 If you want to monitor the system performance of your Mac, then I've got a great little app that you're gonna want to know about. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. And today we're talking about another one of these apps that I have been using for absolutely ages. I think well over a decade at this point, it's called iStatMenus and it sits up in your menu bar of your Mac. And it basically, it's like a little dashboard really that keeps you up to date of all the system performance metrics of your Mac and you can add in and subtract whichever ones you care to work to use. But it really does cover a huge range of things. So it's things like your hard disk space, your RAM usage, your CPU usage, the temperature on various different parts of your Mac, the fan speeds of your Mac, if you've got a Mac with fans. It also measures the bandwidth, your upload, download, things like that, read, write to disks, all sorts, networks, statistics, the list goes on. So it really is a great little app and I'll just show you quickly how it looks. So it sits up here in the menu bar, as I mentioned, and here it is right up in the top. And we've got some little charts, we've got some information there about usage. If you can't quite see that, I did take a little handy snapshot, there you go. So like for example here, I've got my CPU usage and this is showing the graph over time. So this is actually moves over time. Here I've got the little bar chart showing the CPU usage across eight of the, well, across all eight cores of the CPU. Next we've got the overall CPU usage as a percentage of the maximum. And then we've got my SSD, we've got the used space, the free space, we've got the memory. So this is read, write, sorry, memory usage. So we've got the used and the free space. And then also this is the network statistics. So the bandwidth and how much upload and download speed is being used, not available, but being used. And so this just sits up in this top bar, as I say. There are other aspects that you can add in. So we'll come on to that shortly. But first I need to tell you actually where you can get this from. So this is part of the SetApp bundle. And the SetApp bundle is basically a collection of over 200 apps and you pay just one monthly fee of $9.99 a month. And for that, you basically get access to all of these great apps. And as I say, I've been using this one in particular, iStap menus for years and years, just paying it for every upgrade. Every time a new one came out, I paid for the new one. With SetApp, it is now part of that bundle. And so you can just basically get upgrades for as long as they keep making them. They'll come out and you'll just always have the latest version. And that goes for all of the other great apps as well. So if you want to try it out and you wanna try this app out, go to takeonetech.io slash setapp. And if you use that link, you'll be able to get the free trial just like everybody else. But if you sign up, you will also get a free month added onto your subscription. And I also will get a free month. So that is how the affiliate system works. It's as simple as that. We both get a free month and everybody's happy. So it's definitely worth checking out, even if you don't carry on after the free trial because there's loads of great stuff in there. And by the way, I've already made a few videos about SetApp apps and how we're making a few more. So there might be a few more that you're interested in as well. Anyway, let's get back to it. And let me show you, by the way, this is one of these ones. Once you install it, it is rooted right into the system because it's giving you all of the detailed information sort of behind the scenes of your Mac. So you will have to go through that process when you install it or where it will say, give us access to your computer by going into the security and privacy section of your system preferences. But it will tell you all about how to do that, but just don't be alarmed if it asks for that permission. So let me show you in practice how it actually works on my desktop. So here we go. We've got the items just up at the top here. So I'll start with this one. This is the CPU section. And you can see it says CPU. This might be a bit small at the moment, but it'll get a bit bigger in a moment. Then we've got the hard drive space or the SSD, then the memory and then the network. Now, if I click on any one of these, it will expand to give us more information. So there we go. Now we've got this extra panel that's popped out. And as you can see, if I go over any of this information, it pops out even more detail. So here we've got a little chart of the CPU usage. And this is basically mapping it over time. So if we watch this for a moment, it does actually move. It is a live chart updating every second or so every couple of seconds. And then we've also got here, this represents the eight cores of the processor. And you can see which one is being used. And also it gives you a breakdown of which is being used by the system or the user or which parts are idle. So that is just what's represented by those bar charts. It also tells you as a percentage of the total how much is being currently used. And that is the figure that is reflected in here. So here we've got 19, 20% by the user, 21% by the system. So that was about 41% a minute ago. So that is what that is. But it also tells you the processes. And so here you can see the processes. Now, a little bit different here. These figures are actually stated as percentage of total core usage. So 100% on here is basically using one core. So we can see the e-cam live that I'm using to make these videos is basically using 100, is basically using one core of the processor. And then you can see which other applications are