LAPTOP DOCTOR · MAC APP STORE

Your Mac, and the models
running on it.

Per-core CPU, memory pressure, GPU, disk, network and battery in the menu bar — plus live tokens per second from Ollama and LM Studio. Under 1% of one core, about 25 MB.

Get it on the Mac App Store What it costs

01 · The differentiator

It watches your language models

Every Mac monitor shows CPU and memory. This one also knows what your local models are doing, because on a machine running inference those two questions have the same answer.

Live tokens per second: Read from Ollama and LM Studio on localhost, next to the CPU and memory numbers that explain why generation just slowed down.
Time to first token: Separated from throughput, because a model that is still loading and a model that is running slowly are different problems.
Context fill and model residency: Which model is loaded, how much of its context window is used, and how much memory it is holding.

02 · Cost

A monitor should not be the thing that needs monitoring

Measured on an M2 Pro with CPU-time deltas over 60-second windows — not ps %cpu, which is a decaying average — and phys_footprint rather than resident size, which counts shared framework pages.

Measurement	Result	Budget
Idle CPU, three widgets, live chart	1.36%	< 1.8%	pass
Idle CPU, no live chart	0.33%	< 0.5%	pass
Memory, idle	26 MB	< 60 MB	pass
Outbound connections, default config	0	0	pass

The menu bar redraws only when the pixels would actually change, and samplers pause when nothing is displaying them. The refresh-rate control is labelled with its real cost.

03 · What it costs

Free, with one optional subscription

Free

Mac App Store · no account

CPU, memory, GPU, disk, network, battery
Timeline and dashboard
24 hours of history
2 menu bar widgets
Five themes, full keyboard navigation

Laptop Doctor Pro

$14.99 / year · first month free

LLM monitor — Ollama & LM Studio
Unlimited menu bar widgets
30 days of history
Alerts engine — WHEN · FOR · THEN
Insights against an hour-of-day baseline
PDF and JSON report export

Get it on the Mac App Store

Sampling never stops. History is recorded while you are on the free tier, so subscribing reveals it rather than starting it — and if a subscription lapses, nothing you built is deleted. Widgets past the free two are hidden, not removed; alert rules stop being evaluated, not discarded.

04 · What is not here

The sandbox, stated plainly

Laptop Doctor runs in the App Sandbox, as the Mac App Store requires. The sandbox does not permit reading other processes, opening a container runtime's socket, or talking to the SMC. We measured each one rather than assuming it.

No per-process list or X-ray: proc_listpids returns 0 pids to a sandboxed build, against 743 unsandboxed.
No port map: Spawning /usr/sbin/lsof is blocked.
No container stats: The Docker, OrbStack and Colima sockets are outside the container.
No temperatures, fans or wattage: The AppleSMC user client is denied.

None of these are locked placeholders waiting for money — no payment can switch them on, because it is the operating system refusing, not a licence check. They are simply not part of this edition, and the app does not offer controls for them.

05 · Questions

Reasonable objections

Will a monitor slow down the thing it is monitoring?

A little, and we publish exactly how much rather than claiming zero. Idle it is about 1.36% of one core with three widgets and a live chart, 0.33% without the chart. The dominant cost is redrawing the menu bar, so it only redraws when the pixels would change.

Does it need an account?

No. There are no accounts, no analytics and no telemetry. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you configure a webhook yourself, and the only connections it makes by default are to language model servers on your own machine.

Why is it called Laptop Doctor if it runs on a Mac mini?

It runs on any Mac that meets the requirements — mini, Studio, Pro, iMac or a laptop. The name is shorter than the truth.

What happens if I cancel?

You return to the free tier: six system modules, 24 hours of history, two widgets. Nothing is deleted. Your extra widgets are hidden, your alert rules stop being evaluated, and your longer history stops being displayed — all of it comes back if you subscribe again.

Electron?

No. Swift, SwiftUI and AppKit. That is most of where the 26 MB comes from.

Your Mac, and the modelsrunning on it.