Vitals 1.6: a year of history, and when your Mac was at its limits

Open Settings → General and choose how long Vitals keeps what your Mac and each app used: 30 Days, which is the default and what Vitals kept before, 90 Days, 6 Months or 1 Year. The same choices appear in the range menu of Over Time on the Overview, and past 90 days the chart draws a bar per week.

The line under it says since when Vitals has been recording. Delete History… beside it removes everything recorded and starts again from now.

A year of history takes about 30 MB on your Mac. Choosing a shorter time deletes the older history, and Vitals asks first.

The chart in Over Time is of averages, and an average hides the ten minutes your Mac ran flat out. The new Peaks card under it shows the highest CPU, memory pressure, temperature and power in the time you chose, and when each was.

Under At a Limit are the stretches your Mac spent at a limit: from when to when, for how long, and what it was. CPU or GPU at 90% or more, memory under pressure, the temperature you set in Settings → Insights, or macOS slowing the Mac down to cool it.

Vitals keeps a reading of your Mac every five minutes for this, from 1.6 on. The card fills from the day you update.

Click Export CSV beside the range menu in Over Time, and Vitals saves a folder in Downloads with three files: your apps by day, your Mac by hour, and the readings every five minutes. The same button is in the toolbar’s Export menu with a range of its own, in File → Export History as CSV for everything kept, and in Settings → General.

The files hold app names and figures only. Times are in UTC, and numbers use a decimal point, so they open the same in every spreadsheet.

Vitals already tells you when any app keeps the CPU busy or grows in memory. Now you can set a limit for one app in particular: a browser above 8 GB, say, or an editor above 200% CPU, for the minutes you choose.

1. 01 Open Settings → Insights. Under Tell Me When…, click Add a Limit for an App and choose the app.
2. 02 Choose Memory or CPU, the limit, and how many minutes it must stay over it.
3. 03 Or right-click an app anywhere in Vitals and choose Alert When…: the limit starts a little above what the app uses now.

Vitals tells you at most once an hour about the same limit. CPU is of one core, so an app using two cores reads 200%.

Some apps are meant to be busy. Right-click one, or a notice about it under Worth a Look, and choose Don’t Alert About it, Until Tomorrow or Always. It is listed in Settings → Insights under Don’t Tell Me About, with Tell Me Again beside it.

A reader asked for this after 1.5: a reading that turns red in the menu bar should say why. Open the dropdown while one is red and the top line says which reading it is, the limit it crossed and for how long. Click the line to open that tab.

Everything Vitals records is one file on your Mac, and it is yours to open with any tool that reads SQLite. The tables, their columns and a few queries to start from are on the history data page.

If you let Claude, Codex or Cursor ask Vitals, they can now ask about the past as well as the present: how hard your Mac was pushed over a day, a week or a year, when it was at a limit, and which apps used the most over up to a year.

• When was my Mac at its limits this week?
• How hot did my Mac get yesterday, and for how long?
• Which apps used the most memory over the last 90 days?
• Did macOS slow my Mac down to cool it during this morning’s build?

History has its own switch in Settings → Integrations, like your apps and projects.