Comparison

Aetower vs Activity Monitor

An honest comparison. Activity Monitor is good software — it ships with every Mac, it's free, and for many questions it's exactly enough. Aetower exists for the questions it can't answer. Here's where the line actually falls.

What Activity Monitor does well

• It's already installed — zero download, zero trust decision.
• Force-quitting a misbehaving app is two clicks.
• The Energy pane gives a fair per-app energy-impact ranking.
• Kernel-accurate counters for CPU, memory, disk, and network — the same numbers everything else (Aetower included) ultimately reads.

If your question is "which app is eating my CPU right now, and can I quit it," you don't need Aetower. Activity Monitor answers that.

Where it stops

Activity Monitor is a flat process list with no memory of the past and no idea what a process means. The questions it can't answer are the ones that actually cost you time:

• "Why is Chrome 50 rows?" — helpers, GPU processes, and renderers appear as unrelated entries. You sum them in your head.
• "What was running when my Mac locked up at 2 PM?" — there is no history. If you didn't see it happen, it didn't happen.
• "What did that coding-agent session cost?" — Energy Impact is a live number; it isn't attributed to a session, accumulated over one, or connected to the repository the agent was working on.
• "Can my script or agent read this?" — Activity Monitor has no API, no CLI, no automation surface at all.

What Aetower adds

• Entities, not processes. Chrome plus its helpers is one row with one 0–100 friction score built from CPU, memory, disk, network, wakeups, energy, and thermal contribution — the loudest thing on the machine is at the top.
• Bounded local history. Scrub back through recent entity-level snapshots and read a timeline that narrates spikes, anomalies, and restart loops — so a past slowdown is an answerable question, not a shrug.
• An AI-agent surface. Sessions from coding agents and local model servers appear with inferred GPU share, unified-memory pressure, and kernel-measured energy, each labeled with its source.
• Machine-readable everything. A read-only local MCP server for agents, an aetower CLI for your shell, and an addressable UI (aetower://tab/<slug>, ⌘1–8) — the same live state, three ways in.
• Storage and repository context. Safety-tiered disk reclaim that stages through the Trash, and a repository fleet view with git state and agent-contract readiness.

The honest caveats

• Aetower is an early alpha: surfaces move fast, and you should read its output as an operator, not an auditor.
• Per-agent GPU numbers are inferred (macOS has no per-process GPU API); energy and cost figures are estimates with stated confidence, not exact metering.
• It's another app running on your machine — a deliberately lightweight one that watches its own overhead in its Diagnostics tab, but not zero.

Local-first either way: runtime history stays on your Mac unless you explicitly export it, and every outbound channel is opt-in and visible under Privacy → Outbound Data.

Questions this page answers

Is there an Activity Monitor alternative with history?

Aetower keeps bounded local history with entity-level playback and a narrated timeline, so a past slowdown is an answerable question. Activity Monitor has no history.

Can Activity Monitor track AI agent sessions?

No — it has no concept of agents. Aetower shows agent sessions with inferred GPU share, unified-memory pressure, and kernel-measured energy, each labeled with its source.

Do I still need Activity Monitor if I use Aetower?

For a quick force-quit it's fine and always there. Aetower adds entity grouping, friction scoring, history, storage reclaim, and an agent-readable interface.