iStats For Mac

Mac OS X comes with a built-in application that offers you the possibility to monitor your system's performance and review all running apps and processes: Activity Monitor.

However, if you don’t have a lot of desktop space, you must continually interrupt your workflow to go to the Activity Monitor’s main window, which might obstruct your view to other apps.

iStats is a small utility that proposes a more efficient solution: you get to see essential details about the resources usage via a status bar menu that hides automatically when you click your mouse in another area.

Upon launch, the iStats app places its menulet in the status bar, and you get to activate its panel with the press of a button. Note that iStats does not come with a preferences window because there are no customization options available.

Within the iStats main panel, you get to switch between the CPU and RAM tab, or close the app altogether, but there are no other interaction options. Take into consideration that it might take some time until the iStats app pulls the initial data, but it will continue to update the values in real time.

Inside the iStats CPU tab, you get to see a graph depicting the current CPU usage, how much processing power is used by the user or by the system, and how much of it is idle, expressed in percents. As far as the RAM memory goes, you get details about the used, unused, or wired memory.

In both cases, you will also be able to see the top processes that require the most resources. Even though you get to see their names, you cannot copy them to your clipboard, or choose to see them in the Activity Monitor and be able to stop them quickly if necessary.

To conclude, iStats delivers an uncomplicated alternative to keeping an eye on the system’s CPU and RAM consumption and helps you identify the top resources hoggers.

Nonetheless, take into consideration that the iStats utility does not integrate any customization options and does not facilitate dealing with possible issues.