The Hidden Way to Monitor Your Mac’s Temperature for Free

Apple silicon, including the M1 and the new M2 chips,has a reputation for staying Cold even under intense workloads. Intel Macs, on the other hand, run notoriously hot. They are still capable computers, but they get hot fast, which, in turn, slows things down. If you have an Intel-based Mac, you’ve probably experienced this computational heat wave yourself. However, instead of guessing how hot your computer is getting, there is a integrated hidden monitor all intel based macs letting you know exactly what is the internal temperature

Why your Mac overheats (and why it’s bad)

I talked about this topic before.when I mainly focused on laptops. However, whether you have a MacBook or an iMac, the general principle is the same: you don’t want your machine to overheat.

Computers get hot because the internal components, namely the CPU and GPU, generate heat as they work. Depending on your computer, you may not notice it while doing light tasks. However, once you start pushing the machine, you will feel the temperature rising.

It is not that this heat will damage or break your computer. I mean, it absolutely could, but the manufacturers make sure that never happens. A little heat is fine; the parts aIt is designed to operate normally within a wide range of temperatures. However, when the fries start to get too hot…usually around 90 degrees FAhrenheit—your computer will slow down your Processing speed in order to cool things down, a process called “throttling.”

Strangling sucks, because it means you don’t get the performance you expect from your machine truea slow machine is better than a burnt and broken one one, but avoiding the overheating problem in the first place it can help you prevent choke before it kicks inand push your Mac to its full potential.

as long as there is many ways to combat overheating, one is to control the temperature of your Mac. And yes you have an Intel Mac, you already have a monitor built right into macOS.

Hidden macOS Temperature Monitors for Intel Macs

You won’t find these temperature monitors by searching the apps installed on your Mac. You won’t even find them in Activity Monitor, as useful a utility as it is. Rather, your Mac’s temperature monitor is located in Terminal. Wearing Terminal may seem intimidating to many users as it allows you to control your Mac using only text-based commands. But you don’t really need to memorize any of it.e commands to use Terminal; a copy and paste command works just as well.

There are many useful Terminal commands that everyone can use (we cover many of them in this piece) but we are focusing on the temperature monitors this time. There are two commands you can use here. First leaves you view your Mac’s CPU temperature stats. Copy and paste the following command exactly as it is in a new Terminal window (quotes and all):

sudo powermetrics –samplers smc |grep -i “CPU die temperature”

If done right, Terminal will ask for your password. Enter it (unfortunately, you won’t be able to see what you’re typing), then hit return. After a moment, you will begin to see temperature readings, updating approximately every five seconds. Temperatures are written in Celsius, so you’ll need to convert to Fahrenheit on your own, but after a while you’ll start to figure out which temperatures are cold, warm, hot, and cold. also hot.

speaking of which, too getting access to one of my favorite data points on macOS: when things start to get too hot and your Mac decides what it needs to cool things down below, you will see (fan) written next to the temperatures (if your Mac has fans, that is). That lets you know that the fans are starting to work harder to get hot air out of your machine. Fans are obviously a good tool for cooling computers, but they’re not perfect: If your CPU is still heating up to unsafe levels:usually 98 degrees Fahrenheit, going through my experience in Terminal—you will start to see (Energy) instead. When this reading appears, it means that macOS is throttling your CPU to prevent the temperature from going overboard.

You can also check your GPU temperatures with the following command:

sudo powermetrics –samplers smc |grep -i “GPU die temperature”

Note that you will not see (fan) either (Energy) appear in this Terminal windowonly temperature readings.

Options for Apple Silicon

While Apple’s silicon chipset doesn’t face as many heat ramps as Intel-based Macs, it can still overheat and throttle like any other chip. Unfortunately, this built-in Terminal command will not work on M1 and later, since even thoughSE chips are designed differently than Intel chips in the way they handle heat..

The only robust temperature monitor for Apple silicon available ris now TG-Prowhich has a cost. Generally is $20 though at the time of this writingis for sale by $10 If you’re looking for a temporary fix, the app offers a two-week free trial, so you can monitor your temperatures on the M1, M2, or any other Apple silicone variant for 14 days free of charge.

Hopefully, as more and more Mac users adopt Apple’s silicon, developers will write more temperature-monitoring apps for the platform. Hey, maybe Apple will even make their own, for free.