currently using what amount of processor. Next, we've got Apple's memory. So that's the built-in memory on the chip of the processor. Frames per second, which I believe is the refresh rate of the data might be wrong about that one actually. Now that I've come to mention it, but let's move on, shall we? And just assume that I know exactly what that is. The next is the load average. So how much load is being put on the processor over time. And again, this is a chart. And by the way, you can see you've got days and hours and so on. So I can come back here and see what was my processor usage over the past 24 hours. I must have had an afternoon nap there, look at that. I don't know what happened there. Then we've got over seven days, 30 days and so on. So it's really quite a lot of information if you want to go to that level. You've also got the same information of CPU down to the core level as well. We've got a lazy core there, not doing as much work as the others. And then we've got down at the bottom, it tells us our uptime here. So how long the computer's been on for, awake and sleeping and so on. And down here at the bottom, we've got some shortcuts to some of the Apple built in sort of technical apps, I suppose you'd call them. So we've got here, we've got activity monitor. This one is the terminal, no it's not. This one is the console, I should say, which is basically where you can run diagnostics and things like that. This one is the terminal. And then the other one is basically the system information that you'd get. Like if you went up to the top corner of the Apple menu in the menu bar and wanted to get the system information. In fact, let me just quickly show you. It's this one, the one that tells you about all your different hardware and software settings basically over your Mac. And the console is this one, which basically allows you to run crash reports, log reports, diagnostics and all that sort of stuff. But I won't complicate this at the moment because we probably don't need to look at that just at the moment. So then there's also a little uninstall link but we'll skip that one as well. Next, if I go into the memory, you can see that, oh sorry, the disk usage. You can see that I've got my Xtreme Pro SSD a hard drive there or external drive. And you can see how much space is currently free on it. Then I've got my Mac hard drive and then I've also got HP, HP, HP passport. So that's that one and that's how much is free on it. And you can also see the processes and this is R and W for read, write. So you can see which ones are currently reading and writing to the hard drive. And again, you've just got these shortcuts to the Mac system apps as well. This one over here by the way is the preferences for iStat menus itself but we'll come to that one in a moment. Next, I've got my memory. So this is the RAM. And here you can see basically the memory usage. So the app memory usage, wired, compressed and cached memory. And then also you've got some other. So this is how much strain is being put on it basically and this is the actual memory. And then the processes in terms of which applications are using it. Look at that, I haven't quit Dropbox. I normally quit Dropbox before I do any recordings but I must have forgotten. That's terrible, isn't it? But anyway, and creative cloud. Oh dear, that is a double strike against me. That is having Dropbox and creative cloud running when I'm recording. Terrible, terrible. There's been a total system failure in my head. So that is basically you can see, look, e-cam live using 4.6 gigabytes. And then these are not really using too much actually as it goes. So next is the swap main memory. So that's basically where you have a sort of an actual file that is used for storing information in very rough terms. And then this is basically sort of how much information has been passed in and out of the memory as well. And like I say, you've always got these charts that show you the sort of load over time and how much usage has been over time. Next we've got the network and here you can see the network, the wifi and the sort of upload, up and down. Upload and download. And then also the different links here. So ethernet, Bluetooth, Thunderbolt bridge, iPhone and then also the processes and what the upload and download is from those. Now that's all I've actually got up there at the moment but if I come into the preferences by clicking on this one of course it's opened somewhere else on the screen. One second, there we go, this is it. So this is basically where we can set some settings. So you can change all of the different things that we're gonna include. Now we've got some global settings here first of all and this is where we can set things like the color. So I've just got blue. So you can see how these are sort of a blue color. Now the next thing we can do is we've also got help and things like that obviously in here. And then you've also got the light and dark menu bar modes. You can have those styled separately if you want but I don't because I'm always in dark mode because for me that's the only mode but I know there are other opinions that are available on that one. So here you can change basically the menu bar color and also the color of the dropdown. So if I wanted them piercing white like this it's just a bit too much for my eyes that is. So I'll keep them as the dark like that or you could have them even more opaque and black but these ones are just sort of semi-transparent. Next we come on to notifications. So you can include, you see these are things that I don't actually use but you can show alerts for things like weather forecast, daylight saving change, battery time remaining and so on. So when you've got 10 minutes left but I'm on the Mac mini at the moment so I don't