Vitals is out. It is an Activity Monitor alternative for Mac, and the second Mac app I have shipped, after Flit.
Open Activity Monitor on a Mac you actually work on and you get about a thousand processes. Chrome alone is dozens of them, each with its own figure, and none of them is the total for Chrome. The question you opened it with, what is slowing my Mac down, is left for you to add up.
Vitals adds it up. Every process is grouped under the app it belongs to, so the same Mac shows about 60 apps instead of 1,000 processes, each with one figure for memory, CPU, energy, disk and network.
Why another system monitor
The Mac already has good monitors. Activity Monitor ships with it. iStat Menus puts a sensor for everything in the menu bar, and Stats does much of that for free. They are all good at the whole machine, and at single processes.
I wanted the layer in between: one row per app, and a memory of what happened while I was not looking. When the fans spin up at 3 pm, the answer should still be there at 5.
How it works
Every helper, renderer and background process is added to the app that launched it, so Chrome’s helpers count toward Chrome. Anything a project runs, like a dev server, also shows under the project folder it works in.
Vitals keeps 30 days of that history, on your Mac. Nothing about what you run leaves it. Activating a license sends the key, the Mac’s name and an anonymous ID, and that is the whole list.
It stays light, too. With no window open it samples every five seconds and uses about a tenth of a percent of one core. It samples faster only while you are looking at it.
What is in the box
- Apps, not processes. One memory, CPU, energy, disk and network figure per app. Quit or force quit a whole app, or a single process inside it.
- 30 days of history. The last 12 hours, 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days, with the apps that used the most. The app that drained your battery this afternoon has a name.
- Worth a Look. A notification when an app hogs the CPU, keeps growing in memory, or hammers the disk or network.
- Projects. Processes grouped by the project folder they work in, with their listening ports, and the dev servers left running called out. Quit a whole project at once.
- A menu bar you arrange. Every readout can be its own menu bar item, a value, a graph or both, ⌘-dragged into any order. Click it for a pocket version of the app.
- Sound and Bluetooth. A volume slider for every app playing sound, which remembers each app’s level, and every connected device’s battery, lowest first.
- Sensors. Temperatures, fans, disk volumes, and battery health that matches System Settings.
It needs macOS 15 Sequoia or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. The download is 10 MB, and it is notarized by Apple. Every tab works in the browser on the home page, so you can see how it works before you buy it.
Pricing
Vitals is a one-time purchase. One payment, every update for life, no subscription. The regular price is $29.
For the launch, the price starts low and rises in steps as licenses sell. The first 1,000 went at $5 and were gone in eight days. As I write this, it is $9 for the next 100. The site shows how many are left, counted from real sales rather than a timer.
There is no free trial. There is a 14-day refund instead. If you post about Vitals and the post takes off, you get half or all of your money back and keep the license.
The first week
Twelve releases in seven days, from 1.0 to 1.1.1. An Intel build the day after launch. A Dock icon for people who want Vitals where Activity Monitor lives. Celsius or Fahrenheit. A menu bar you arrange yourself, Sound and Bluetooth tabs, and a mixer that remembers each app’s volume after a restart.
More than a hundred people have posted about it. Some of what they found is on the wall of love: one person learned that their browser was using most of their memory, and that their next Mac needs 32 GB.
Try it
If a figure looks wrong, or you want a readout that does not exist yet, tell me. Vitals asks how it is going after a week, too, and that goes straight to me.