AppTamer2.8.4

From its menubar icon, AppTamer lets you identify applications consuming excessive CPU time and tell them to slow down or stop. It addresses background work such as browser tasks and animated advertisements that waste processing power, increase heat, and make fans run louder.

The utility automatically reduces an app’s CPU use, pauses it when you switch away, and restarts it when you return. It comes preconfigured to manage Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, Spotlight, Time Machine, Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, and many other applications. You decide which programs it controls, choosing between stopping them, limiting their CPU share, or slowing them through processor-core selection.

On Apple Silicon Macs, AppTamer can move busy background applications to the processors’ efficiency cores while reserving performance cores for the software you want to run fastest; those efficiency cores can be more than twice as efficient. Preferences let you adjust its behavior from conserving battery power to giving every available CPU cycle to demanding software such as Final Cut Pro. Recovering even 5% of CPU activity can add roughly 20 to 30 minutes of battery runtime in some situations, making it useful for mobile Mac users.

AppTamer can also help track down sudden heavy CPU use from an application or macOS process, including activity triggered after adding new pictures. Version 2.8.4 is freeware for macOS and supports both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.