Will a desktop buddy slow down your Mac?
It is the fair question to ask before you put a cartoon character on your desktop: what does it cost your Mac? Here are real numbers, measured on an Apple silicon Mac with both buddies out and walking, rather than the reassuring adjectives most apps offer.
| What | Measured |
|---|---|
| Both buddies exploring | About 4.8% of a single CPU core |
| One buddy | About 2.4% of a single core |
| Standing about | Drawing is capped at 30 frames a second |
| Hidden, held, or screen locked | No drawing at all |
| Download | 3.4 MB |
| Needs | macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple silicon or Intel |
What 4.8% of a core actually means
A modern Mac has at least eight cores, so two buddies are using well under one percent of what your machine can do. For comparison, a single browser tab playing video will usually ask for more. It is not nothing — we are not going to claim a 3D character is free — but it sits far below the things you already run without thinking about them.
They slow down when nothing is happening
A buddy standing about draws at 30 frames a second rather than the full refresh rate, and speeds up only while actually moving. Pick one up and drawing pauses. Hide them, lock your screen, or let the display sleep, and they stop drawing altogether — there is no point animating a character nobody can see, and it is the single biggest thing we do for your battery.
The app is small, because the characters are not in it
The download is 3.4 MB, which is unusually small for anything with 3D in it. The reason: no character files ship inside the app at all. Your buddies download to your account after you sign in, which keeps the app tiny and means an app with no account takes up almost nothing.
What about the feature that watches my Mac?
The awareness feature — buddies reacting to your charger, your quiet minutes and whether Claude Code or Codex is working — is off until you switch it on. When it is on, it checks a handful of cheap system values every few seconds and reads nothing heavier. No screen recording, no keystrokes, and nothing leaves your Mac.
How we measured this
The app ships with its own CPU check: it puts Max and Avery on the Dock, sets them exploring, and samples the app and the rendering processes it started for ten seconds. The numbers above come from that check run on an Apple silicon Mac in September 2026. Your Mac will differ, and an older Intel machine will work harder, but the shape holds: two small characters, well under a single core.
If it ever feels heavy
Put a buddy on its own with the menu-bar menu, turn off exploring so they stay put, or choose a smaller size in Settings — fewer pixels is less work. And quitting is instant: they leave nothing running behind them.