October 12 2014

iStat Menus

by Brian Dunagan

CPU

iStat Menus is the first app I install on any Mac. On every computer, at some point, I think, “Why is this slow?” It might be CPU. It might be RAM. It might be network. It might be disk. iStat Menus gives me the answer, at a glance.

iStat Menus began life as iStat Pro, a free Dashboard widget for Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). In 2007, the widget transitioned into the OS X menu bar with iStat Menus 1.0, and in 2010, it became a paid app with 3.0. Since then, it’s been updated numerous times with the latest OS X support, moving to 4.0 in 2012 and 5.0 in August 2014. The team originally shipped widgets under the moniker iSlayer, but they started up Bjango as an iOS app company and migrated all their apps to it in 2010. Marc Edwards, one of the team, went into detail about the history (and the future) of the company in a Freshly Tilled Soil podcast episode.

See the screenshots below for the app’s battery, memory, network, and time menu bar items.

Battery

Memory

Network

Time