Beacon puts your Mac's vitals — CPU, memory, network, thermals — in your menubar. This guide covers every panel, every reading, and how to tune Beacon for an at-a-glance system view.
Click anywhere on the menubar strip and a 340-pixel-wide panel drops down. What you see depends on where you clicked.
The Overview panel — one row per metric, with the trial countdown pinned to the header.
Clicking the Beacon icon opens the Overview. It's a scrollable list of every metric Beacon tracks, presented as a small single-line summary per category:
Tap any row to dive into the dedicated panel for that metric. The navigation lives inside the popover, so you don't lose your place on screen — the popover stays anchored to the menubar.
Each metric has its own dedicated panel — CPU, Memory, Network, Disk, Sensors, Battery. Every one of them follows the same layout: a hero card at the top (a gauge plus a few key numbers), a history graph below, and then whatever extra reference data fits the metric. Top processes for CPU and Memory, fan readings for Sensors, volume list for Disk, and so on. All of it scrolls inside the 340-pixel popover.
In the header of the Overview panel — top right — Beacon shows one small
pill. During your free trial it's the trial countdown
(23h 47m). When the trial expires it switches to a red
"Trial Expired" badge. With a license, it shows your Mac's
uptime instead — quietly useful when you're trying to
remember whether you rebooted last week or not.
The CPU panel is the densest of the six — it has to communicate both whole-machine load and which processes are responsible.
CPU panel — per-core mini graphs on top, top processes below. Warm and hot cores recolour automatically.
At the top is a circular gauge showing total CPU usage, with three numbers next to it:
The gauge itself uses the total of User + System, so a 100% gauge with 50/50 User/System means the CPU is fully saturated, half by your apps and half by the kernel helping them.
Below the gauge is a row of vertical bars — one per logical core. On an M-series Mac that means every performance core and every efficiency core (so 8 bars on an M1, 10 on an M1 Pro, etc.). The bars fill from the bottom up:
Each bar is labelled with its core index underneath (0,
1, 2…). The mapping to P-cores vs E-cores
depends on your Mac, but in general the lower indices are performance
cores and the higher indices are efficiency cores on Apple Silicon.
Underneath the cores is a usage history graph — a rolling window of CPU usage over the last few minutes. It updates at your chosen sample rate (every 2 seconds by default) and re-scales to the highest value in view, so a quiet machine still shows a recognisable shape.
At the bottom is a list of the top 5 processes by CPU usage. Each row shows the process icon, name, PID, and current CPU percentage. The list updates every ~6 seconds (twice your sample interval) — fast enough to catch the troublemaker, slow enough to stop names from flickering around.
Need more than five? Hit the Inspect Processes button above the list. The panel switches into inspector mode — a compact status bar at the top, then a scrollable list of every running process, with column headers you can click to sort by CPU, Memory, or Name. Hit Inspect again to flip back to the gauge view.
The process list is only scanned while you've got the CPU or Memory panel open. The moment you close the popover, scanning stops — Beacon shouldn't show up in its own top processes list when you're not actively looking at it.
Memory is the metric most people misread, mostly because the macOS memory model isn't a simple "used / free" split. Beacon shows it the same way Activity Monitor does, only smaller.
The hero gauge isn't used memory — it's memory pressure. That's macOS's own composite reading of how close the system is to needing to swap, and it's a much better "are we in trouble?" signal than raw used bytes. Green is fine, amber is getting tight, red means swap is happening and apps are starting to feel it.
Next to the gauge are four numbers — the actual breakdown:
Below the gauge is a horizontal segmented bar — the same four colours as the breakdown — that gives you the relative shape of your memory in one glance. The legend underneath lists the segment names in case you don't have the colour map memorised.
Below the bar is a Details card with three numbers that don't fit the hero summary:
Same pattern as the CPU panel: top 5 processes by memory at the bottom, with an Inspect Processes button that flips into the full sortable list. The "process" column shows the binary's name and icon; the "memory" column shows resident bytes — what's actually in RAM, not virtual size.
