How to Fix High CPU Usage By AMPDevicesAgent

Want to do something about the ‘AMPDevicesAgent’ program causing high CPU usage on your Mac?

In late 2019, Apple separated an iTunes process that was responsible for syncing your devices together and backing up its files onto your Mac. This resulted in the Apple Catalina product of AMPDevicesAgent, a background process that does all sync-related activities.

While syncing your devices might seem as simple as connecting your iCloud to your iPhone, it can be a different story for your computer. Your Mac’s processing power, the CPU, is the primary resource that the AMPDevicesAgent uses to sync your files. Read more about what AMPDevicesAgent is here.

This can be incredibly taxing on your computer, which can be annoying when you’re in the middle of work or doing another CPU-intensive process like editing a video. Whatever it is you’re doing, you’ll notice a decrease in performance whenever this background process is running.

Here’s what you can do about it!

• 1. Schedule Your Synchronizations.
• 2. Remove Your iPhone from Finder.
• 3. Disable Finder Opening After Boot.

1. Schedule Your Synchronizations.

Synchronizing your files and backing up your folders are really important habits as a modern-day digitally-connected person.

Often enough, you can avoid having to disable AMPDevicesAgent or Finder by just scheduling the syncing of your devices much better.

You can do this by turning on your Mac and your iPhone and leaving it alone for a couple of minutes while you go ahead make a cup of coffee. This type of practice isn’t uncommon, and you’ll find that a lot of processes can be left alone for a while, and it’ll be over relatively quickly.

However, since this is automatically done when both your Mac and iPhone are connected via Wi-Fi, delaying the sync for later isn’t really an option. Disabling Finder starting up after powering on is your biggest bet to being able to manually sync your devices at your discretion. You can do this by following the methods below.

2. Remove Your iPhone from Finder.

Usually, what triggers the automatic backup is when Finder identifies your iPhone over the Wi-Fi. This is a pretty good method as a stable and fast internet connection will quickly backup your files. However, since this usually happens on the first sign of your Wi-Fi connection, it can be troublesome.

To put it into context, you could be powering on your computer in a cafe shop or when getting home after a long day and before you can even use your computer its performance immediately decreases due to the automatic syncing.

Of course, this only becomes a huge problem if the files you’re backing up are large, as this can take the longest to complete. Removing your iPhone from Finder will stop this automatic process from happening with your iPhone.

Here’s how you can remove your iPhone from Finder:

1. Go ahead and open Finder.
2. Now, on the left pane or the sidebar click on your iPhone device.
3. Next, go to General and uncheck Show this iPhone when on Wi-Fi.

This will hide your iPhone in Finder’s sidebar until you enable it again. The only way to enable this feature again is to connect your iPhone via lightning/USB cable onto your computer which should be detected by Finder.

3. Disable Finder Opening After Boot.

A quick and easy way to stop the automatic syncing in your background is to close Finder altogether.

Since closing Finder every time your boot or turn on your Mac can be a hassle, in this method, we will teach you how to disable it from automatically opening on its own.

This will not disrupt any important functionalities that cannot be recovered by manually opening Finder. We will disable Finder automatically opening by using the command Terminal in Apple.

If you find this intimidating, don’t worry! This is a relatively easy method, just follow the steps below, and you should be fine.

Here’s how you can disable Finder opening after boot:

1. First, open up your command Terminal.
2. Now, type or copy and paste the following command into the Terminal.

defaults write com.apple.AMPDevicesAgent dontAutomaticallySyncIPods -bool true

3. Finally, log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.

The command essentially changes your settings to disable AMPDevicesAgent from automatically syncing your devices, which in turn will disable Finder from automatically opening when a device is connected.

You can revert the change by entering the following command to your Terminal.

defaults delete com.apple.AMPDevicesAgent

These two methods should be the only ones you need to fix your AMPDevicesAgent taking too much of your CPU. The methods above will disable Finder and hide your iPhone from being discovered through the Wi-Fi.

That brings us to the end of this article. We hope that this guide helped provide solutions that helped fix your ‘High CPU usage AMPDevicesAgent’ issue. If you have other questions related to this article or if you came across another alternative solution, feel free to share it below.

If this guide helped you, please share it. 🙂