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Monitor Your Mac From The Dock
Mar 11, 2025
Some cool things you can do with Activity Monitor to monitor your Mac from the dock. For more video how-tos, check out: http://www.cultofmac.com I also make technology videos on my main channel (unrelated to Cult of Mac): http://www.youtube.com/mscomputervideos
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0:05
hey everyone today I'm going to show you
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how you can monitor your Mac status
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right from your dock now I've gotten a
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lot of questions about the items that
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are running in my menu bar and this
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application up here is IAT menu and it
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gives me some quick information about
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status of different things on my Mac in
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this case I have my network bandwidth as
0:24
well as my memory now this is nice and
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all and I use it all the time but the
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fact is that it cost $16 for this
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application which may be out of some
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people's price range for something that
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they're only going to use once in a
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while or that it's not really a critical
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thing but with activity monitor which is
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a application that's built right into
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Mac OS 10 every Mac has it you can
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achieve a similar effect and monitor
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your max status right from your doc so
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it's open up activity monitor you're
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going to open a new finder window you're
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going to go into your applications
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folder and from there you're going to
1:00
scroll down until you find utilities
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folder and in there you'll see activity
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monitor uh most likely it'll be the
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first application and you can open that
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up now from here you have a lot of
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different things you can see uh here's
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all my processors running CPU system
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memory disk activity dis usage Network
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all kinds of things uh but the fact is
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that this is kind of clunky and to look
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at this all the time it's not quick and
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it's not easily accessible able or handy
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at all but you can view these things
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right from the activity monitor icon
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instead of being this boring little icon
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down here that really provides no useful
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information you can turn this into a
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live updating icon uh by right clicking
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or control clicking on it you're going
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to pop up this little menu and the first
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thing you're going to want to do is go
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under the options menu and click keeping
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dock so that this application will stay
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here at all times the next thing you're
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going to want to do is go under doc icon
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and from here you have a lot of
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different options of what you can
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transform the doc icon into by default
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it's set as show application icon uh but
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let's say we want to show the CPU usage
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now it turns into a CPU meter now you
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can see the usage of my
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CPU so that's kind of neat and it looks
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pretty nice too and now you have a
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simple CPU usage meter right in your doc
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uh you can also change this to something
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like CPU history and now you'll see the
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history of the activity of it if you
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prefer
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that uh you can also do Show Network
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usage and from here you can see what the
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usage of the network is you can't see
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how many kilobytes or megabytes you're
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going through but it gives you a rough
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estimate of what you're doing uh but you
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also have a disk activity this one's
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probably a little more accurate and I
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also have memory usage so here I can see
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that I'm using quite a bit of memory
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and this one's exactly like the graph
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that you see an activity monitor here
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you don't get the breakdown of
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everything uh but if you know these
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colors here and you know that free is
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blue and you can set the colors uh to
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whatever you want you can customize this
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and you can realize oh this uh orange
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chunk here is what I'm using at the
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current time and the blue chunk is
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what's free and that's kind of the most
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important parts right so then I can show
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this back to application icon keep it
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like that if I want but you're going to
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get a lot more usage out of having the
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do icon so I'm going to leave it as
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memory and now you're going to start to
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replicate that function of IAT menus or
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there's other applications just like
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that out there and you can also go up to
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the monitors Tab and from here you can
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show CPU usage and what it'll do is
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it'll bring down this little uh box here
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that shows pretty much the exact same
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thing you saw in the dock but as a
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little floating window so now if you
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want to keep this you know maybe up in
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the corner uh for just quick reference
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you can do that or what you can do is
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you can go floating CPU window and let's
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say I want it
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horizontal now it'll show up right here
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and it's just little floating there's no
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bar it's very unintrusive and it just
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shows you the CPU usage and let's say I
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want to shrink the doc back down and
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just stick it in the corner or I can
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kind of monitor it at all times and
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works very well and now you can see I
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have my memory usage showing in the doc
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application icon as well as the CPU
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usage and I can change this as well I
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can show the CPU history and this brings
4:36
up another window not the most elant uh
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solution but it still works and I can
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also clear the CPU history
4:44
oops just like that so there you go so
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this is a very low resource consuming
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way to monitor your max status it's not
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like it's going to be taking up hundreds
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of megabytes of Ram or anything to just
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monitor what you're doing and it's very
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simple and handy and you can see right
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here I have memory usage as well as CPU
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usage all for free right in the
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application now the downfall is when you
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quit activity monitor you're not going
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to see that anymore and uh that's kind
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of a bummer it'd be nice if the
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application icon was able to still
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update even when the application was
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closed uh but unfortunately that's not
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there what you can do is you can close
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the window it'll still remain open and
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you can still see the status of both of
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those things so it's pretty neat and
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especially the doc icon it really
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integrates into the system very well it
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kind of looks like it's supposed to be
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there so that's about all that's the
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easy way to monitor your Mac status
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right from your dock I hope you found
5:43
this video useful and thank you for
5:45
watching
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