How to Control Fan Speed on Apple Silicon Mac & MacBook Pro

While MacOS automatically manages the cooling fans on your Mac, there are some particular situations where MacOS is not necessarily the most efficient. Advanced users might find it advantageous to manually control the fan speed of your Apple Silicon Mac, particularly on a MacBook Pro (remember, the newest MacBook Air models do not include a cooling fan at all).

One of the main benefits to manually controlling fan speeds on MacBook Pro models is that you can help to prevent a Mac from overheating in some situations where you know the laptop is prone to overheat, like when used outdoors in the sunlight, even on a mild temperature day. Additionally, some Mac users may want to control their Mac fan speed to run at faster RPM speeds for gaming, LLM usage, or rendering, which could potentially improve the performance of certain apps and games.

Now that we’re in the warm season throughout the northern hemisphere, some Mac users may be taking their MacBook Pro’s outside, but even on a milder 60° day you might find that a MacBook Pro completely overheats if it’s being used in direct sunlight. While there are a variety of tips to help keep a Mac cool in hot weather, one of the most direct methods involves using an app that manually manages the fan speed, allowing you to force the fans to run at full speed right away when in a warmer environment, rather than waiting for the Mac to overheat and then have the fans kick in. The app we’re going to use for this purpose is called Macs Fan Control, and it works for any fan-equipped Mac and Apple Silicon Mac.

• Grab Macs Fan Control from the developer (or from Github) – free

Macs Fan Control is a free app to download, and it’s pretty simple to use.

For my specific use-case with this app, I put the fans on max speed anytime I’m using my Mac in direct sunlight outdoors, even on milder days, as a prophylactic of sorts to keep the machine running as cool as possible. If you also use a temperature monitor on your Mac to keep an eye on internal temps, you’ll find that higher fan speed keeps those temperatures down as well.

Remember, this Macs Fan Speed will only work on an Apple Silicon Mac with a fan, so that includes a MacBook Pro and most desktop Macs, but does not include the MacBook Air series since that no longer has a fan for cooling (which also makes the modern MacBook Air not a great choice if you need to regularly use your Mac outdoors in the sun, like if you work in field research or similar, but otherwise it’s a fantastic laptop and one we highly recommend).

But it’s not just hot weather situations where Macs Fan Control can be useful. You can also manually boost your fans to keep the Mac hardware running cool when doing anything CPU heavy that would otherwise heat up a Mac. For example, if you’re advanced Mac user running a local LLM or high resource using game, you might want to set the fan speed to maximum and if you have abundant RAM you might even combine that with manually increasing VRAM allocation to maximize performance of that LLM or GPU intensive game or process.

While we’re focusing on Apple Silicon Macs here, MacFanControl works on Intel too, so if you’ve got an Intel Mac that heats up often and you want to cool it down, it might be worth checking out too. And if you have a much older near antique ancient Mac, you can also control the fans on older Mac OS X versions and much older Intel Mac hardware with a similar app called SMCFanControl (which we covered way back in 2007!).

Just remember to set the Macs Fan Control app back down to “Auto” settings when you’re done with the specific scenario, so that you don’t put unnecessary prolonged strain on the fans. While I’ve never heard of an internal fan dying on a Mac, anything that moves can break down over time, so use some caution with apps like this.

Do you ever manually adjust your fan speed to manage your Mac temperature, or do you let MacOS handle the job entirely? What use cases do you have for boosting your fan speed on your Mac? Share your experiences, thoughts, and anything related in the comments!