A system monitor that lives in your Mac's menu bar

#What the menu bar HUD shows

The HUD sits in your menu bar. Click it and a popover opens with your Mac's vitals: CPU, GPU, memory, disk, network and battery, updating live. You don't need to open a window or switch apps. It's meant for the moment you hear the fans spin up or feel the Mac slow down and want to know why.

The popover also has a few real controls:

• Fan presets for Auto, Cool and Max. Auto leaves the fans to macOS. See Mac fan control for how this works and how control goes back to macOS.
• Keep Screen On stops the display from sleeping while you read, present or watch a long job finish.
• Eject All safely unmounts every external drive and disk image in a single click.

#The Status dashboard

When you want more than a glance, open Status in the app. It's a live dashboard with a health score, CPU, GPU, memory pressure, battery, disk, network and fans in one view.

Below the numbers is the part that answers "why": the processes actually using your Mac right now, ranked by CPU, power and memory. A process that has used most of your CPU for ten minutes is easy to spot, and so is an app that's draining the battery in the background.

#When a monitor helps

Most of the time you won't need it. It's useful when something feels off:

• After a macOS update, when Spotlight and Photos re-index your files and the Mac runs warm for a while. Our guide to Spotlight indexing and high CPU covers what's normal.
• When the fans get loud, the CPU and process list show whether it's real work or a runaway process. See why a MacBook's fan gets loud.
• When the Mac feels slow and you want to know if it's memory, CPU or a background app. Read why a Mac can feel slow after a macOS update.
• When background apps pile up. Processes you don't recognize often come from login items. See login items and background apps.

#Power and network, not just CPU

CPU isn't the only thing worth watching. When the battery drains faster than usual, sorting the process list by power shows which app is responsible, even if its CPU use looks modest. A browser tab playing video in the background or a sync client catching up after a few days offline are common causes.

The network reading helps with a different question: whether your Mac is busy talking to the internet. A large upload, a cloud backup or a photo library syncing can keep the Mac and its network busy for a long time. Seeing that traffic in the menu bar explains why a video call stutters or a download crawls, without opening another app.

#Memory pressure, not free memory

A Mac with little "free" memory is usually fine. macOS fills spare memory with caches on purpose, because empty memory does nothing useful. The number that matters is memory pressure, which shows how hard macOS is working to make room. Status shows memory pressure for that reason. If it stays high and your Mac feels slow, look at the processes using the most memory.

#How it compares to Activity Monitor

Activity Monitor comes with macOS, it's free, and it shows more detail per process than any menu bar app. Keep using it for deep dives. What it doesn't give you is a quick look from the menu bar, a single view of GPU, fans, battery and network, or the extra controls. Freshist's HUD and Status cover that everyday glance. The two work fine side by side.

#Native and quiet

Freshist is built in SwiftUI for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon and Intel. It doesn't bundle a browser engine. It also sends no telemetry: your process list and readings stay on your Mac. The app also includes Privacy Check, which shows which apps are using your camera and microphone right now.

#Part of one license

The monitor isn't a separate subscription. Status and the menu bar HUD come with Clean, Apps, Optimize and Analyze in a single license: $9 once, with lifetime updates, on up to 3 Macs, and a 14-day refund if it isn't for you.