Show a CPU graph in the Mac menubar

A single CPU percentage in the menu bar is useful, but a small graph tells you a lot more — you can see the spike that happened ten seconds ago even though the current number is calm, and you can tell at a glance whether activity is steady or bursty. The native macOS menu bar doesn’t include this; you need a helper.

The options

Activity Monitor’s Dock icon

The native trick: View > Dock Icon > Show CPU History. This puts a stacked per-core history chart on the Dock icon. It’s in the Dock, not the menu bar, but it is genuinely a graph.

Caveats: requires Activity Monitor to stay open, the icon is small, and if your Dock auto-hides you lose visibility. Useful, but only as a stopgap.

Activity Monitor’s CPU History window

Window > CPU History (Cmd-3) pops a floating window with the same per-core stacked graph but at a useful size. Same downside — it has to stay open, it’s a floating window, and it disappears when Activity Monitor quits.

Menu-bar tools with sparklines

The actual fit for the question. Most menu-bar monitors offer a sparkline display mode for CPU.

For Beacon specifically:

1. Install Beacon.
2. Open Settings > Menu Bar and tick CPU.
3. In the CPU settings, change Display Style from Percentage to Graph (a small scrolling sparkline).
4. Click the graph in the bar for a larger detail view with longer history and per-core breakdown.

The sparkline updates roughly once a second and shows the last 60 seconds or so directly in the bar. Stats and iStat Menus offer similar graph modes; pick whichever you like the look of.

Reading a tiny graph

A few patterns to notice:

• Flat low line — idle. Good.
• Single tall spike — one-off task (an app launch, a Spotlight import). Normal.
• Sawtooth — a process retrying something on a loop. Often a stuck sync agent. Worth investigating.
• Steady mid-height line — sustained workload (a build, a render, a video call). If you don’t recognise the source, click the graph for top processes.
• Wall of red/peak — pegged CPU. Open the detail panel and find the culprit.

The reason a graph is more useful than a number is that the shape carries information. A 40% number could mean “constant background daemon at 40%” or “spiked to 100% twice in the last second and is now at 0% averaging out to 40%” — and those are different problems. With a sparkline you see immediately which one is happening.

A small menubar housekeeping note

If your menu bar is crowded (notched MacBooks are tight), the sparkline takes about the same space as a ”%” readout — 30-40 pixels. Don’t enable it for every metric; pick the one or two where shape really matters (CPU and maybe network) and use plain numbers for the rest.