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Your Mac runs hot. Apple waits. HeatPilot doesn't.
Take the yoke of your own thermals — three modes, live temps in the menu bar, and one click hands control straight back to Apple.
Before you're ever asked
About the administrator password
The first time you switch HeatPilot into a mode that takes the controls, macOS will show you a HeatPilot-branded administrator prompt. A free app asking for your password is exactly the moment you should get suspicious — so here's the explanation up front, before you ever see it.
HeatPilot is two parts. The menu-bar app — the part you see — is an ordinary, unprivileged app. It reads temperatures and draws menus, and it couldn't touch your fans if it wanted to. Fan hardware is privileged territory, and macOS is right to guard it. So the one job that needs privileges lives in a tiny root helper whose entire vocabulary is “set fan speed” and “hand control back to Apple.” Your password installs that helper, once. That's the whole transaction.
And if you only ever fly in System Auto, you'll never be asked at all.
Apple is always one click away
Built to hand the controls back
- System Auto restores Apple's thermal management instantly. So does quitting the app. There is no state where HeatPilot is gone and your fans are stranded.
- The helper watches for kill, logout, and shutdown signals — and its last act is always the same: give Apple back the controls on its way out.
- Cooler Auto only ever raises fan speed above Apple's own curve. It never slows a fan below what Apple would do. The worst case is a cooler, slightly louder Mac.
- Fanless Macs and Intel Macs never see a password prompt. The privileged modes simply show as disabled, with a plain explanation of why there's nothing for HeatPilot to fly.
Don't take our word for it
Verify it yourself
You shouldn't have to trust a stranger's download page — and you don't have to. Every claim below is checkable from your own Terminal, in about a minute.
codesign -dv --verify /Applications/HeatPilot.appAuthority=Developer ID Application: AgentC Consulting LLC
spctl -a -vv /Applications/HeatPilot.appaccepted · source=Notarized Developer ID
shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/HeatPilot-Installer.dmge1c93539463e4390a21bc0a2b39762f141e48c605d4f1ff6be580d67c3c23dab
Want to go one layer deeper? The release also carries a GPG-signed SHA256SUMS file.
The quiet part, out loud
What HeatPilot never does
No network calls. No account. No telemetry — not “anonymized” telemetry, not “just crash reports.” None. Cut your network and everything still works, because nothing in HeatPilot has anywhere to phone.
Its entire memory of you is a small JSON file in
~/Library/Application Support/HeatPilot/ — your chosen
mode and preferences, in plain text you can open and read yourself.
The fine print, kept short
Requirements & uninstall
Requires: an Apple Silicon Mac with fans, running macOS 14 or later. Intel Macs aren't supported — their fan hardware speaks a different language, and we'd rather not support it badly.
Uninstalling leaves nothing behind: switch to System Auto, quit HeatPilot, then delete
the app and ~/Library/Application Support/HeatPilot/. Apple
has the controls again, as if we were never aboard.
brew tap agentc-consulting/heatpilot https://github.com/AgentC-Consulting/heatpilot && brew install --cask heatpilotHeatPilot is free for life. We build native apps like this for clients — talk to AgentC.
Found a quirk? Open an issue — we read everything.