AI Usage with your Claude plan limits, a Thermals screen, external drive speeds, a flat new look and a much lighter app.
New
- AI Usage: how much Claude Code and Codex you’ve used, read from the logs they keep on your Mac. Tokens by day, model and project, an estimated API cost, Claude Code’s current 5-hour window and Codex’s 5-hour and weekly limits.
- Claude plan limits: turn on Show Plan Limits in AI Usage to see the same session and weekly limits as Claude Code’s
/usage, checked with Anthropic every 5 minutes while they’re on screen. Off until you turn it on. - AI in the menu bar: a new AI figure shows your Claude session limit (or Codex’s, from its logs), and the popover lists both with their weekly limits and reset times.
- Thermals: temperatures for the CPU, GPU, memory, SSD and battery, with fan speeds and 30 days of history.
- Disk: the speed of each attached drive, internal and external, and a history of external drive activity.
- Battery: health and cycle count again on macOS 27, plus the cycles your battery is rated for.
Improved
- Overview: “Busiest right now” is now a table of the ten busiest apps with CPU, memory, disk and network. Click a column to sort by it.
- Claude Code and Codex show up by name with their icon, instead of as a version number such as “2.1.299”.
- An app’s history shows where it lives on disk, with a button to reveal it in Finder.
- A flat design: cards without borders, a cleaner screen header, and stat tiles that line up on every screen.
- Cortex uses about a quarter of the memory it did: around 55 MB instead of more than 200 MB with the window open.
- Quieter alerts: no more “memory will run out in X minutes” notifications (the forecast stays in the app), and alerts for unusual GPU, Neural Engine and network load are now off until you turn them on.
- Thermals has its own screen, so the CPU screen is shorter.
Fixed
- CPU, Neural Engine and memory power on macOS 27, which updates these figures only every few minutes. Cortex now shows the average over the last update window instead of 0 W.
- Neural Engine sessions sometimes missing for the first minutes after launch.
- Implausible P-core temperatures, such as 5 °C, from cores that are powered down.
- Small transfer rates read “127 bytes/s” next to “0 B/s”; they now read “127 B/s”.
Privacy
- The privacy policy describes the new, optional Claude plan limits check. Unless you turn it on, Cortex still makes only the update and license checks.