Hot
Hot is a macOS menu bar utility that helps you monitor your Mac’s thermal state, including temperature and CPU throttling indicators.
What is Hot?
Hot is a lightweight macOS utility for monitoring your Mac’s thermal condition from the menu bar. It is designed for users who want a quick view of temperature and performance pressure without opening a full system monitor. On Intel Macs, Hot can show CPU temperature, CPU speed limit, scheduler limit, and available CPU information. On Apple Silicon Macs, it focuses on CPU temperature and the system’s thermal pressure, and it can also display a graph view for sensors. Published by Jean-David Gadina, Hot fits well into troubleshooting, performance monitoring, and day-to-day awareness of how heat may be affecting a Mac during demanding workloads.
Key features
- Show CPU temperature from the menu bar
- Display CPU speed limit and throttling information on Intel Macs
- Show system thermal pressure on Apple Silicon Macs
- View sensor graphs on supported Apple Silicon Macs
- Highlight thermal issues with color changes in the menu bar
- Open a lightweight utility without a full dashboard interface
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Safety overview
Status: Mostly safe
Hot is a legitimate hardware-monitoring utility for macOS. It reads thermal and sensor information to report heat and performance pressure, which is normal for its purpose. The main practical concern is that sensor readings can be misread or misunderstood, especially if you use them to judge whether your Mac has a hardware problem. Use it as a monitoring aid rather than as the only basis for repairs or system changes.
Recommendation: Keep Hot if you actively monitor Mac temperatures or throttling from the menu bar. If you no longer use it, removing it is usually fine and only affects its own monitoring features.
Common paths
/Applications/Hot.app
Preference paths
~/Library/Preferences/com.xs-labs.Hot.plist
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