Pages on Macbook Air M4 is causing Battery Drain and Heating Issue

I would be willing to bet that Google Chrome and its long-reported tendency for energy consumption with n-tuple tabs open is the real battery hog, and not that instantaneous Pages reading you display.

The only times that I could meet or exceed that shown Activity Monitor reading for Pages was:

1. Launch Pages and select a blank template which briefly reached 2000.
2. Open a 180-page text document and rapidly switch the home and end keys on my extended keyboard for about 20 seconds. That reached 1800.
3. Taking the open blank doucument in [1] and copy/pasting three large paragraphs of text into it reached 342.

All other times for Pages bumbled along at 0.1 to 0.5.

The above is Pages v14.4 on a M4 Mac Mini Pro (64 GB, 14c/20g) running Tahoe 26.0.1.

I cannot explain why your M4 Air gets warm when running a 10-page Pages document but not for other applications, unless you have something else running concurrently that you are not mentioning. It wouldn't take much as the M4 Air has no fan.

About all you can do is run Pages by itself with no other applications running. That means uninstalling any anti-virus software (if you use it), and rebooting the Mac to assess the new behavior. Update Tahoe to 26.0.1 if you haven't done so.

Very interesting. I have randomly noticed my MacBook Air M2 getting hot but have detected no commonalities. Sometimes it runs hot and sometime not/thought it was my new Apple display/but I've never caught/it doing that and sometimes i ignore the thought.... I unplug the display for a bit and it cools off.... and the next three times it does not get hot....

Sorry, but I would listen to the Viking.... above