[michaelcampbell]

Your situation is different than mine; this is the first I've heard of Dropbox even registering as a top use of battery.

How many files do you have? I've got 26000 files in my Mac's dropbox folder. (Granted, very few of them change more than once or twice a day; maybe 20 or so of those do.)

[Spooky23]

It definitely happens in some scenarios. Especially if you do fancy things like using links, etc, and especially when Apple incremented MacOS.

IIRC, there was a variable, hard limit for objects in a folder or locks in a folder where it would go wacky.

[rikkus]

My top five in the 'Average Energy Impact' column of the Energy tab in Activity Monitor, as of this moment:

Docker (3.13) Dropbox (2.08) Outlook (2.03) Safari (2.02) Slack (1.57)

Total 131771 files currently on disk (I'm using Selective Sync, because SSD prices)

[michaelcampbell]

Interesting. Mine's quite far down on the list at < 1.

[rayiner]

I last used Dropbox in 2011 or so (I stopped using it because it killed my battery life). It may have gotten better since then. (But my point is addressed to what it takes to get popular, i.e. that its easier to make a “dumb” tool popular, and Dropbox was popular back then.)

EDIT: Clearly not just me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464901 (thread from 2016)

[jonknee]

Going out on a limb here, but I think it's possible things have changed in 7 years (and that it was probably something specific to your setup, not something millions of Dropbox users with a Mac had to put up with).

[michaelcampbell]

> i.e. that its easier to make a “dumb” tool popular,

If this was your intent, then using the tired "worse is better" trope and claiming an issue from 7 years ago, that no one else has claimed to have seen is seems a far cry from it.

Dropbox became popular because it was easy, it worked, and did exactly what it said it did. That might be "dumb" in that it's not feature packed, but you use a lot of negative connotations when none are required.