have to worry about battery so I don't have these active. Next, so I can toggle that one off. Next we've got the weather again. I don't actually have the weather in here but because it's always sunny here in Thailand. If it's not sunny it's raining momentarily so there's little point having it. But the weather you can actually have that on and if I just toggle that on then what will happen is you can see what's the particular thing that I've got here active. So basically when you're setting up all of these things you have active items, so that says active items and down here you have inactive items and basically you can just drag whichever ones of these you want up into here to make them active in the actual bar above so you can change which ones of those you want. You can also change the location so you can specify a specific location. I suppose we're gonna have the weather where somewhere where I know it's bad weather so that I can see how bad it is in a specific location but you're just basically adding these all in here. You can change things like the time, time format, 24 hour or 12 hour, the wind, speed, the all this sort of stuff, visibility whether you want it in kilometers or miles. The source of it so either acu-weather, dark sky or wherever you want to get your weather from. The size of the display and the temperature whether you want it in Fahrenheit or centigrade. The pressure, how you want that measured and the rain or snowfall whether you want that measured in millimeters and centimeters or in inches. I don't think I need to worry about inches of snowfall here in the north of Thailand but anyway. So that is how you would add that in. Next we've got CPU usage which is something that I do have and basically here you've got a few other options from in terms of the views. You can see that as I'm changing these it's actually changing it up here as well. So if I just move this one over here it's just rearranging my charts. So the other things that you can add in here is we've got the, currently we've got the graph and we've got also a bar chart which shows the CPU usage of or the usage of the cores of the CPU and then you've got other things like the load average. You could have this expressed as a pie chart. So a pie chart express showing you the percentage of the usage in that way as well. You've also got the GPU. So if you've got a separate GPU you can have that up there to show you the usage of that one. You can add a little space in as well. And then you've also got this app usage format. So Unix style is between zero and 800%. That's basically where I was telling you about the where we're looking at the app usage and it tells you the percentage of a single core. So you can actually change that so that it's basically instead would be showing you the percentage overall but I do leave it like that as the default just so that it gives me an idea of how much of a single core that they are using. And then the next is the processes to show. So if you remember when I click in this thing here we've got these five processes that show basically the top five but I could show the top 15 if I want and then it would list the top 15 as well. So that's just up to you whether you want to, how many you want to have on that. So then the next one, oh, by the way I should say that there is a hotkeys for all of these as well. So if you want to toggle a hotkey to just drop down these I don't tend to have a hotkey for this to be honest because really I just use it as a visual in the top but it's only when there's a problem occasionally I will go and look at the dropdown to see what's going on but you can edit and add a hotkey for just that particular one. So you'd press the hotkey and this menu would drop down. That's basically what that would do. And then you can also edit the actual dropdown itself. So here you go. We've got all these different sections. So if I wanted to rearrange these you can see how much, what's the word now? I think my mind's gone completely blank. How you can customize it how much customization there is available. You know, you can organize these exactly as you want and rearrange everything. And you can change the graph colors and all sorts in specifically in the dropdown as well. So I'll just click on save for that one. So that's where you edit the dropdown. Next one we'll look at is the memory and very similar. It almost didn't notice the change there but very similar. It's the same format. You can change the number of processes to show. You can change the format of the app usage statistics and then we can add a hotkey. We've got a few other things here. So this is the memory, the sort of read write I suppose of it and you can change the you can also have a chart here to show how the memory's changed over time. I'm not so bothered about that one in the same way that I am with the CPU. I like to see what's happened over time with that. But the RAM, I just tend to leave that one just to see the maximum that it is at the moment. But you can also change add some extra things in here as well. And you can also edit the dropdown and you can also edit the hotkey just as you could with the processor. Next disk space. So this is going to be very familiar again. Same format, different ways of expressing it. You can have the sort of read write of the disk and you can add that in as a little chart as well to see how that's changed over time. And then you can also basically have different ways of measuring the activity on a per-d disk basis. You can also change the graph type that we've got in here. And then also the processes to show just like before if I put that on to a higher number then basically when I click in the disks it's basically got this here as well. So that is, sorry, I've just clicked in