Not sure if my experience will help, but I had an overheating issue as well after installing macOS 26 on my 14" MacBook Pro M1... not to mention terrible slow on everything I tried to work on, laggy & jumpy… a fresh reinstall of macOS 26 didn't change a thing, the laptop was always warm and never cooled down and the fans came on frequently… initially I waited for 26.1 to be released and installed the update, seemed like the overheating backed off a bit and the fans weren't coming on as much, but the machine was still always warm (not super hot as others mentioned)... but it didn't seem to fix anything else, still laggy and slow to process things, and if anything I ended up with some other weird browser issues all of a sudden…even my mouse was acting up! Well fast forward to this week, it finally drove me crazy enough to dive in to see what I could do to get it running better... a few days ago I contacted support getting the usual scripted responses on things to check that weren't resolving the issues and unfortunately ended up with no answers and a scheduled call for a senior advisor the next day… so I decided on my own to reinstall the macOS 26 "again" before talking with them (which included the 26.1 update this time)... and shockingly that actually worked and made a HUGE difference! Now my machine runs like brand new again, no issues being laggy or jumpy like before and my mouse is working again. So I went ahead and cancelled the call for a senior advisor. HOWEVER... today I started to notice the overheating came back, not as bad, but fans were kicking on again… so here's the good part that I hope helps some others.... looked for community discussions about this and took some advice from others recommending to change a couple of display features that seem to cause overheating issues from CPU usage; Accessibility>Display>Reduce Transparency (toggle to ON)... along with Accessibility>Motion>Reduce Motion (toggle to ON)... wow I can’t believe it, it actually worked! My machine was noticeably cooler to the touch in under a half hour. Fans haven't kicked on and I don't think my machine has been this cool to the touch since I installed macOS 26! Hopefully this isn’t a temporary fix, but my machine is almost cold to the touch in less than 2 hrs now. I think the combination of reinstalling macOS 26 (with the 26.1 update), along with changing the display settings mentioned above, did the trick. I know everyone has different machines, and with different programs and uses. I am medically retired so I don’t have dual monitors or a docking station, and I don’t have any big programs that I run either.
