Blip Stats
System Stats & Bench
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.
Blip puts honest device stats, a real benchmark, and serious network tools on your iPhone and iPad — the same featherlight philosophy as Blip for Mac — free, in one app.
Overview — live cards for CPU, memory, storage, battery, thermal state, and network. Tap any card for full details: memory breakdown, load averages, core counts, boot-derived uptime, local IPs with tap-to-copy, tap-to-reveal public IP, VPN and radio awareness. Honest suggestions appear only when a real signal fires.
Blip Bench — CPU, memory, GPU, and Neural Engine throughput in Blip's fixed reference units, comparable across every device running Blip. The full profile adds a sustained phase that measures thermal throttling, with results animating in leg by leg.
Speed — test against the public OpenSpeedTest service or your own self-hosted server. Download and upload draw as separate curves, latency is measured idle and under load (bufferbloat), and every result is graded per activity: browsing, HD and 4K streaming, video calls, cloud gaming, big uploads.
Network — ping and traceroute with per-hop latency, timeout detection, and an offline GeoIP map of the route. The location database is downloaded once and lookups never leave your device.
Storage — sequential disk speed tests on internal storage or any volume you can reach in Files, caching disabled and flush included.
Widgets — bench score, storage, and last speed test on your Home Screen, each stamped with its age. Shortcuts — run benchmarks and speed tests or capture a full stats snapshot from Automations.
No accounts, no ads, no tracking. Everything Blip shows is what iOS honestly exposes to a well-behaved app.
Blip Stats for iOS is a self-contained device-stats, benchmark, and network-tools app. No account, no login, no tracking — a demo account is not applicable.
What the reviewer will see, and the network/system behavior behind it:
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OVERVIEW: live device cards (CPU, memory, storage, battery, thermal, network) using only public APIs (host_processor_info, host_statistics64, getifaddrs, NWPathMonitor, etc.). The "WAN IP" row in Network details contacts api.ipify.org ONLY when the user taps "Tap to reveal" — never automatically.
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BENCH: Blip Bench runs CPU/memory/GPU/Neural Engine workloads on-device (full profile ~90 seconds, including a sustained thermal phase). High CPU/GPU usage during a run is the feature, not a defect. No network use.
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SPEED: network speed test against either (a) OpenSpeedTest's public service, driven through their own embeddable widget — their sanctioned integration path — or (b) a user-configured self-hosted OpenSpeedTest server. Sustained high throughput during a test is intentional. Latency is measured with a handful of ICMP echoes (standard SOCK_DGRAM/IPPROTO_ICMP datagram sockets, no special entitlements) to a user-configurable target (default 1.1.1.1).
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NETWORK tab: classic ping and traceroute using the same ICMP datagram sockets, to a user-configurable target (default 1.1.1.1). The optional offline GeoIP database (DB-IP Lite, ~100 MB, attributed in-app) downloads once from db-ip.com on explicit user request in Settings; all lookups happen on-device and no addresses are ever sent anywhere.
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STORAGE: the disk speed test writes a large temporary file (caching disabled), reads it back, and deletes it. External-volume tests use the standard Files document picker with security-scoped access.
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Home Screen widgets (bench score, storage, last speed test) populate after the app has been opened once. Shortcuts expose Run Benchmark / Run Speed Test / Get Device Snapshot.
Note: the Mac App Store listing for this universal app mentions an optional "Blip Helper" companion for Mac-only hardware metrics. That is macOS-only and does not exist on iOS — the iOS app is fully self-contained.
system monitor,cpu usage,memory pressure,menu bar,activity monitor,gpu,battery health,fan speed,mac
Now on iPhone and iPad too. Live vitals, Blip Bench with Neural Engine scoring, graded speed tests, traceroute with a hop map — one free app across Mac and iOS.
2.0.2 — GPU in the menu bar, and every corner of the Mac app now speaks your language.
- New (Mac): optional GPU utilization readout in the menu bar — Settings → Visible Items → GPU, in both layouts. Thanks to impiri for Blip's first outside contribution!
- Mac: 79 strings that had slipped through in English — recommendations, thermal status, helper status, bench labels, and Shortcuts setting names — are now properly localized into all 8 supported languages.
- Mac: visible-item toggles now match the menu bar's order.
https://wemiller.com/apps/blip/
exclude: new_territories: yes
free