TG Pro review: Stay alert to hot fans and hot chips on a Mac

Price When Reviewed

$20

Best Prices Today: TG Pro

Apple includes many hidden thermometers in its Macs and a tachometer for models with one or more fans. In normal usage, you may never give a thought to how hot your performance cores are or how fast a fan is running. But we live in times of extreme temperatures, and some Macs—particularly Intel models—run hot already.

TG Pro exposes low-level information Apple tracks and lets you set alerts in case values exceed what’s considered safe for long-term operation. You may want to have a fan or fans kick in sooner or faster than Apple’s default behavior or run your Mac cooler to preserve its longevity.

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You can view current information via a lengthy dropdown system menu that you can customize to reduce entries you’re less interested in. It’s menu bar item provides a concise summary you can tweak to show the highest or average temperature across all sensors, among other choices. You can also bring up the app’s sole window to view a graphical display of regularly updating temperature information.

This list of temperatures includes parts of the CPU, GPU, and power supply. These are mainly on a single chip with an M1 or M2, or divided among several for older Intel systems. Checking “Check hard drive temperatures using SMART” in TG Pro > Preferences > Temperatures can pull in data from external drives. I use an external SSD as my startup volume, and it’s useful to know its temperature in case it were to start overheating.

You can set alerts to appear as macOS notifications (on appropriate versions of macOS) and optionally configure outbound mail settings for TG Pro to email you warnings.

A Fan section in TG Pro’s preferences allows you to set rules to trigger fan operation. For instance, you might want the fan to run at maximum whenever the highest temperature of any sensor reading CPU values exceeds a particular temperature. Fan control requires installation of a helper app, which TG Pro displays the status of 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 to the fan running at maximum. You can unlock this setting and choose specific fan speeds. If you do, you’re assuming responsibility from the operating system for choosing all the other situations in which to run a fan or not. It’s an interesting set of choices that Tunabelly Software goes into great depth about if you need to know.

TG Pro costs $20 for a one-time license fee that covers 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 keeping your Mac from experiencing a fever and using fan speeds to help is 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 warnings.

With the strong resurgence of the Mac in recent years, we want to celebrate the tools we use and that readers recommend to make the most of your macOS experience. Mac Gems highlights great nuggets of Mac software, apps that have a high utility, have a sharp focus on a limited set of problems to solve, and are generally developed by an individual or small company. Stay tuned for weekly updates, and send your suggestions to the Mac Gems Twitter feed (@macgems).

Mac, Utilities