ChipEyes: Apple Silicon power & GPU monitor
As beautiful as btop, but shows real power, GPU usage, and per-core clocks on M-series Macs.
- Problem
- On M-series Macs, btop can't show what users care about most: watts, GPU usage, or per-core clocks. Figuring out which process is draining battery or throttling is guesswork.
- Solution
- A menu bar and terminal dashboard reads SMC and IOReport directly to show real-time power, clocks, temperatures, and GPU usage, with plain-language diagnostics and no sudo needed at very low overhead.
- Users
- Apple Silicon Mac developers, performance-sensitive users, and terminal-monitoring enthusiasts.
- MVP
- Menu bar real-time power/temp/clocks; GPU usage display; per-core clock list; one-line anomaly diagnosis; under 1.5% CPU overhead.
- Revenue
- Free basic monitoring; Pro one-time purchase unlocks history charts, export, and alerts; enterprise licensing.
- Why now
- M-series Macs are now mainstream dev machines, but built-in Activity Monitor lacks chip-level metrics and existing TUI tools lag hardware. An indie can differentiate quickly with Swift/IOKit.