Beacon's Network panel is the one most people pin open when they're debugging "why is the internet slow?" — it shows what's going where, from which app, in real time.
At the top are two big numbers — current Download and Upload rates, summed across every active interface. The arrows next to each rate are colour-coded: down is teal, up is coral, by default. Both colours are configurable in Settings.
Rates are bytes-per-second, formatted to a sensible unit — B/s, KB/s, MB/s, GB/s — so a 200 Mbps download shows as around 25 MB/s, not a seven-digit byte count.
Below the rates is a dual-line graph — download and upload overlaid in their respective colours. The Y axis auto-scales to whichever line is bigger, with a minimum floor of about 1 KB/s so a quiet network still shows a useful shape. A legend underneath confirms which colour is which.
Underneath the graph is a list of the top apps by current network activity — up to 5 of them. Each row shows:
The list refreshes every 5 seconds — fast enough to keep up with "Slack just woke up" type events, slow enough to be readable.
Below the apps is the Interfaces card — one row per active network interface, each with its name (en0, en1, etc.), a green dot to show it's up, and the current down/up rate just for that interface. Useful when you're flicking between Wi-Fi and Ethernet and want to see which one's actually carrying traffic. Underneath everything is a Session Totals card with the total bytes downloaded and uploaded since Beacon started.
Hit the Inspect Activity button (sits between the hero rates and the graph) and the panel flips into a full network inspector — every process with at least one socket open, with a search box at the top and column sort by Active, Sockets, or Name. Each row expands inline to show the listening ports, protocols, and PID of the process — handy when something's making outbound calls and you can't tell what.
The Disk panel is a static-feeling one — disks don't change minute to minute — but it's the quickest way to see how full every mounted volume is without opening Finder.
At the top is a circular gauge for your boot volume (usually "Macintosh HD" or whatever you renamed it to). Next to it are four readings:
Below the gauge is a small usage-history graph (the boot volume's used ratio over time) — slow-moving but useful for spotting a slow leak.
Every mounted volume gets its own card — boot disk, external SSDs, USB sticks, encrypted Time Machine targets. Each card has its own mini gauge, a stacked usage bar (used → purgeable → free), and a small "free bytes" number on the right.
The boot volume gets a small "Boot" badge in coloured pill form so you can tell it apart from look-alike volume names.
Each volume card includes small info badges along the bottom for the things you'd otherwise have to open Disk Utility to check:
The full volume scan — including the metadata about encryption, format, and removable status — runs roughly every 30 seconds. Between scans Beacon updates only the usage ratio, so plugging in a new drive shows up within half a minute without redoing the whole job constantly.
Beacon reads from the SMC (System Management Controller) on Intel Macs and the equivalent endpoints on Apple Silicon. Which sensors are exposed depends on the model — a Mac mini gives you a handful, a MacBook Pro gives you a few dozen.
The Sensors hero — CPU temperature ring + a live fan card with its min/max range.
The hero gauge tracks CPU temperature, scaled against a 0–110°C range. The colour shifts as you climb:
Temperatures display in Celsius by default. Flip the unit globally to Fahrenheit in Settings → General.
If your Mac exposes a GPU sensor (most do), it appears in the hero card next to the CPU reading, with its own colour band. On Apple Silicon the CPU and GPU share thermal headroom — when one's hot the other usually is too — so this is more diagnostic than predictive.
Below the hero card is a two-column grid listing every temperature sensor Beacon could read from your Mac. Common ones include CPU die, CPU proximity, GPU die, battery (laptops only), the airflow sensor, ambient, and one or two SSD sensors. Each row has a coloured pip (using the same hot/cold scale), the sensor label, and the current reading.
Below the temperature grid sits the CPU Temperature history graph — a rolling window of the CPU sensor, scaled to 110°C, with the line colour tracking the current temperature.
If your Mac has fans (so: not a fanless MacBook Air, not a Mac mini M1 on some workloads), they get their own card at the bottom of the panel. Each fan row has:
The Battery panel only appears on Macs that actually have a battery — MacBooks. On a desktop Mac the widget toggle stays available, but flipping it on does nothing visible.
