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Created July 8, 2026 18:25
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Monitoring CPU temperature on macOS
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macOS-cpu-temperature-monitoring.md

Monitoring CPU temperature on macOS

This note describes various ways to monitor the CPU and GPU temperatures on macOS.

These methods were tested on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 26.5. They may not work on older Intel Macs or other versions of macOS.

macmon

The open source utility macmon displays various indicators on the system, including the CPU and GPU temperatures, as illustrated below.

macmon

Source code repo: https://github.com/vladkens/macmon

Installing on macOS using Homebrew:

brew install macmon

smctemp and spindump

These command-line tools are used in the following script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "CPU temperature: $(smctemp -c)°C"
sudo spindump 1 1 -stdout -file /dev/null 2>/dev/null | grep -i "Fan speed" | sed 's/  */ /g'

Sample output:

CPU temperature: 51.4°C
Fan speed: 2512 rpm

The command spindump comes with macOS.

The command smctemp is an open source tool. It is available through Homebrew using a third-party tap:

brew tap narugit/tap
brew install narugit/tap/smctemp
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