using a very high percentage of the CPU.

The bar graph shows mostly red, indicating that system processes (rather than user processes) are using most of the CPU. Select "System Processes" (or "All Processes") in the "View" menu to see which system processes are involved. That should make the job of determining why it is happening easier. Let us know what you find out.

You said you "decided to simply format everything and proceed with a new, clean system." Was it still nice and clean when you took those screen shots, or had you reinstalled any non-system software?

If we can rule out third-party software (since you didn't install any), you should consider the possibility that the high kernel CPU is being caused by some recurring hardware error being handled by the kernel. Try running Apple Hardware Test or similar test suite.

It was nice and clean

Ummm, I don't think so.

In the second screenshot Clean My Mac 3 is running. It is a third-party product whose usual outcome is poor performance. I doubt we can help much further until that program is removed--it could be hiding other issues.