For macOS

Get your
battery back

WattMate shows which apps are using your Mac's power, and how many minutes you get back by quitting one.

10 days free, no card. Notarized by Apple. Requires an Apple silicon Mac and macOS 15 or later.

WattMate in the menu bar: the power the Mac uses now, the heaviest apps in watts, and how many minutes quitting one frees

2 minutes after you quit an app, while you're on battery, WattMate measures the Mac again and prints what actually changed.

The problem

macOS gives you a number
with no unit

macOS · Activity Monitorthe tool that comes with your Mac

How much is Safari costing me?

42.3

A number with no unit, no scale and no end. Good for ranking apps, useless for deciding anything.

WattMate

How much is Safari costing me?

24 minutes of battery

2 hr 34 → 2 hr 58

It uses 7.0 W of the 31.0 W the Mac is using — a quarter of everything.

In the menu bar

One click. Everything that's
using power, in watts

Real watts, not a score

Two things here are measured, not guessed: how fast the battery is losing energy, and how much energy the chip is using. The first comes from the battery's own current and voltage; the second from the counters inside the chip.

Minutes, not percentages

A share tells you how the pie is cut. A minute tells you what quitting an app is worth. WattMate takes the time your Mac says is left and shows what it becomes without that app.

Its helpers count too

A browser is thirty processes and a compiler spawns hundreds that live for seconds. They're grouped with the app that started them, so the number next to the name is the whole app.

Plugged in

When the adapter
can't supply enough

Plugged in and still losing charge? That happens when the Mac needs more than the adapter delivers — and WattMate says so in watts: the Mac needs 71, the adapter gives 59, and the missing 12 come out of the battery.

It also shows where those watts are going, app by app, and the two things that fix it. macOS shows none of this: it shows a battery icon that stops filling.

Plugged in but the charge is falling: the adapter is 12 W short

The one number

When one app is worth naming, it is
a quarter of everything the Mac uses

26%

Measured, split by model

of the whole Mac goes to the top app in the moments when there is something to name — the median across 308 such moments of real work.

+28

Projection

minutes back if you quit it, at two hours remaining. A quarter of those moments were worth +16 or less; a quarter, +60 or more.

2.6×

Measured

between a light hour and a heavy one — 4 hr 02 from a full charge against 1 hr 33. What you're doing decides it, not the battery.

Measured on the author's MacBook Pro across two days — 374 completed windows, 8.9 hours of them on battery, 6.8 of those above 20 W. One Mac and one kind of work; yours will differ. These are the figures the app itself recorded, not a marketing estimate. The split between apps and "Screen and system" rests on a 7.5 W baseline this machine never sat still long enough to confirm.

The receipt

A promise you can check

Any tool can print a number. 2 minutes after you quit an app, WattMate measures the Mac again — on battery, where power use can be measured — and prints what actually changed.

And when the load moved for other reasons over those two minutes, it says so plainly instead of taking the credit. Those quits are not counted toward your total.

App page: promised 24 min, got 29 min after quitting Safari

The only screen where both halves stand together: what we promised before you quit, and what the Mac actually did after.

Over months

Every charge you spend
leaves a record

Detailed data is kept for two days and then deleted. The summary of each session is kept indefinitely — until you erase it yourself in Settings — a few dozen bytes that answer "where did yesterday's charge go?" long after the details are gone.

History: a month of discharges with what each one went to

A month of sessions on battery: how long each one lasted, how much charge it cost and which apps it went to.

Overnight

Your Mac wakes up
while you sleep

Not once — dozens of times a night, and most of those wake-ups were scheduled by something with a name. macOS keeps that record and shows it to nobody.

Night breakdown: 6% lost in sleep, 68 wake-ups, Spotlight named first

Six per cent gone over eleven hours, and the list of who asked for it. What each wake-up cost we don't know — macOS reports charge in whole percent — so we say how many times and for how long, and nothing more.

What we can and can't measure

The limits are printed
on the box

Graphics has a total, not an owner

Graphics energy is measured as a total. Which app used it is worked out from how long each app kept the GPU busy — macOS has no per-app energy counter for graphics. The total is exact; the split between apps is not.

