To make sure your Mac lasts as long as possible, you should check its temperature. This can also help you figure out if any of its parts are burning. Getting too hot should be fine for newer Macs like the Mac Mini M2 or Mac Studio. But older Macs may need help with this. If you want to know how hot your Mac’s engine and graphics card are, read on.
If the temperatures are getting too high, you should clean out the vents on your Mac or consider upgrading the parts so they can handle the current task better. In this help, we’ll show you how to find out the temperature on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. The weather can be checked on the spot or all the time.
With the Hot app, you can see how hot the Apple Silicon Mac CPU is.
The free and open-source app Hot was made by iMazing to make it easy and quick to check the CPU temperature on a MacBook or Mac. This works on CPU-based and Silicon-based Apple computers. For Intel Macs, we’ll talk about some other options that also give you GPU info below. However, for any M1- or M2-based Mac, the Hot app is a free app that you can always see in the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Step 1: Go to the iMazing website and find the free app page. About a third of the way down, you’ll find the Hot app.
Step 2: Launch Finder, then navigate to the Applications directory. After that, open the Downloads folder in the Dock and then drag the Hot app to the Applications folder. To launch the app, go to the Applications section or Launchpad.
Step 3: Look for the Hot app’s flame-shaped button in the menu bar at the top of the screen. It will show the CPU’s usual temperature next to it. There are more choices in the Hot app’s menu, where you can also switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius for the temperature display.
With Terminal, you can get a picture of an Intel Mac’s temperature.
If you want to check your CPU temperature quickly, you can do that on Intel-based Macs without having to run any extra software. When you type a certain command in the Terminal, which is macOS’s version of Command Prompt, your CPU temperature will start to be tracked. Do these things:
Step 1: Open the app called Terminal. To get to it, open the Dock and choose Applications. Open the Utilities folder that you found here. These tools are where you should find the Terminal.
Step 2: Open the Terminal and type or copy and paste this exact command line:
PowerMetrics: sudo powermetrics –samplers smc |grep -i “CPU die temperature”
Press “Enter” to enter the order. You might be asked to enter your macOS account password at this point. Sometimes, this can be hard to do in the Terminal app because it doesn’t show the characters you’re typing. You’ll have to type the password without seeing them and then press Enter again. After you enter your password, you don’t have to type the phrase again.
Step 3: Take a moment to let Terminal start making logs for your CPU temperature. Every few seconds, the Terminal will keep writing a log that shows how the temperature is changing over time. The log will stop when you close the program.
Keep in mind that the temperatures will be given in Celsius. This is how most computer temperature reports are written, so you will need to do some quick math in your head to get Fahrenheit numbers. If you aren’t used to working with Celsius, you can type the temperature into Google and get a Fahrenheit translation.
For a CPU reading, you can use this phrase whenever you want, but it gets a bit of a pain to do often. Let’s look at a solution that will be better for keeping the temperature stable over the long term.
The Fanny app lets you keep an eye on the continuing Intel Mac temps.
What if you want to see your Intel Mac’s temperature all the time without having to type a command each time? What if you want to keep an eye on the GPU temperature instead of the CPU temperature to help you figure out what’s wrong or focus on one piece of hardware?
In this case, you should definitely get the Fanny app. It’s free, small, straightforward to use, and keeps an eye on your Mac’s performance all the time, including the temperatures of the CPU and GPU:
Step 1: Get the Fanny Widget from this website by clicking the Download button.
Step 2: Fanny will be saved on your Mac as a zip file. To open the zip file:
- Could you find it and click on it?
- Click on Fanny to download it.
- Make sure you really want to open it.
Step 3: Fanny won’t let you use a new window. Instead, it will add a small icon with three dashes to the top right corner of your Mac to show that Fanny is running. When you click on that item, a new screen will appear.
How can I tell if my Mac is getting too hot?
These programs notify you of Mac overheating. Computers that shut down, restart, or freeze may be heated. Adobe Photoshop and resource-intensive games stress the computer, making this especially true.
Because computers generate heat. CPU, graphics card. Heat goes to fans and vents instead of parts. But sometimes, these systems can’t carry heat fast enough, and hardware malfunctions. Machine overheating.
Before your Mac goes down or breaks, monitor its temperatures using these tools. Too much heat may cause it.
Intel-based MacBooks and laptops should have a CPU temperature below 45–50 degrees Celsius without programs. Opening more apps warms the PC quickly. More significant effort means more excellent heat. Intel processors can survive 100°C.
When idle, Silicon-powered Apple Mac and MacBook laptops cool to 20–35 degrees Celsius. Operating heavy apps like 4K ProRes video processing or massive 3D graphics sequences might exceed 100 degrees Celsius. Every MacOS PC reduces the processor or speeds up the fans for safety.
However, defective fans or blocked airflow may cause issues. Last, upgrading to more efficient parts and PCs speeds up and cools machines. We also offer Mac speedup steps. Most of those guides tip excellent CPU and GPU.
