iStat Menus 6
Always know what’s going on with your Mac
$22 From Bjango, bjango.com Needs OS X 10.11 or later
The idea of hardware monitoring won’t make the average Mac user very excited. But iStat Menus manages to add a glossy sheen to resolutely utilitarian subject matter.
After installing some system components, iStat Menus invites you to turn on its various menus from a user-friendly settings pane. On doing so, little icons appear in your menu bar. Most are basic graphs, showing things like CPU and memory usage, or the battery level in connected Bluetooth devices.
Click a menu and iStat Menus gets gleefully geeky, enabling you to drill down into detailed statistics – and more graphs than are necessary. Need to know if your CPU usage regularly spiked during the past seven days, or if your storage drives are getting full? The information’s just a click away.
In fact, as of iStat Menus 6, “no clicks” might be more accurate, because menus can be opened with custom keyboard shortcuts. If you’re wedded to the keyboard, this is bliss. And new customization options don’t stop there. Now you can reorder menu sections, and be notified about key events, such as low batteries, a lack of storage, or when daylight savings time is imminent.
As ever, the Time widget remains superb, providing a combination of customizable menu bar clock, drop-down calendar, calendar events, and world clock. Even this has been improved, though. You can now create two-line clocks, which – particularly on Retina displays – enable you to squeeze lots of information into a tiny space, without impacting legibility. Since you can also add multiple clocks, this is perfect when working with people across several time zones.
Version 6 also adds a brand new menu: Weather. This is less polished – there’s a small but noticeable delay when the menu’s clicked (presumably due to data loading), the visual design is merely OK, there’s no imminent rainfall graph, and you need to pay to keep the thing running after six months.
The last of those points is understandable, given that developer Bjango takes a small financial hit for every refresh you make; but Weather needs more refinement to compete with the best of its rivals. For everything else, iStat Menus 6 is in a class of its own.
the bottom line. A strong update to what was already a smart, efficient, and essential macOS utility.