Mac Temperature: Where to Check It and When to Worry

macOS itself shows no degrees — not in Settings, not in Activity Monitor. It has a thermal pressure level (pmset -g therm, powermetrics), which is more useful than a number for “is my Mac overheating?”; for degrees you need a third-party monitor such as Stats or iStat Menus.

What matters isn’t the degrees, but whether heat is slowing your Mac down and what’s making it hot.

Getting warm is normal

A Mac warms up under load, and that’s how it’s meant to work. If a laptop has fans, Apple says they turn on automatically to cool critical components. Fan noise while exporting a video is not a fault; when the noise is worth looking into is in the fan noise guide.

A MacBook Air with Apple silicon has no fan. Under long, heavy load it cools down by slowing down: the system reduces speed to avoid overheating. That’s normal too — see step 4, “Heat”, in why your Mac is slow.

What macOS itself shows

No degrees, but Terminal (Applications → Utilities → Terminal) can tell you a few things.

pmset -g therm shows whether the system has recorded any thermal warnings. If there haven’t been any, it says so:

Note: No thermal warning level has been recorded
Note: No performance warning level has been recorded

There may be a line below about whether the system limited the CPU. An answer like this is a good answer: the Mac hasn’t complained about heat.

sudo powermetrics --samplers thermal -n 1 shows the current thermal pressure level. It asks for an administrator password, prints a single sample and exits. It only reads and changes nothing.

Thermal pressure is an estimate of how much thermal strain the system is under and whether it needs to back off. Howard Oakley, who writes about macOS internals on the Eclectic Light blog, notes that both Intel and Apple recommend watching thermal pressure, and that temperature is a poor way to monitor this because the system itself controls it (a 2024 article).

How the chips differ:

• Apple silicon — powermetrics has only the thermal sampler, which reports thermal pressure, not degrees. There’s no sampler with temperatures;
• Intel — besides thermal there’s an smc sampler (“SMC sensors”): readings from the System Management Controller’s sensors. powermetrics -h lists the samplers on your Mac.

Where to get degrees

Only from third-party monitors — for example, Stats (free and open source) or iStat Menus (paid). Why some monitors show temperatures and others don’t is covered in the guide to menu bar system monitors; how Stats and iStat Menus differ on sensors, price and license is in the system monitor comparison.

A caveat for Apple silicon: the CPU and GPU sensors there are thermal zones, not cores. The Stats developer notes that zone names change from chip to chip, so the number in a sensor label isn’t a core number. They tell you whether the Mac is getting hot, but you can’t compare them with a figure from someone else’s table.

As for tables of “normal” temperatures for M1, M2 or Intel: Apple doesn’t publish such figures. The ones going around blogs have no source — don’t judge your Mac by them.

When to worry

Not by a number, but by signs:

• The Mac is hot while you’re doing nothing. Apple suggests opening Activity Monitor and checking CPU activity — most likely a process is busy for no reason;
• The Mac slows down under load and stays slow — the export keeps getting slower, the fan never quiets down;
• The Mac shuts down unexpectedly while you’re working.

Before blaming the hardware, check the conditions. For laptops, Apple recommends an ambient temperature between 10 and 35 °C (50 and 95 °F), a stable surface with good ventilation — not a bed, pillow or blanket — and clear vents.

What to do

1. Find the culprit. Activity Monitor, CPU tab, sort by % CPU. A high kernel_task isn’t the culprit but a consequence: the kernel takes time away from processes to cool the CPU. More in the kernel_task guide.
2. Let the Mac cool down. Close heavy apps, move the laptop off soft surfaces, clear the vents.
3. Update macOS if you haven’t in a while.
4. Reset the SMC — on Intel only. Macs with Apple silicon have no separate reset: according to Apple, the SMC resets automatically, and a restart is enough. On Intel the steps depend on the model and are in the same article.
5. If nothing helps, get it serviced. Unexpected shutdowns and strong heat without load in normal conditions are a reason for diagnostics.

What not to do

• Don’t install fan control utilities “just in case”. The fans turn on automatically; even Stats calls its own fan control legacy.
• Don’t work with a laptop on a bed or under a blanket — fabric blocks the vents.
• Don’t trust temperature “norms” without a source, and don’t worry that your number is higher than someone else’s.

In the app

To be clear up front: Mac Resources doesn’t show temperatures or fans. The widget extension runs in the macOS sandbox, which doesn’t expose the sensors. For degrees, use Stats or iStat Menus.

What the app does help with is where the heat comes from:

• the menu bar item shows the highest percentage of CPU, memory and GPU and turns red above 80%. A red item showing CPU or GPU plus a hot Mac means heat from load, not a fault;
• the Processor and Last Hour widgets draw a graph for the past hour — you can see when the load that’s heating the Mac started;
• both the menu bar item and the widgets show the GPU. Heat often comes from the GPU — games, video export — rather than the CPU.

The app is free and runs on macOS 14 and later. If your Mac is not only hot but also slow, walk through the step-by-step diagnosis.