Is there an efficient way of observing the temperature of your Mac?

ku4hx wrote:

You can do this in terminal: sudo powermetrics --samplers smc |grep -i "CPU die temperature"

FYI, this does not work on an Apple Silicon Mac.....there is no SMC. The only thing I could find relating to system temperature on Apple Silicon Macs is a "thermal pressure" reference which on my Apple Silicon Mac reported as "Nominal", so not very useful.

sudo  powermetrics  -s  thermal

Many of the command line utilities don't retrieve the same information from an Apple Silicon Mac as it does on an Intel Mac. If the information can be retrieved, many times it tends to require a lot more work to parse it from the output.

You can do this in terminal: sudo powermetrics --samplers smc |grep -i "CPU die temperature"

Source: https://www.lifewire.com/check-macbook-temperature-5184146

And there're 3rd party apps such as Fanny

It surprised me too when I went to test a battery using another low level utility and found Apple modified the output of one of the values to be a percentage instead of the actual raw value reported by the battery making it completely useless. Still in the process of creating a script to access the information using yet another utility which is incredibly hard to parse. Just goes to show that the macOS codebase is not the same for Intel & Apple Silicon Macs. These changes are not something someone would normally suspect.

HWTech wrote:

It surprised me too when I went to test a battery using another low level utility and found Apple modified the output of one of the values to be a percentage instead of the actual raw value reported by the battery making it completely useless. Still in the process of creating a script to access the information using yet another utility which is incredibly hard to parse. Just goes to show that the macOS codebase is not the same for Intel & Apple Silicon Macs. These changes are not something someone would normally suspect.

I’ve done work porting operating systems across processor implementations and different processor architectures, and this is absolutely one of the areas where there can be and often are differences.

Even within entirely-vendor-controlled processor architecture families (e.g. Apple silicon, definitely not Intel), there can be large differences in the sensor data offered and the sensor data interfaces used to access it. Sensor data might have been available in some registers on one, in some different registers on another, accessible only via I2C on another, and via the box-internal Ethernet network on a third.

The implementation of anything that’s not included in the user-visible API can be fickle. And sometimes even what’s in the user-visible API, if the necessary platform port changes are big enough.

Hardware diagnostics and event logging is almost always “fun”, and is at often least system family-specific if not box-specific.

Processor errata is such sweet sorrow.

If you’re willing to work a little, it’s free: https://github.com/macmade/Hot

Ah rats!! Thanks