A free, open-source macOS menu bar app for fanless Macs. Always shows the current temperature. When macOS raises thermal pressure, a 1–5 rank appears beside it, colored yellow to deep red. A persistent log shows when throttling happened.
Fanless Macs (MacBook Air) throttle under sustained load — long builds, multiple simulators, Docker — and there's no fan to hear it. StillAir puts throttling where you can see it: the temperature, the pressure rank, and a log of every level change.
- Always-on temperature in the menu bar (°C / °F)
- Throttle rank 1–5 beside the temperature when the machine is under pressure (color follows pressure, not °C)
- Throttle log — timestamped level changes, so you can see when throttling happened
- Read-only by design — reads SMC temperatures and Darwin thermal pressure. No fan control, no SMC writes, no privileged helper, no Login Items approval
- Grab
StillAir.dmgfrom the latest release - Open the DMG and drag StillAir into Applications
- Launch StillAir — it appears in the menu bar
Requirements: macOS 13.0+, Xcode 15+, XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen)
git clone https://github.com/nsd97/stillair.git
cd stillair
xcodegen generate
open StillAir.xcodeproj # ⌘ROr:
xcodebuild -project StillAir.xcodeproj -scheme StillAir -configuration Debug buildNotarized DMG: cp .env.example .env (APPLE_ID, APPLE_APP_SPECIFIC_PASSWORD, APPLE_TEAM_ID), then ./scripts/build-dmg.sh — builds, signs, notarizes, and publishes a GitHub release.
StillAir reads SMC temperatures (the number) and Darwin notify com.apple.system.thermalpressurelevel (the 1–5 rank and color). Those are different signals: the OS can throttle while the °C readout still looks "fine."
| Rank | Pressure | Menu bar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nominal | 72° default color |
| 2 | Fair | 72° yellow |
| 3 | Serious | 72° orange |
| 4 | Critical | 72° red |
| 5 | (notify max) | 72° deep red |
StillAir is a descendant of ChillMac by Timothy Murphy (MIT licensed). ChillMac is a full system monitor with fan-speed control for Intel Macs; StillAir keeps the temperature monitoring and drops fan control entirely, reworked for fanless Apple Silicon.
Lineage: idevtim/chillmac → nsd97/chillmac (Fan Sooner) → ArchieOS-org/chillmac (StillAir prototype) → this repository.
See LICENSE — the original MIT notice is preserved alongside the StillAir copyright.
StillAir is an unprivileged menu bar app. It reads SMC temperatures via IOKit and thermal-pressure state via Darwin notify. It does not write SMC keys and has no privileged helper. See SECURITY.md.