The obvious and most reasonable explanation is that one or several processes currently running on your Mac are causing your central processing unit to allocate a lot of resources to maintain their operation. In other words, if you encounter high CPU usage on your Mac, the first thing on your to-do list is to look for the “culprit” app or apps. Start your research by opening the Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder. Click on the header of the CPU column to sort the processes so that the most resource-heavy ones are at the top of the list. If you are using a graphics editing tool or P2P software, it will almost surely use up most of your processor’s power. Web browsers also tend to get CPU-intensive over time due a growing amount of caches and history they store. Mac malware is another possible cause that’s often overlooked and underestimated. Malicious programs can be crudely coded and wear out the system when operating. Some strains are hogs by design – crypto miners make a good example. Some make Macs run slow deliberately, thereby trying to hoodwink the victims into paying for spoof optimization. Anyway, this is one of the areas worth inspecting in case a high CPU usage quandary occurs.