I have a MacBook Air that’s really sluggish these days, regardless of what I do. On my Windows PC, I can open Task Manager to check what’s eating up the memory, CPU and take the appropriate actions. But how do I do it on a Mac? What’s the MacBook equivalent of Windows Task Manager? How to open Task Manager on MacBook Air and check the CPU usage? Please help!
Q: What’s the alternative to Task Manager on Mac?
A: The MacBook equivalent of Task Manager is Activity Monitor. It’s preinstalled on all Macs and shows how much CPU, memory, energy, disk space, and network your Mac is using. With it, you can monitor all processes that are currently running, including the hidden ones and force quit those that are stalled and can’t be closed as usual.
Q: How to open Task Manager on Mac?
A: To pull up Task Manager on Mac, AKA Activity Monitor, you can open Finder and then navigate to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. Or use the hotkey Command-Space to open Spotlight search and then type “activity monitor” and click on the proper result to launch it.
Q: How to force quit in Mac Task Manager?
A: There are two ways to force quit in Mac Task Manager.
- Use the force quit shortcut Option-Command-Esc, then select the frozen app and click Force Quit.
- Open Activity Monitor, then select the frozen app’s process, click the x icon and choose Force Quit.
If you want to check CPU usage, memory consumption, energy, disk space, and network in Mac Task Manager, the following are helpful.
CPU usage in Mac Task Manager
Tapping on the CPU tab will reveal all the processes that are currently consuming your Mac’s CPU/GPU with the following information:
%CPU: Percentage of CPU being used by the process.
CPU time: The process’s runtime on the CPU.
Threads: The total number of threads being used.
Idle wake ups: The number of times the system wakes up from idle mode to perform tasks
%GPU:Percentage of GPU being used by the process.
GPU time: The process’s runtime on GPU.
PID: The unique number assigned to the process.
User: root/your account
Memory consumption
This tab tells you how much memory is being used by each running process and how long the process is running. Since RAM (Random-access memory) directly impacts your Mac, you may consider closing the heavy loaders to speed things up。
Memory Pressure: If the bar is red, consider upgrading the RAM.
Physical Memory: The amount of RAM being installed.
Memory Used: Total amount of RAM currently in use.
App Memory: The total amount of memory apps use and their processes.
Wired Memory: Memory that is permanently allocated and cannot be compressed or swapped out to disk.
Compressed: The RAM that’s compressed to make room for other processes.
Swap Used: The amount of disk space being used as virtual memory when RAM is full.
Cached Files: Memory that was previously used by apps but is now available for other apps.
Energy use: This pane provides an overview of the energy use of each app.
Disk Space: The Disk pane explains the amount of data each process has read from or written to your disk.
Network: It details how much data your Mac is sending or receiving over the network.