The sound of the fans spinning up on your mac is never a welcome noise, but it’s usually completely normal. Determining the fan speed without 3rd party software isn’t easy, but not impossible:

do shell script "SD=~/.spindump.txt; rm $SD; spindump 1 1 -file $SD; grep 'Fan speed' $SD; rm $SD" with administrator privileges



Copy and paste the above into your (Apple)Script Editor and run it. You’ll need an Adminstrator password.

However, that doesn’t really tell you what you want to know: is my mac too hot or not? Should I do something about it?

Fortunately, we can get a better idea of the mac’s thermal state (and we don’t need admin privs to do it!), with this script:

The script not only reports the mac’s thermal state, but prints out Apple’s recommended advice, if any. Uncomment the last line of the script to get the result in a display dialog box; otherwise, you can just read the result in the results pane of your script editor.

Enjoy! 🙂

Featured Image: Flicker