Attention Everyone This post continues to receive plenty of comments experiencing the same issues as described in my post. There have been a few who have posted potential work arounds. It's good to know my experience isn't uncommon. However, to properly change and fix things - this is what we all must do: Open Feedback Assistant (apple's service for collecting feedback from developers using their tools like Xcode) - Feedback Assistant is a website for those who don't know. Open a new ticket describing the issue with Xcode and the crashing and the high CPU usage. Wait for Apple to notice and ask for more information from you. In doing so, by sheer number of similar reports in the Feedback Assistant we will help Apple notice and fix these issues, and hopefully make the Xcode experience much better for the foreseeable future. I'm sure we agree that we all want to help Apple make Xcode great to use and operate as the best dev tool in the mobile marketplace. Just today, I have received reply from Apple on my ticket regarding one of the problems listed in this post and I have followed their instructions to send them over a diagnostic report generated via Terminal, which will help them see what exactly the issue is. Also as a sidenote - I had repaired my macbook pro last week because i noticed that it was not sitting flat and the screen was not closing flat, which is a sign of swollen battery. I also noticed i had high CPU usage from my antivirus (BitDefender) when first running the simulator. I'm not sure if they are related problems, but I do still experience issues like high CPU with Xcode after the repair and disabling BitDefender. But the Spotlight issue does seem to have disappeared for me; although I can see on my Activity Monitor, some process called "CrashReport" appears with high CPU usage when I run the simulator, then it disappears after a minute.