HIDDENMINELABS
HeatSeek for Mac
macOS

See which app is heating your Mac, right now

A menu-bar-only macOS app that shows live thermal pressure on fanless M-series Macs and names the processes generating the heat. Purely observational — it reads, it never controls fans.

HeatSeek for Mac
app window screenshot →

Key Features

Menu bar thermal gauge

A live 0–100% pressure reading that shifts green to yellow to red as the machine heats up.

60-minute history graph

The Details window charts the last hour of thermal pressure alongside a process breakdown.

Throttling alerts

Notifications fire when pressure crosses your threshold, with a five-minute cooldown so a hot spell alerts once.

Event log and CSV export

Throttling starts, ends, and durations are logged, and the whole history exports to CSV.

Why We Built This

A fanless Mac throttles silently

On an M-series MacBook Air there's no fan to spin up as a warning — the machine just gets slower. Activity Monitor's Energy Impact is too coarse to diagnose that, and iStat Menus is a full system-monitoring suite when all you want is thermal visibility. Apple restricts direct thermal sensors on Apple Silicon, so HeatSeek infers pressure by blending CPU load, GPU utilization, and ProcessInfo.thermalState, then attributes it to the processes actually burning CPU. It lives in the menu bar, updates every two seconds, and otherwise stays out of your way.

Read-only by design

No fan control, no SMC pokes, no dangerous operations — it only observes, using public process info with no network requests.

Names the culprit

Per-process CPU sampling via libproc ranks what's heating the machine, so you know whether it's the simulator or the browser.

Cheap to run

One 2-second tick, no third-party dependencies, no Dock icon or window — a menu bar agent you forget is there until it turns red.