I've had very stubborn runs of the md* indexer (not at laptop can't recall name -- mdimport?) decide that yes, this coffee shop is a great place to crank it up.
A similar one is a large initial indexing by the Dropbox app. I've had my M1 Air on the desktop Thunderbolt dock for the past month so it's gotten way past that initialization stage.
Spotlight’s energy use shows up in Activity Monitor, though.
Whatever drains my battery is invisible to Activity Monitor (but visible to apps that monitor the power management hardware itself), so presumably it must be some hardware device?
I'm no expert but I definitely can't help but wonder if it's WiFi or Bluetooth. Maybe something like radio interference making it work 50x harder?
Around a decade ago I had a MacBook that was super sensitive to interference issues. Although I'm not sure if that results in a big power draw (the way it does with cell phones for example when you're constantly going in and out of service).
I can fairly confidently rule out Bluetooth, as turning it off in control Center doesn’t seem to affect the power drain. Wifi is certainly a possibility though.
I've had very stubborn runs of the md* indexer (not at laptop can't recall name -- mdimport?) decide that yes, this coffee shop is a great place to crank it up.
A similar one is a large initial indexing by the Dropbox app. I've had my M1 Air on the desktop Thunderbolt dock for the past month so it's gotten way past that initialization stage.