Pulse

Pulse tells you what your Mac is actually doing. How hard the processor is working, how hot it’s running, where the memory went, how fast the disk is. And it lets you check all of that from your phone when you’re nowhere near it.

A real Mac app, not a menu bar readout

On the Mac, Pulse is a window you keep open. The Summary view puts a live processor chart at the top with per-core load bars and the current temperature underneath, then memory broken into wired, active, compressed, and cached, then storage throughput and power draw, and finally the full process list sorted by what’s using the machine right now. It’s the view you leave on a second display while you work.

There are also dedicated views for the things you go looking at when something feels wrong. Performance lists every processor, graphics, and memory metric the Mac exposes, and lets you star the handful you actually care about so they stay at the top. Thermals reads every sensor the hardware reports, twenty of them on the Mac Studio shown here, and groups them the way the machine is physically laid out rather than as one long undifferentiated list. If your Mac is throttling under load, that’s the view that tells you which part of it is hot.

Why there’s an iPhone app

The reason to watch a Mac is usually that it’s doing something long and unattended. A render, a build, a backup, or just a machine at the office while you’re at home. That’s what Pulse is built for. The Mac app does the measuring, and the iPhone and iPad app is a window onto it, showing the same sensors and the same charts from wherever you happen to be.

Getting to it doesn’t mean opening your Mac up to the internet. On your own network, Pulse connects straight across the local network. Away from it, on cellular or someone else’s Wi-Fi, the same connection rides over a mesh VPN like Tailscale. Either way there are no ports to forward, no dynamic DNS to keep alive, and no cloud relay holding your data as it goes past. Nothing is ever sent to Avenue Apps. The connection is between your own devices and nothing else.

If you look after more than one machine, you switch between them from a device picker. A desktop at the office and a laptop at home look the same from the phone in your pocket.

Testing a drive without leaving the app

Pulse benchmarks disks too. It writes a real test file and reads it back with the cache bypassed, charts both passes, and shows the result against typical figures for an internal SSD, a Thunderbolt NVMe, a portable SATA drive, and a USB 3 drive, so the number means something instead of just being a number. Every run is kept with its date, drive, and test size, which is what lets you tell a drive that’s genuinely wearing out from one that just had a bad afternoon.