Track CPU temperature and thermal throttling with the open source Hot

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Activity Monitor on Mac
Activity Monitor on Mac (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • Hot is a free open source app that tracks your CPU's temperature and whether it's being throttled due to heat.

Those M1 Macs might run cooler than a polar bear's behind but the same can't be said about those Intel chips most of us have crammed in our Macs. Thermal throttling is very much something that happens with the more powerful chips and a free open source menu bar app called Hot keeps track of whether that's happening.

A small app that's distributed under the terms of the MIT License, Hot is free for everyone with the source code available on Github. It has one job, but it does it well – Hot shows you how hot your CPU is and whether the system is throttling its speed to cope with any overheating.

Hot Menu Bar Screenshot

Hot Menu Bar Screenshot (Image credit: iMore)

That's all there is to it, really. The app shows your CPU's scheduler and speed limit as well as a graph to show the relationship between past speeds and temperatures – and it all lives in your menu bar, out of the way.

You can download Hot for free from the iMazing website. And really, why wouldn't you?

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.