Usage: System Activity Monitor
System stats at your fingertips
From Free FROM Oleh Stasula, usage.pro NEEDS macOS 11 or later
Keeping track of your Mac’s resource usage can be tricky. Apple’s Activity Monitor is suited to a deep background dive, but Usage aims to provide a view of key hardware stats.
Information covers CPU, memory, network, system hard drive and battery, plus a device component that’s unique to the floating widget.
The free version gives access to menu bar items, plus a selection of widgets for more detail via a popover window. You can access up to four components that monitor CPU, network, and system disk in real-time only. If you’d like to add history graphs or monitor memory and battery, you’ll need a Pro licence (from £4.99 yearly/£7.99 lifetime).
The configuration screen is split in two; on the right is the current content of the menu bar and popover windows, on the left are components for each, split into tabs. You can click and drag to add, or roll your mouse over one to reveal add (+) and remove (–) buttons. Existing items on the right can also be reordered by drag and drop.
We’d like more interactive elements, and see the Disk Utility work with non-system drives. Nevertheless, Usage is a good go-to app for monitoring your system. Nick Peers