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Best prices today: TG Pro
Apple has many hidden thermometers in its Macs and a tachometer for models with one or more fans. In normal use, you may never think about how hot your performance cores are or how fast a fan spins. But we live in times of extreme temperatures, and some Macs, especially Intel models, are already getting hot.
TG Pro reveals low-level information that Apple tracks and lets you set alerts in case values exceed what’s considered safe for long-term use. You may want to run a fan or fans earlier or faster than Apple’s default behavior, or run your Mac cooler to preserve its lifespan.
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You can view current information through a long drop-down menu that you can customize to reduce items you are less interested in. The menu bar item provides a concise summary that you can customize to display, among other things, the highest or average temperature for all sensors. You can also open the app’s only window to see a graphical representation of regularly updated temperature information.
This list of temperatures includes CPU, GPU, and power components. These are mainly on a single chip with an M1 or M2, or spread over several for older Intel systems. Tick ”Check hard disk temperature with SMART” in TG Pro > Preferences > Temperatures can retrieve data from external drives. I use an external SSD as my boot volume and it’s helpful to know the temperature in case it overheats.
You can set alerts to appear as macOS notifications (on eligible versions of macOS) and optionally configure outgoing email settings so that TG Pro can email you alerts.
A fan section in TG Pro’s preferences allows you to set rules to activate the fan. For example, you might want the fan to run at its maximum when the highest temperature of a sensor reading CPU readings exceeds a certain temperature. Fan control requires the installation of a helper app, whose status TG Pro displays in the Fan preferences.
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For Intel Macs with a T2 security chip and all M1 and M2 Macs, TG Pro can’t bump the fan higher without taking full control. Thus, the company locks all overrides on the fan that is running at maximum. You can unlock this setting and choose specific fan speeds. If you do, you accept the responsibility of the operating system for choosing all other situations where you want a fan to run or not. It’s an interesting set of choices that Tunabelly Software goes into in depth if you want to know.
TG Pro costs $20 for a one-time license fee for three Macs for personal use or one for business use. That fee also covers all future updates to version 2, first released in 2014. TG Pro works with macOS 10.12 Sierra or later.
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If preventing a fever on your Mac and using fan speeds are part of your computer health plan, install TG Pro for peace of mind and greater control.
Apple has dozens of thermometers and fan tachometers that TG Pro exposes for monitoring and alerting.
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