The Neural Engine is never blamed

Its energy is measured, but nothing in macOS says which app asked for it. So it is never charged to an app — it stays under its own name, where you can see it.

Rounded against ourselves

Your Mac's own power isn't knowable to the watt, so the minutes are shown at the low end of what the measurement allows. You'll rarely get less than shown.

It says "Still measuring"

The app list is there from the first seconds; naming the minutes needs more measurements. The screen says exactly that, instead of showing a number that will change.

Pricing

10 days, starting
the first time you unplug

It starts the first time you unplug, not when you install: on the charger there is nothing to measure and nothing is spent. From then on it runs by the calendar — plugging back in does not pause it. No card to start.

Two ways to pay for the same thing: rent it or own it. Both open every paid part; neither buys updates, because updates are not sold here — a new version works with the key you already have.

A year

$9.99

Renews yearly, cancel any time. If it lapses, the paid parts lock again and everything you measured stays where it is.

Forever

$29 $19

Launch price for the first 100 keys Paid once. The key never expires, and nothing about it renews.

Prices are before tax. Your local VAT is added at checkout, which shows the final amount before you pay.

Works on 2 Macs with the same key
The app checks the key with the licence server about once a day. A network failure never takes the licence away — only an explicit “not valid” does. A yearly key that was not renewed is the one exception: it closes a week after its date, network or not
Minutes, the depth of the run journal, the archive of nights and the totals need the key; the list of apps, their watts, the battery's own health readings, the last run and the most recent night stay free
Downloaded from here, notarized by Apple
Download the trial Buying opens shortly — the trial needs no card and no account.

Privacy

Everything is computed
on your Mac

App names, process names and your energy history never leave the machine. There is no account and nothing to sign in to.

Anonymous usage statistics and crash reports are on by default — app version, Mac model, macOS version and counters rounded to steps, tied to a random installation id. One switch in Settings turns them off, and the privacy page lists every event by name.

0.1 W

Measured

is what the instrument itself costs — two tenths of one per cent of what the Mac uses. About a minute of battery across a working day. Measured on one Mac; the cost of a single measurement tick is guarded by a test.

Questions

Why isn't this in the App Store?
To read how much energy another process has used, an app has to run outside the sandbox — inside it, a process can only read its own. The App Store requires the sandbox, so this kind of measurement can't be sold there by anyone. The app is notarized by Apple, which is the same malware check every app goes through.
Does quitting apps actually save battery?
Sometimes — and telling the difference is the whole product. The usual answer online is "no, macOS handles it", and for most apps that is true. WattMate names an app only when quitting it is worth real minutes, and 2 minutes after you quit, it measures the Mac again and prints what actually changed — or says plainly that the effect could not be isolated. The answer comes from your Mac, not from a rule of thumb.
Battery health says 96% — why does a charge only last a few hours?
Health and hours answer different questions. Health — capacity and cycles — comes from the battery controller and changes slowly over years. Hours are decided by what is running right now: the same full charge can last several times longer or shorter depending on the work. WattMate shows both sides — the battery's own readings, and the list of what is using the charge at this moment.
Why does my Mac lose charge overnight?
Because it wakes. macOS gets woken while the lid is closed — by network packets, Spotlight indexing, scheduled services — and each wake costs charge. WattMate reads the macOS power log and names what woke the Mac, how many times and for how long. The most recent night is free to open.
Does it work on Intel Macs?
No. The download is a single-architecture build for Apple silicon, so on an Intel Mac it won't launch at all. The energy counters it reads are part of Apple silicon too.
What happens when the year runs out?
The yearly key stops unlocking the minutes, and the free part of the app keeps working. The one-time key never expires.
Will it be accurate on my Mac?
The two measured quantities — battery discharge and chip energy — come from your own hardware, so they're as accurate on your Mac as on any other. What varies is how much of the total your screen takes, and that's why minutes are shown at the low end.
Does it use much power to run?
It costs about a tenth of a watt — a minute or two of battery across a working day. It measures itself with the same instrument it measures everything else, and you can see its own line in the list.

See where the hours go

Download the trial See pricing

10 days free, no card · Requires macOS 15 or later · Apple silicon