Earlier this week, our friends at Bjango released iStat Menus 6 — a massive update to the popular menubar-based system monitoring app for Mac. This is a big update since the release of iStat Menus 5 over three years ago and includes an impressive list of new features and improvements — as is expected from Bjango. We’d gotten a sneak peek at the iStat Menus 6 app icon a few days ago.
If you’re hearing about iStat Menus for the first time, there’s a lot you’ve been missing out on. iStat Menus is an incredibly powerful and feature-rich system monitor for Mac from the house of Bjango. It sits comfortably in your menubar and gives you in-depth stats about your CPU, Memory, Drives, Network, etc. The app began its journey all the way back in 2007 and since then, the folks at Bjango have crafted the app into near perfection. Version 6.0 ships with new features such as weather, notifications, hotkeys and more.
Wait! Did you say, Weather!?
One of the most notable addition in iStat Menus 6, and kind of an oddball feature from Bjango, is the addition of Weather stats in the app. The app now reports the current temperature of your location, along with the hourly forecast, weekly overview and more — pretty icons and glyphs included.
This new weather feature requires an ongoing subscription. You get 6-months of usage when you get the app and can extend your subscription for another year at $1.99 (60-minute updates), $3.99 (30-minute updates) or $5.99 (15-minute updates).
Notifications
iStat Menus 6 comes with support for custom notifications. You can ask the app to notify you for things like when your CPU usage is higher than X, Memory Pressure is Above X and so on. The app supports a long list of configurable alerts, so there’s a lot to choose from.
Notification Center Widget
iStat Menus 6 now ships with a tiny widget that you can enable in your Notification Center. It’s kinda like iStat Mini and lets you quickly glance at some of the popular iStat Menus features.
Customizable Colors & Hotkeys
iStat Menus has had stunning light and dark themes, but now you can go beyond that and customize the appearance to an extent. iStat Menus 6 allows you to pick the menubar color for the graphs and stats, opacity for the borders, the background color for the dropdowns and dropdown graphs. These customizable settings are available in the Global section in the app.
Similarly, you can now reorder dropdown menus and even set specific hotkeys for each dropdown in the app and easily access them with few taps on your keyboard.
Other notable improvements shipped in this release include improved accessibility, AirPods battery level support, automatic fan set switching based on events, Multiple menubar world clock times, Internet connectivity indicator, etc.
iStat Menus 6 is an incredible update and having used it over the last few days, I can happily recommend it to anyone. If you’re an existing iStat Menus user, the upgrade is just $9 for you. If you haven’t jumped aboard yet, iStat Menus 6 is available for $18 from the Bjango’s website.