Big Weather

Big Weather is a weather app built specifically for the macOS menu bar. A glance at the menu bar gives you the temperature, and when you click it, the days ahead show up as one curve, so you can see when the rain comes in and when it clears without reading a table. It is designed for people who look up at the menu bar more often than they open a separate weather app. The app is free on the Mac App Store and requires macOS 15.2 or later. Its central idea is to make the forecast glanceable and visual, turning hourly weather data into an interactive wave that lives right where you already work. Whether you need a quick temperature check or a closer look at the next ten days, Big Weather keeps the weather in the menu bar and out of your way. The problem Big Weather addresses is simple: most weather apps make you open them, then read through rows and columns of numbers to figure out what is happening. That is fine when you are planning in advance, but it is clumsy when you just want to know whether rain is coming before your next meeting, or whether it will clear by the time you leave the house. By placing the forecast directly in the menu bar and rendering the days ahead as a single curve, Big Weather lets you understand the shape of the weather at a glance. You do not have to interpret a table; you can scrub along a line and see temperature and rain hour by hour. This makes the app useful for people who check the weather many times a day and want an answer in seconds rather than a full report. The core visual feature is the interactive hourly wave. You run your cursor along the curve and it tells you the temperature and the rain at that hour. The free version includes two days of this hourly view, and Premium extends it to ten days, still hour by hour. The free version also provides temperature and conditions in the menu bar, your location or any city in the world, 48 hours of temperature and rain hour by hour, a 3-day forecast, UV for today and tomorrow, and wind, pressure and humidity. Premium adds ten days of forecast, hour by hour, along with more frequent updates. The app also offers multi-day UV, 10-day trends, and a minimalist design option for people who just want the basics. You can choose light or dark mode, chart or plain text, °C, °F or both, and set a keyboard shortcut to open it. New in version 5.0 is AI insights, a Premium feature that turns the forecast into a sentence. The menu bar tells you what today holds, for example "Heavy rain from 4PM," and the panel sums up the week. From Thursday onward, the panel also covers next week. These insights are written by Apple Intelligence on your Mac, so your location never goes to an AI service. This requires macOS 27 and a Mac with Apple Intelligence; other Macs get the regular summary instead. The result is a forecast you can read in plain language, useful when you want a quick narrative rather than numbers, and it keeps the privacy promise of the app intact by doing the work locally. Also new in 5.0 is official warnings, another Premium feature. When a flood, storm or heat warning covers where you are, it sits at the top of the panel as the weather service wrote it, word for word. Each day it touches gets a marker, and the menu bar gives you a heads-up. Official warnings are available in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Beyond warnings, the app works wherever you are: it can use your current location or any city in the world, and you can save the places you keep checking and hop between them. The app emphasizes privacy: your location goes to the weather service to get a forecast, and that is it. There are no ads and no profile. It is also light on your Mac, opening instantly and won't show up in the list of things eating your battery. Big Weather's overall approach is to combine a glanceable menu bar presence with a visual, interactive panel. Instead of forcing you into a full weather app with maps and long lists, it distills the forecast into a curve and a few key readings. The free version is a proper app rather than a trial, so most people can rely on it without paying. Premium adds the longer forecast horizon, AI insights, official warnings, Apple's weather data (which the app says is usually sharper for your exact spot), more frequent updates, and Family Sharing across your Macs. The AI insights run natively via Apple Intelligence, and the app's design choices keep the experience minimal and fast. This combination of a small surface area and rich, opt-in depth defines how the product works. For users, the benefits are speed, clarity and privacy. You get the temperature at a glance and a visual sense of when rain arrives or clears, so you can make quick decisions without opening a separate app. The app is free to start with no ads, and the Premium tier is optional. Because your location is only sent to the weather service and AI insights run on-device, you get useful forecasts without tracking. The app is light on system resources, opening instantly and not appearing in battery consumption lists. Customization options like light or dark mode, chart or plain text, temperature units and a keyboard shortcut let you fit the app to your habits. Customers on the Mac App Store describe it as clear, concise, excellent placement of information and great design. Use cases for Big Weather include checking the menu bar before heading out to see if you need an umbrella, scrubbing the hourly wave to find the exact hour rain starts and stops, and looking at the UV forecast for today and tomorrow before spending time outdoors. You can use it to survey the next ten days with Premium and see temperature trends at a glance. Travelers can save cities and hop between them, while people in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe can receive official flood, storm or heat warnings directly in the panel. The AI insights are useful when you want a sentence summarizing the day or week, and the keyboard shortcut makes it easy to open the forecast without touching the mouse. Big Weather is built for macOS users who want weather in their menu bar. It requires macOS 15.2 or later, and the AI insights feature requires macOS 27 and a Mac with Apple Intelligence. The app is distributed through the Mac App Store and uses Apple's weather data, with official warnings sourced from weather services in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe. Pricing is straightforward: the Free version costs $0 and is a full app, while Premium is $1.99 per month, $9.99 per year, or $29.99 once for lifetime access. Monthly and yearly plans start with a month free. Premium includes Family Sharing across your Macs, and the app is made by a one-person shop. Support is available by email, with replies usually within a day. Overall, Big Weather takes a familiar need—checking the weather—and fits it neatly into the macOS menu bar with a visual, interactive curve and optional AI-powered summaries and official warnings. It is free to use as a proper app, with Premium adding longer forecasts, AI insights, warnings, Apple's weather data and family sharing. For anyone who looks at the menu bar more often than they open a weather app, it offers a fast, clear and private way to stay ahead of the forecast.