How to check your Mac's temperature

Option 1: thermal pressure in Terminal (built in)

macOS tracks a thermal pressure level and uses it to decide when to slow the chip down. You can read it with powermetrics, which ships with macOS:

sudo powermetrics --samplers thermal -i 1000 -n 1

**** Thermal pressure ****
Current pressure level: Nominal

Level	Meaning
Nominal	Normal. No performance limits.
Light, Moderate	Warm. macOS has started holding back.
Heavy and above	Hot. Performance is clearly limited.

To watch it over time instead of once, drop -n 1 and press Control-C to stop:

sudo powermetrics --samplers thermal -i 2000

This is the most useful single signal for “is heat affecting my Mac right now?” It doesn’t give degrees, though.

You can also see power draw, which is what produces the heat:

sudo powermetrics --samplers cpu_power,gpu_power -i 1000 -n 3

Option 2: an app for real temperatures

Apple Silicon exposes dozens of temperature sensors, but only through system interfaces that apps read for you. Common choices:

App	Type	Notes
Stat Space	Free, Pro one-time	Menu bar temperature, all sensors, power, fans, thermal state
Stats	Free, open source	Menu bar modules including sensors and fans
iStat Menus	Paid	Long-running, very detailed
TG Pro	Paid, one-time	Temperature-focused, with fan control
Macs Fan Control	Free, with paid Pro	Fan-focused, shows temperatures
macmon	Free, open source CLI	Terminal dashboard for Apple Silicon, no sudo

For a Terminal option that shows degrees:

brew install macmon
macmon

Which temperature should you look at?

There’s no single official “CPU temperature” on Apple Silicon. Apps choose:

• Average of CPU cores. Smoother, good for trends.
• Hottest sensor. Jumpy, good for spotting peaks.
• GPU. Matters for games, video and local models.
• Battery. Runs much cooler than the chip and rises with charging.

Pick one app and one reading and watch it over time. Comparing a “hottest sensor” from one app with an “average” from another will make one of them look wrong.

What counts as normal is covered in normal Apple Silicon temperatures. In short: 30 to 50 °C at idle and up to the 90s °C under heavy load are expected.

Check fan speed too

On Macs with fans, the fan speed tells you how hard the system is working to cool. No built-in tool shows it on Apple Silicon. Most of the apps above do. A MacBook Air has no fan, so there’s nothing to read.

Reading it in context

A temperature alone doesn’t say much. Pair it with what’s running:

top -o cpu -l 2 -n 5 -stats pid,command,cpu,power

High temperature plus a busy process is normal. High temperature with nothing busy, or Nominal pressure turning to Heavy during light work, is worth investigating. See Mac running hot and thermal throttling.

Doing this with Stat Space

Stat Space reads the temperature sensors without sudo and can put CPU temperature in your menu bar. The popover’s System tab lists every sensor it finds, power in watts for CPU, GPU and Neural Engine, fan speeds, and a thermal pill (Cool, Warm, Hot · throttling) based on macOS’s own thermal state. From Terminal, statspace sensors prints temperatures, fans and power. Temperature alerts and 30 days of per-minute history are included, all free.