How to optimise your Mac’s cooling using conduction, convection and radiation. Use physical principles to cope with extreme summer temperatures, and how you can work more comfortably as well.
temperature
Scrolling becomes sluggish, switching between apps is slow. Look in Activity Monitor and kernel_task is hogging the CPU. It’s time to help your Mac cool down,, as detailed here.
Open Activity Monitor. If kernel_task is the top of the CPU % list and hogging its cores, what should you do? Can Energy Modes help?
Why you shouldn’t try killing kernel_task, but take action to help cool your Mac and reduce the heat it’s producing.
Signs of thermal strain in a Mac, including what kernel_task is doing, how to encourage heat dissipation and reduce it production.
With the heat of summer drawing near, it’s time to consider keeping our Macs and their peripherals cool. Covers thermal paste, heat sinks, fans and more.
How do the SMC and CoreDuet manage the systems in your Mac, and should you fiddle with them?
How power efficiency is just as important to desktop Macs as it is to notebooks, and the story of the Mac mini in power from 2005-2023.
There’s a reliable and accurate index for the heat which can’t be measured by iPhones or Macs, and isn’t understood by many anyway.
Summer is allegedly coming: the season when your Mac could see its harshest use. Does yours get too hot?
The Eclectic Light Company 