⚡ PowerWatch Download for Mac

Your battery is draining. This shows you why.

PowerWatch measures your Mac's real power draw, names the app responsible, and proves the fix. Free and fully open source, for Apple Silicon.

Download for Mac Why I built this
macOS menu bar with the PowerWatch readout showing 24 watts

See your live power draw and the app behind it, right in the menu bar. Captured on a real Mac.

Three things you get

The PowerWatch menu bar readout

See the drain the moment it starts

Live watts in your menu bar. Orange past 15, red past 25. No opening anything.

Get told which app is to blame

Five minutes over 30 watts and this lands, naming the app and how long you have left. Real wording, real thresholds.

The draw profile with experiment markers and a benchmark card reading plus 40.3 watts

Know the fix actually worked

Mark the timeline, change one thing, and see the before and after. Or hand the logs to an AI. That's how the story below ended.

The whole story in one report

Every app's share of the energy, findings ranked by severity, and the power trace over time.

The PowerWatch report: a survey sheet headed 'Your Mac averaged 24.4 W on battery', with BetterDisplay top of the consumers table and named as the number one drain

The report exactly as PowerWatch renders it. Demonstration data, reconstructing the investigation below.

Why I built this

For about two months my Mac kept dying two hours after a full charge. I couldn't figure it out.

I tried the obvious things. I asked every AI model I had. I downloaded battery tools. Nothing found it.

So I built a logger that writes down real watts every 30 seconds, what the battery itself reports. I sent its logs to an AI model and there it was: a bug in an outdated BetterDisplay was holding the display pipeline in EDR mode, quietly burning 50 watts.

The power trace: draw falls from about 50 watts to 7 when BetterDisplay is quit, returns when relaunched, stays low after the update

The proof, reconstructed with demonstration data. Quit it and the draw fell to 7 watts. Relaunched it and the drain came back. Updated it, fixed for good.

Battery life went back to normal that day. Chrome, Claude, and Codex are still hogs, but that's fine. Now I can see them.

Download PowerWatch

Free. Fully open source. Your data stays on your Mac.

Download for Mac

Or build it from source.