The hero gauge tracks the charge level, with the label reflecting current state: "Charging", "Plugged In" (full and on power), or "On Battery". Colour goes red below 20% on battery, green otherwise.
Underneath the gauge is a battery-shaped bar visualisation — same level, with a lightning bolt overlay when you're charging — and a Charge History graph below that. Useful for spotting "what app drained me?" patterns over a day.
Three numbers in the hero card track battery longevity:
The Details card below pulls in lower-level info from the battery controller: condition (Normal / Service / Replace Soon), raw capacity in mAh, design capacity in mAh, and the battery's own temperature reading (in your chosen unit).
Everything in Beacon is configurable except the Beacon icon itself. You can hide any widget you don't care about, reorder the ones you keep, and reskin every colour Beacon uses.
Open Settings → Widgets and you get a list of all six widget types — CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, Battery, Sensors — each with its own on/off switch. Flip a switch off and the widget disappears from the menubar strip immediately; flip it back on and it returns. The settings update is instant — Beacon rebuilds the strip in place rather than restarting.
There's no upper limit on the number you can enable, but past four or five widgets the strip starts eating into the rest of your menubar — so pick the ones that actually earn their pixels.
The Widgets settings list is drag-to-reorder. Grab a row by its handle and drop it where you want — the menubar strip mirrors that order left-to-right, with the Beacon icon always pinned on the far right. The order persists across launches.
The Colors tab exposes a colour picker for every line and bar Beacon draws:
Four preset palettes ship with the app — Blue (default), Green, Purple, Sunset — and a Reset to Defaults button at the bottom gets you back to the shipping look in one click. Temperature colours aren't customisable; they're fixed to a hot/cold scale because the semantics matter.
Open Settings with ⌘, or via the gear button at the bottom
of the Overview panel. The window has six tabs.
0.5s, 1s, 2s (default), or
5s. Faster intervals are more responsive but use a
little more CPU; 2s is the sweet spot for desktop use.
Heavy providers like sensors and battery still sample at half rate
(every other tick), and disk metadata at every 15th tick — so most of
the cost stays in the cheap providers.
The list of all six widget types — each with a description, an on/off switch, and a drag handle for reordering. See Customising above.
Per-element colour pickers, presets (Blue / Green / Purple / Sunset), and a Reset to Defaults button. Covered in detail in Customising.
Where you activate a licence key, or where you'll see your current status if Beacon is already activated. Three flavours:
Beacon's antenna mark, name, version, build, and a "Show Welcome" button that re-opens the post-install welcome window in case you closed it too quickly the first time around.
Beacon is mouse-first by design — it lives in your menubar, after all — but the standard macOS shortcuts apply where they make sense.
Settings is also reachable from the gear button at the foot of the Overview panel, or from the cog at the bottom of any detail panel — the "Widget Settings" chip in the panel footer drops you straight into the Widgets tab.
Beacon ships with a 24-hour free trial. Every feature is unlocked the moment you install — full panels, full inspectors, every sensor, every widget. The trial pill in the Overview header counts down the time you have left.
When the trial expires, the menubar widgets stay visible — desaturated and dimmed, but still drawing — and the dropdown panels switch to a placeholder overlay that prompts you to buy a licence. Nothing in Beacon nags you while the trial is live; the only sign you're on a trial is that pill in the corner.
Past the trial, Beacon is $14.99 once, forever, on this Mac. Or pick up General Software Unlimited for one monthly fee and you get Beacon plus every other app we ship.
Already bought Beacon and moved Macs? Open Settings → License on the new Mac and paste your key. Beacon will deactivate the old install on our server and activate the new one in the same step.
A system monitor that uses 4% of your CPU isn't really doing its job. Beacon is built to be invisible in its own readings — here's how it stays that way.
getifaddrs.
Beacon never shells out to top, iostat, or
similar — every reading is a direct syscall.
That's everything Beacon shows.