Bartender 6
We’ve re-built Bartender from the ground up to be beautiful, performant, and reliable. Bartender has been a staple of Mac users for years, and that brought with it lots of old hacks & tricks. We’ve modernised everything, from the algorithms used to move your items, through to the design of the entire app.
The design seems to have been inspired by System Settings.
We’ve also brought our new movement system to Bartender 5, so you’ll get all the speed & reliability improvements for free on Sequoia. And yes, we’ve fixed the Apple menu bug.
[…]
We’ve maintained a strict commitment to privacy throughout the new Bartender. We know that granting screen recording permissions can be intimidating, so we’ve maintained our policy of the app not sending anything anywhere. Your menu item images are stored in memory to show them in Bartender Bar or the layout screen, and they aren’t persisted. We’ve also reduced the amount of times Bartender has to capture the bar too, so you’ll see the purple dot even less. For people who don’t want this at all, you can re-arrange your items once, then disable screen recording permissions and use Bartender in a locked-down mode.
I saw lots of speculation that after the acquisition it would switch to a subscription, but the new version is still a regular purchase at $20 ($12 for upgrades) vs. $16 ($8) for Bartender 5.
Roustem Karimov reports high energy use.
Previously:
- Sequoia Screen Recording Prompts and the Persistent Content Capture Entitlement
- Bartender Acquired by Applause Group
- Bartender 5
- System Settings
Update (2025-10-09): Tommy Weir:
I don’t know if others on the latest Tahoe (non beta) have issues with Bartender 6, but it’s been the sole problem I’ve had since the upgrade. Endlessly re-indexing the apps, and slowing the Mac down to a crawl, only fixable by quitting.
7 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
> The design seems to have been inspired by System Settings.
The problem with this is that System Settings sucks. I'm not a die hard about the older design of Preferences, but the current version is terrible.
I’ve been using “Ice” [1] recently and am surprised how well it works. Bartender was always slow and sluggish, while Ice has been running smoothly. It seems to use less resources.
Will give the new version a try to see if it has improved. I’ll only use it though if i can completely block internet access with Little Snitch, as the developer “ Applause Group” has a bad reputation privacy wise…
Doubt it though, as they probably check the license frequently.
I'm surprised to find that Applause haven't (yet) destroyed Strongbox, either. It's been all positives, thus far. Guess privacy invasion is only for people using assistive technology for core functionality like TTS output while the device is locked.
I've moved to Ice as well. I'm glad they're maintaining the app and it's not another subscription model, but the whole ownership transition was handled in a way that put me off.
I wasn’t someone who ditched Bartender because of the acquisition, but Bartender 6 is, so far, not worth paying for. I’ve tried the betas and now the official release, and it is slow, buggy, and resource hoggy. It doesn’t even feel like beta quality. More like an alpha for an official release. Very disappointed.
I've purchased Bartender licenses since version 1, but the upgrade to 6 has been rough. I've had it forget my layout and move everything to hidden several times, and the UI for arranging menu bar items has been jittery (something they claimed to fix in a recent point release, but I've experienced it at least once again since that update). I hope they iron things out with additional updates.
I’m not on Tahoe, but I’m seeing the same high energy usage with bartender 6. I have also seen my system lock up until I quit it.
