PowerDetector vs Blip Stats

The PowerDetector app uses the iPhone charging status to sense AC power, allowing the iPhone to act as a remote power sensor and email notification device. Configure the PowerDetector app with email addresses, plug in the iPhone to a charger and if the power goes out an email or text message will be sent to you.

Blip is a featherlight system monitor that lives in your menu bar. One click shows everything happening inside your Mac — CPU load, memory pressure, disk activity, network speeds, and more. No clutter, no subscriptions, no bloat. Why people love Blip: Blip makes everything your Mac is doing visible without getting in the way. It polls every two seconds, uses about 42 MB of memory, and weighs roughly 2 MB on disk. Most system monitors use 200+ MB and ship features you'll never touch. What you get: CPU — Total usage bar in your menu bar. Click for per-core utilization, user/system/idle split, load averages, and P-core and E-core counts. Memory — Usage percentage at a glance. Drill into total RAM, active/wired/compressed/app breakdown, swap, and memory pressure. Network — Live connectivity in the menu bar. Tap for up/download speeds, bandwidth since boot, interfaces with IPs, VPN detection (Tailscale, WireGuard), tap-to-reveal public IP, and a history chart. Disk — Every mounted volume with space used and free, real-time read/write speeds, data transferred since boot, and a live I/O history chart.* GPU — Apple Silicon GPU utilization, renderer name, core count, and a historical chart. Optional menu bar readout.* Battery — Charge, health, cycle count, temperature, time remaining, charging status, power source, and condition.* Fans & Thermals — RPM per fan with min/max ranges, plus CPU and GPU temperatures read straight from the SMC. Shows "fanless Mac" gracefully on MacBook Air.* Top Processes — Top 5 by CPU and memory, with app icons and delta-based measurements that match Activity Monitor.* System — Mac model, macOS version, uptime, thermal state, and Blip's own memory footprint so you can verify it stays tiny. Metrics marked * need hardware-level access. Install the free Blip Helper companion app to unlock them, at github.com/blaineam/blip. Test and automate: Speed tests built in — benchmark any mounted drive with uncached sequential write/read plus random-read IOPS, and measure network throughput against OpenSpeedTest's public server or your own. Run a live traceroute (MTR) with per-hop loss and latency, mapped hop by hop. Shortcuts support — Get System Metric exposes 37 live metrics as chainable numbers. Run speed tests, start or stop a traceroute, open the Traceroute Map, and read or change Blip's settings — from the Shortcuts app. Designed to stay out of your way: Two menu bar layouts, horizontal or stacked. Hover any row for a live sub-panel. Customizable colors: category, monochrome, or your own — plus label toggles, optional colorization at high usage, and launch at login. Built right: Written in Swift with strict concurrency and zero external dependencies. Apple Silicon native, notarized by Apple. Blip Bench: Measure what your machine can actually do. Blip Bench scores CPU (single and all cores), memory bandwidth and latency, GPU, and Neural Engine throughput in fixed reference units — one scale shared by every Mac, iPhone, and iPad running Blip. The full profile adds a sustained phase showing how much performance thermal limits take back, against live fan and temperature data. Now on iPhone and iPad: Blip Stats 2.0 is one free app across your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The iOS app brings live device cards with drill-in details, Blip Bench, dual-curve speed tests with idle vs under-load latency and per-activity connection grades, ping and traceroute with an offline GeoIP hop map, disk speed tests, Home Screen widgets, Shortcuts, and one-file stats snapshots.