How to check your Mac's temperature on Apple silicon

Does macOS show CPU temperature?

No. Activity Monitor shows CPU, GPU, memory, energy, disk and network use, but no temperature. System Information doesn't list one either. And Apple's view of third-party temperature apps is cautious: they don't measure the outside of the case, which is much cooler than the inside, and Apple says never to use them to diagnose hardware problems (Apple).

There's a practical reason too. Apple silicon chips have many temperature sensors, and Apple doesn't document which is which. The developer of Stats, a free monitor, notes that the "CPU" sensors are thermal zones on the chip, not individual cores, and that the sensor keys change with each new chip (Stats). Any single "CPU temperature" an app shows is its own choice of which sensors to read or average.

One more change in macOS 27: the battery entry in ioreg -rn AppleSmartBattery no longer includes a Temperature value. We checked on macOS 27.0.1, and a developer has reported the same change for Apple's power-source API on the Apple Developer Forums. Older tips that read the battery temperature this way return nothing on 27.

What Terminal can tell you

Thermal pressure with powermetrics

powermetrics is Apple's built-in power and performance sampler. Its thermal sampler reports the current thermal pressure (man powermetrics):

sudo powermetrics --samplers thermal -n 1

• It needs your administrator password (that's the sudo), because powermetrics refuses to run otherwise ("must be invoked as the superuser"). It reads; it doesn't change any setting.
• -n 1 takes one sample and exits. Without it, powermetrics keeps printing every 5 seconds until you press Control-C.
• Look for the line Current pressure level. The level names come from macOS itself: Nominal, Moderate, Heavy, Trapping and Sleeping, in that order.

On Intel Macs, older guides use --samplers smc for temperatures and fan speeds. On Apple silicon there's no such sampler: powermetrics -h on our M2 Max MacBook Pro with macOS 27.0.1 lists thermal but not smc.

Thermal warnings with pmset

pmset -g therm

This needs no password and changes nothing. Apple's man page says it shows thermal conditions that affect CPU speed, and that it isn't available on all platforms. On our Apple silicon Mac it printed only:

Note: No thermal warning level has been recorded
Note: No performance warning level has been recorded
Note: No CPU power status has been recorded

That's what we've seen on Apple silicon. Don't read it as "no heat"; use powermetrics or an app for the live state.

Thermal pressure explained

Thermal pressure is macOS's own judgment of how hard it has to work to manage heat. Two naming schemes are in use, and they come from different parts of macOS:

Apple doesn't say how the two line up. One developer who compared them under load found that ProcessInfo reported Fair through both Moderate and Heavy, with performance dropping at Heavy (Stan's blog). Treat that as one person's observation, not a rule.

Why it's the better number: a sensor reading of 90 °C on its own tells you little, but Serious tells you macOS is giving up performance to keep cool. If pressure stays Nominal, the exact temperature doesn't matter much. If it climbs often, see why your MacBook runs hot.

Apps that show temperatures

iStat Menus, Stats, TG Pro, Macs Fan Control and Hot are trademarks of their owners. Tend isn't affiliated with any of them.

Which to pick: Stats if you want free and open source; iStat Menus if you want a polished, deep menu bar monitor; TG Pro or Macs Fan Control if you think you might want fan control later. Our comparison of Stats and iStat Menus goes further, and Tend vs iStat Menus covers where Tend fits.

What's a normal reading?

Apple doesn't publish normal internal temperatures for its chips, so any "normal range" you read online is someone's observation. Readings also aren't comparable between apps, because each picks and labels sensors its own way, and between chips, because the sensors differ.

A more useful way to judge your own Mac:

1. Note the reading at idle, with nothing open, in a normal room.
2. Note it under your usual heavy work, such as an export or a game.
3. Watch thermal pressure at the same time. If it stays Nominal or Fair under your heavy work, your Mac is coping, whatever the degrees say.
4. Investigate changes, not absolute numbers: a Mac that runs much hotter at idle than it used to, or reaches Serious more often, has picked up a new cause.

How Tend helps

Tend Pro's Thermals page shows every temperature sensor your Mac exposes, with its average and peak, each fan's speed against its minimum and maximum, and the thermal pressure macOS reports, in plain words. At Fair, for example, it says: "Slightly elevated. Fans may spin up, but performance is unaffected." Thermals are part of Tend Pro; the free version shows which apps are using the most power, which is usually where the heat comes from.

Questions

Related guides

Sources

• Apple, Keep your Mac laptop within acceptable operating temperatures
• Apple Developer, ProcessInfo.ThermalState; the macOS SDK header OSThermalNotification.h for the pressure level names
• man powermetrics, powermetrics -h, man pmset and pmset -g therm on macOS 27.0.1
• Apple Developer Forums, IOPMPowerSource not returning a Temperature value anymore (September 2026)
• Bjango, iStat Menus and Mac App Store version differences, checked 13 October 2026
• Stats on GitHub (v3.0.21), TG Pro, Macs Fan Control and Hot on GitHub, checked 13 October 2026
• Stan's blog, Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling (December 2025; third-party observation)

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