Apple should Sherlock SAP’s open-source energy management app

SAP’s open-source energy management app, Power Monitor, shows how you could manage energy costs for your devices — and your Mac could help you do so.

Designed for business users managing large fleets, the app should also benefit consumers concerned about energy use. It’s a great example of a tool that does one useful thing well, which is track Mac energy use and calculate cost.

Who doesn’t worry about energy costs? They’ve risen steeply since 2020. That concerns people using Macs at home, but price is a major worry for larger enterprises managing hundreds of Macs in a challenging business environment. Managing energy also matters to larger enterprises struggling to adopt ISO 50001 energy management systems, and we know Apple understands energy use.

What is SAP’s Power Monitor?

Available via GitHub, Power Monitor is designed to help enterprise users get a handle on sustainability efforts. If you are someone who continues to cling to the faith that human impact on the environment is minimal, then Power Monitor does do something else useful, too – it calculates your energy costs. 

What’s neat about the app is that it provides you with this information in a very Apple-like way. Open it up and at a glance you’ll see your current system power in Watts, along with average power, highest peak power, and energy costs that day. You can also see how much CO2 has been emitted by the energy use of your Mac. You can access this information in the app or via the Menu bar.

The application requires you to enter your energy costs and can let you activate flexible energy tariffs for those with suppliers that charge different rates at different times of day. You gain a good, in-depth overview of the costs and consequences of Mac use.

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Jonny Evans

When it comes to managed fleets, IT can poll this data from across their devices to gain excellent oversights into energy use. If you’re running a business that uses dozens, hundreds, or thousands of Macs, you’ll already know that this information can tangibly help manage costs. It’s the kind of information any graduate of the Apple-supported Clean Energy Procurement Academy needs sometimes.

What alternatives exist?

I’m sure there are other apps that deliver similar insights, but they seem hard to find. Those I did find either track use on a per-app basis (like Activity Monitor), or are tied to specific energy suppliers, which SAP’s app is not. The Home app will track electricity use across compatible HomeKit devices, but doesn’t track the cost of running your Mac or, weirdly, any other Apple device on the network.

I find it strange that, at a time of rapidly accelerating energy costs, finding an off-the-shelf solution to help manage those costs appears challenging. That should change, which is why I think Apple should Sherlock SAP’s Power Monitor app and provide this simple but useful tool within macOS. 

Why isn’t this a Mac feature already?

Why isn’t a feature like this already inside Macs?

Perhaps because people haven’t said they need it. Or maybe Apple just doesn’t want to remind people that using their Mac costs money? Potentially, it is because the most popular Macs work on battery power. There may be perfectly good reasons not to include a tool of this kind, but one more major reason Apple should do so is for bragging rights.

You see, we already know Macs deliver more performance per watt than other systems, thanks to the five-year-old move to Apple Silicon. What better way to show how that low energy promise translates into real economic benefit than by making it possible to track accurate performance/energy costs against the estimated costs per hour when using other platforms? 

Would you use Power Monitor?

Enterprises attempting to tally their carbon emissions to achieve compliance with national climate targets will eventually demand access to data of that kind. Why not make this information an operating system feature? And why not make this available across all Apple’s products, rather than only Macs? Do you think Apple should integrate a tool like this to help you manage your fleets?

I do.

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