PulseMac

Everything your Mac is doing, in the menu bar. CPU, GPU, memory, network, storage, battery and fans — read from the hardware, refreshed as often as you want.

macOS 14+UniversalVersion 1.1

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Platform: macOS 14 or later
Architecture: Universal — Apple Silicon and Intel
Runs as: Menu bar, Dock icon optional
Version: 1.1.0

At a glance

Seven subsystems, one menu

CPU and GPU usage, memory pressure, network throughput, storage, battery and fan speed — all in one menu you pull down rather than an app you switch to. The heaviest processes are listed alongside, so the number and its cause arrive together.

CPU 34%GPU 12%MEM 61%NET 1.2 MB/s

Interface preview · the menu

From the hardware

Sensors, not estimates

Thermal sensors for CPU and GPU, real fan speeds, and battery health with its cycle count, read out of IOKit directly. Where a figure comes from a sensor the Mac actually has, that is the figure shown — and where a Mac has no such sensor, the row is not invented.

CPU 48°CGPU 41°CFan 2100 rpmHealth 94%412 cycles

Interface preview · sensors

Only when it matters

Thresholds you set, notifications you asked for

Separate alert thresholds for CPU, memory and temperature, so it speaks up when something is actually wrong rather than chirping through normal work. Polling is tuned per subsystem — cheap readings refresh quickly, expensive ones like storage and process lists do not.

CPU alert 90%RAM alert 85%Temp alert 95°C

Interface preview · thresholds

Using PulseMac

From first open to finished.

A practical walkthrough of the core workflow.

Launch it oncePulseMac lives in the menu bar. The Dock icon is optional — turn it off to run purely from the menu.

Set your thresholdsPick the CPU, memory and temperature levels worth interrupting you for.

Leave it runningStart at login, and check it only when the menu bar tells you to.

Under the hood

Different polls for different costs

Reading CPU load is cheap; enumerating storage and building a process list is not. PulseMac keeps a separate interval for sensors, storage and processes rather than one global refresh rate, so the fast numbers stay live without the expensive ones burning battery to match.

It is also the one universal binary in the catalogue — Apple Silicon and Intel, back to macOS 14 — because a machine old enough to need watching is exactly the machine that benefits most.

Questions about PulseMac?

Feature requests and bug reports are genuinely welcome — most of what these apps do came from someone pointing out that the alternative was annoying.

[email protected]