The older devices get, the harder is to find original parts. While with old hardware, it’s not a problem, devices that are fairly newer have all kinds of checks and throttles made “for the user’s protection”. Nah, it’s so that Apple can charge you 300 smackaroos for a battery worth 60.

I changed the battery on my second Late 2013 15" Retina MacBook Pro, and of course, it started to have issues. As it happened with the other laptop I have, while running on battery, if the charge goes below a seemingly random value between 50% and 60%, a process named configd (sometimes in tandem with powerd and/or secd, and sometimes even mds_stores) starts spinning up, slowing the system to a crawl (hello beach ball mouse cursor!) and starts draining the battery at a rate of about one percent per minute. Killing the culprit processes is useless because they instantly respawn, and the only way of temporarily fixing this behaviour is to plug it to a wall charger and wait for a couple of minutes.

There’s been a lot of talk about the issue and many people have reported this, and while the solutions usually involve disabling Internet Sharing from System Preferences, I had no such setting activated. In my case the issue here is simple: somehow the OS doesn’t see the battery as being genuine and starts going crazy. I know that’s not a lob, but that’s the most technological explanation I’ve got. So in order to fix this issue forever, there’s one fairly simple solution, but I didn’t find it explained for idiots (like me), so here it goes. I have to mention that I’ve tested this on two Late-2013 15" MacBook Pro devices, one running Mac OS Catalina (10.15) and Mac OS Big Sur (11) and it worked on both cases.

Step 1: Download and Install OpenCore Legacy Patcher

Download OCLP from Github. You just need the file OpenCore-Patcher.pkg, you can ignore the others. I used version 2.4.1, because that’s the latest at the time of writing the article 1.

OCLP is a project for both running and unlocking features in macOS on supported and unsupported Macs. The project’s main goal is to breathe new life into Macs no longer supported by Apple, allowing for the installation and usage of macOS Big Sur and newer on machines as old as 2007. I won’t say more about it, because it’s not very relevant for our use case, but if you want to research OCLP in more detail, check the project page

Step 2: Disable Firmware Throttling

Install OCLP from the PKG file, and then run the program from your Applications folder (A). There, click on the “Settings” button (B).

In the panel that appears, click on “Advanced” (C), tick the “Disable Firmware Throttling” (D), then click on “Return” (F) to return to the main app screen.

Once here, click on “Build and Install OpenCore” and follow the steps on the screen.

Choose “Install to disk” (G),

Choose your main storage disk (H)

Choose the volume (partition) where your EFI is (I).

Once everything is finished, click on “Reboot” (J). Make sure to keep pressing the Option (alt) key while booting!!

Step 3: Reboot

then wait until your system starts up, it should normally boot.

Now you can unplug your computer from the power source and see if you still have configd and/or powerd go haywire and starts slapping your CPU when the battery level drops under a specific value (it was around 50% on my laptops).