But again unless you're a software engineer there's really not too much useful information you can get here. So it's a good idea and a good way to get an idea of what you Mac is doing. I can see which ones are using the most energy, reads and rights to the disk, and network access. Go into there and sort by memory and see which task is using the most memory. I could look at other things like Memory. So it's going to add up to 100% so 60% now may still be only using a fraction of my CPU. Now the high number there doesn't necessarily mean that much because it's a percentage. I'm recording this for the tutorial right now and you can imagine that's using most of the CPU. So I can see what app is using the most CPU time. Let me click on it again to sort the opposite way. I can sort by clicking on one of these columns here. I can look at activity based on CPU, Memory use, Energy use, Disk use, or Network use.

So you can see I've got tabs here at the top. That could be a very useful view as well.īut let's leave it at Active processes and try to take a look and see what we can get from this information. Which ones have windows in your screen now. But typically if you go to Window processes you'll see exactly which apps you're using. Here's things that are actually running, actually doing things right now. So you can go further into Active processes. But still a lot of stuff that are just background processes and things you don't need to worry about. See the user here changed to all Macmost on the right because there are system processes that are being used and there may be other users on your Mac too that are logged out so this narrows it down a bit. In View you can specify instead of say all processes, you can do just My processes. You can do that by going to the View menu. If you're looking to find something here that's useful for the typical user then you want to go and narrow down what you're seeing here. But that's okay because you can ignore most of this. Unless you're a software engineer you're probably not going to know what most of this is. But you basically get this long list of processes and you can see how much CPU they're using and other information about them. You can alter how this view looks so it may not look this way for you if you've changed it. This is what you see typically when you first run it. How do it use it? To find it look in your Applications Utilities folder or I just use Spotlight and just search for activity, monitor and it comes up that way. A lot of people have asked me exactly what is this for. Video Transcript: Let's take a look at an app that comes with your Mac called Activity Monitor. Check out Using Activity Monitor at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

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