Show HN: I got tired of btop not seeing my Mac's chip, so I built siltop
A developer has released 'siltop', a terminal-based system monitor designed specifically for Apple Silicon Macs. It provides detailed hardware metrics like wattage and temperature without requiring root access.
Why it matters
It addresses a gap in monitoring tools for power users who need granular hardware data on modern Mac hardware without the security risks of sudo-based tools.
A calm, honest system monitor for Apple Silicon, in the terminal you already live in. Real watts, real clocks and real temperatures from every M1–M5 chip. No sudo, no telemetry, about 1.3% of one core.
Screenshots come from siltop --demo , a canned 60-second session (build burst, GPU inference, battery drain, rising heat), so they look the same on every Mac.
btop is beautiful, but on a Mac it can't see the chip: no watts, no GPU, no cluster clocks. asitop and powermetrics see the chip but need sudo . macmon is lean but stops at the SoC. siltop sits in between: as clean as you want by default, as deep as you need when something is wrong.
Self-cost was measured back to back with btop and macmon on the same machine; the method and raw numbers are in docs/research/12-self-cost.md .
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