Advice from an Apple tech: When your Mac gets too toasty
Ever hear a Mac's desktop fans go into overdrive under normal operating conditions? Or felt a Mac laptop go from a normal temperature to a more-than-toasty lap roaster in under a minute? Those are times when a Mac was running hotter than it should have been.
What are the long-term effects of overheating on a Mac? Beyond warmer temperatures and additional noise from the fan working overtime to cool its operating environment, you can expect to see slower performance. Long term, damage to core components may occur—for example, heat can affect battery life on a laptop.
Your Mac is not alive, but where heat and airflow is concerned, it's essentially a breathing thing—give your Mac some room to breathe.
While current hardware uses internal temperature sensors to shut itself down before parts become dangerously overheated, it still helps to keep an eye on things before your Mac gets too hot. To this end, Bjango's $16 iStat Menus application is excellent, with a temperature gauge in the Finder's menu bar as well as readouts for your incoming and outgoing Internet bandwidth, hard-drive capacity, and RAM and CPU usage. iStat Menus told me that my MacBook Pro's temperatures swung between 130 and 177 degrees Fahrenheit while I was installing World of Warcraft, so the software gives you an idea of just how warm things can become under the hood of your Mac.
iStat Menus
Ventilation
Your Mac is not alive, but where heat and airflow is concerned, it's essentially a breathing thing—give your Mac some room to breathe.
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