completely the wrong one, that way around. There you go, there's the 10 processes. Now, the disks to show in the menu bar, so this shows specifically my max hard disk so that is here, so that is this one. Now actually I have added this one since I've set this up so I will move this one up there. And now basically I can see my Extreme Pro up there as well. And you could also add some of these other ones. So I've also got this other one but that's just for a temporary backup. So I'll leave that one out for now. Next we've got the network and it's the same sort of deal in here. You can add in some of these other informations. Informations, some of this other information. My language is going totally off the rails today. Same deal with the hockey and so on. And then you can also look at basically whether you want the primary thing that you're looking at in terms of network activity to be ethernet, wifi or whatever. And the format, either kilobits or megabits or so on. The decimals, so how to treat those whether you want one decimal place or multiples and the processes again, I'm just gonna pump these up so I can see a few more manage IP addresses so you can do some work here with showing the IP address or the secondary address and so on. So that is basically what we've got in the network. Now the sensors, I don't actually have this on for this one because I'm not as bothered about, not bothered, but I'm not so worried about my heat and things like that on this new Mac mini like I was with my laptop previously, my MacBook Pro. Did used to, the fans used to kick in and it used to get quite hot. So here you've basically got sensors where you can look at the fan speed, you've got the temperature, you've got fans and you can set the temperature. So let me just say, see what this is. So this is saying, but let me toggle this one on for a moment. This one is saying the temperature of the particular sensor, but look at all these different sensors. So we've got the Apple neural engine, the CPU efficiency cores, CPU performance cores, GPUs and so on and so forth. So you can really, they're hard drive. So it's got temperature sensors on all of these different locations and you can actually see how hot things are getting. And I've got to say with my MacBook Pro, seeing some of these temperatures getting up to close to 100, it did make me think that's getting quite hot. And there's also fans as well. So obviously there isn't fans on this Mac Mini or at least not particularly active, but on the MacBook Pro, I could see the speed. And to be honest with you, I didn't really need the sensor to tell me that it was kicking in. Cause it sounded like a little helicopter it was taking off from my desk. Next, we've got the battery and again, this doesn't have a battery but you can add in things like the battery for your AirPods, for any other Bluetooth devices things like that. And so those can all sit up in the menu bar if you want. So you've got these different symbols for different devices, your iPods and so on. And it'll tell you sort of time remaining and charge as well. So you can add all of that in. So that is quite useful to see the charge of your different devices. But like you can see, there's nothing actually to show here because I don't have any batteries currently plugged in. There's also time as well. So you can edit the, have a custom clock from here where you can change the format. So if you want to take out the default Mac clock you can take that out and then you can change things and put like multiple time zones, things like that. So here you go. We've got world clocks. So we could put the clock in different locations and add those in. And then you can also show other things like events, weeks, the week of the year, things like that. And so you can add that in and it will put in you can request calendar access and it can put your little events. So if you want those sorts of things up in your menu bar then you can do that from here. Personally, I don't want all of that clutter in my menu bar and I've got a nice big clock on top of my monitor. So I actually just minimized even the system clock to as small as it could be just this little tiny analog clock in the corner. So then this is the last sort of major section of it but there is also this combined drop down where if you want to just combine a whole series of different things into one drop down then you can combine these all together and add things like GPU memory discs and so on. And then it'll just be one drop down that's got everything in. If you maybe have got a little bit short for space in your menu bar, then that is a great way to go about it. So that is iStat Menus in a nutshell and that's what it does. It is a really great little application to have just to be able to glance up and see what's going on especially now that I'm doing recording and live streaming this became all the more critical especially on my old Mac to be able to just look and see what the system was doing and if I was close to having a complete system failure or not fortunately on the Mac mini these things haven't been such an issue but it's still nice to be able to have this visual on what is going on on my Mac. And so as I say part of the set that bundle definitely download it from there and give it a go at takeonetech.io slash set up. And if you are using it or you have used it or you've got any comments or questions about it in particular, then don't forget to leave those down below in the comments section and also like and subscribe and share it with friends and family at this video. And don't go anywhere though because there is plenty more videos coming up next specifically out of the set up bundle and those will be in a playlist at the bottom right. So until next time, have a great day.