Not using any menubar stat programs currently, but have done so for exactly this reason in the past. Even if nothing is misbehaving, they’re helpful for keeping a pulse on your machine and for getting a feel for which programs are heavy on resources for no good reason.
It used to be that noise from hard drive activity and fans spinning up were a pretty good proxy for this, like how my iMac G5 would do its best impression of a jet engine whenever a flash ad banner appeared on screen. These days on M-series Macs though a random browser tab can be keeping a whole core pegged in the background and the only reason I’d notice is if I happened to touch the bottom of the laptop and notice it’s slightly warm.
cosmic_cheese|1 year ago
It used to be that noise from hard drive activity and fans spinning up were a pretty good proxy for this, like how my iMac G5 would do its best impression of a jet engine whenever a flash ad banner appeared on screen. These days on M-series Macs though a random browser tab can be keeping a whole core pegged in the background and the only reason I’d notice is if I happened to touch the bottom of the laptop and notice it’s slightly warm.