Why does my MacBook Air M4 heat up so quickly?

KiltedTim wrote:

Exactly how are you measuring the temperature?

The best native measurement I can find without installing a third party app is a command that you run in the Terminal app. The command is "sudo powermetrics -s thermal -n 1".

I get the result Nominal and the full set of answers is Nominal, Fair, Serious or Critical.

What programs did you use to measure it?

My paid iStatistica program shows 96 degrees Celsius after starting my MacBook in a room with air conditioning. Other programs do the same, showing 80-90 degrees Celsius on the processors when the computer is actually cold to the touch :D

Download "Macs Fan Control" for free from the website and "State" from the App Store – these programs work well with M processors.

The "State" program shows 38-40 degrees Celsius during everyday use, just like "Macs Fan Control," not 90 degrees Celsius like iStatistica Pro :D

I also use the Macs Fan Control and use the "CPU Core Average" sensor in Fahrenheit degrees. I also have no background apps running, especially Clean My Mac, which I discovered was the main contributor to high temp readings. I now am seeing 91 degree F readings in Mac Fan Control versus 170 degree+ readings before!

I have a m2 air and upgraded to the m4 air recently as I was pleased with the battery life and had no heating issue like windows laptops, I discovered the overheating issue started to show up when i enabled apple intelligence and turning it off showed immediate results. Also to minimize further you can turn off background items on your settings and turn off location as well.

I also just bought an M4 Air, and compared to my other M2 Air, I also found that the displayed temperature is slightly higher than my M2's.

I also checked the overall energy consumption and CPU utilization, and found that even under normal circumstances, the idle CPU of this M4 is not as good as that of the M2, so it is obviously running in the background, occupying CPU resources and causing AIR to generate more heat than M2.

Just tried to migrate from M1 Air to M4.

I need a bigger screen for vim (2 columns + explorer + panel on the right side) and 13" is not enough.

I have bought 15" M4 32GB/2TB and I can't use it.

M4 much hotter than M1, much more than I can tolerate.

On the screenshot, you can see temperature metrics after running dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/zero on M1 (also with browsers and a lot of running software) and M4 (zero setup with only open Safari app).

why they don't care about tempreature?

I'll be back on the M1 and have continued my search for fanless laptops with a good screen and comfortable operating temperature.

Fatalicious wrote:

I’m experiencing the same issue. My brand new MacBook M4 15" frequently overheats, especially when using Figma or Photoshop. Temperatures regularly reach around 60°C, and can spike up to 80°C if the room temperature is above 25°C. This is a serious concern.

80C is not seriously hot if it is a short duration spike. 90C is at which point the CPU will begin throttling until it cools down.

CPU cores, whether Apple or Intel are rated to 95-100C max temp.

I have disabled the background running applications setting and now my M4 is not overheating any more when getting out of idle state :) I think this may be a Sequoia bug ....

I this can help

Ajmaljalal wrote:

Is there someone from Apple to provide some feedback here. I have the same issue with my.

This is a support forum for other users to try and help each other. You should use the Support link at the top of the page next to the search icon if you want to talk to someone from Apple.

FWIW, my recently purchased M4 MacBook Air with 24GB RAM and 512GB SSD runs on average about 3-4 C hotter under normal use than my M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD. when under heavy use, it actually is a 4-5 C cooler than the M1.

Downloaded Fan Control from their website and, since the M4 MBAir has no fan, no temperature data can be or is provided! This Program does not help at all...and the "State" program is all in Chinese!!! No help here either...My "Clean My Mac" program reports a 183 degree F temp, which is high. So the question still remains unanswered...why is the M4 MBAir running hot/warm.. any background apps, including my VPN, are OFF!

KiltedTim wrote:

So your hand is sensitive enough to determine the exact temperature then?

Well my hand feels it's not hot which is the adjective you put in the title. My hand also tells me that my iPhone gets hot sometimes. See my other answer for a Terminal command that I ran.

I 100% agree. Same thing on my 15 inch Air M4.

It gets noticeable hot super fast and the battery goes fast, opposed to all those Youtubers saying the battery is a lot better with the M4.

And this is all just with Safari/Chrome/Discord and a few other lightweight apps open.... I have put my M2 through a lot worse stress and never has it even reached the point where I could say it's getting hot...

Was expecting an improvement from my M2, but it feels like downgrade at this point...

Real questions is: Do we have a problem which is fixable, or should I just return the M4 and stick to my M2?

I just got a new 32GB RAM M4 Air after using a 16GB RAM M3 Air for a year. I transferred everything over with the migration assistant, so the apps are identical. My primary browser is Microsoft Edge, and I used it daily on my M3 air without issues, after opening up 2 Edge windows (my work and personal accounts) my computer immediately got noticeably warm in my lap, which I never experienced on the M3 Air. When I opened the Activity monitor it shows that 16.08 GB of CPU are in use with 2 Edge windows (44 tabs and 5 tabs) and 1 Safari window (2 tabs) open. I don't understand how the CPU usage can be so high when I had more Edge windows with more tabs running in the background of my M3 Macbook, and the 44 tab window was directly imported from the other computer. I only ran into CPU issues when I attempted to have my many browser windows run with multiple Excel and PowerPoint, and even then, the computer wouldn't heat up, it would just make me close some applications.

I am going to update the computer to the latest OS and test out using Firefox as my daily driver browser, but I am very concerned that this brand new computer is having so many issues with such a lightweight task, especially as I upgraded to a higher RAM model to accommodate my heavy workloads.

I want to know if this is a widespread issue with the new M4 Airs or if this is an issue that would warrant trying to get Apple to replace the computer.

I'm having similar issues on my 13" --upgraded memory and ssd too. I've noticed very light usage that would never cause any significant heat on my M1 air, will get really warm on the bottom in just a few minutes --my monitor shows 73C.

Is there a way to voluntarily under clock the M4 when you don't really need performance?