Cat
Sleeps through anything under 45°. Wakes up unwillingly.
v1.0.0 · Free · Notarized by Apple
Watch your Mac
Watch your Mac
sweat.
BurnMyMac puts your Mac's temperature in the menu bar as pixel art, with a small creature that reacts to it. It sleeps when you're idle and panics when you're not. Free, native, and it asks for no permissions at all.
macOS 13.0+ · 4.9 MB · no account, no licence key, no permission prompts
Perfectly comfortable.
A number tells you.
A face shows you.
Pick a creature and it lives next to the temperature, cycling through four moods as your Mac heats up. You stop reading the number and start noticing the face — which is the point, because you were never going to read the number.
Chip
A DIP package with opinions. It is the one getting hot, after all.
Blob
Holds its shape right up until it doesn't. Past 85° it melts.
Ghost
Already dead. Still visibly concerned about your render.
Four faces.
Every pixel on purpose.
Each style is drawn on a 48-pixel grid at whole-point cells, so every design pixel lands on exact device pixels and nothing is ever resampled. macOS draws status images at their natural size — so pixel art in the menu bar is exactly as crisp as it is authored, and this is what that buys.
Arcade
A 5×7 face with real diagonals on the 2, 4 and 7. The default.
Micro
3×5 digits — five rows is the floor before 8 and 0 become the same picture. The narrowest option, for a crowded bar.
Segment
Seven-segment, with the unlit segments ghosted at 12% the way a real LCD's are. That ghost is what makes a 1 read as a digit.
Dot Matrix
The same face drawn as separated dots. Flip-dot board, shrunk to fit above your desktop.
The number
The hottest one.
The hottest one.
Never the average.
This Mac publishes 55 readable thermal sensors. Averaging them is the intuitive choice and it is wrong twice over: throttling tracks the hottest spot, not the mean — and every Mac reports sensors that are powered down and pinned at a constant, which drag an average down forever.
So BurnMyMac takes the maximum of the cluster you pick, discards anything physically implausible, and says hottest in its own menu rather than quoting a comfortable fiction.
Small, quiet,
and out of the way.
Zero permissions
No Accessibility grant, no Full Disk Access, no automation prompt — nothing. First launch is: icon appears, number appears. Nothing about your Mac leaves it.
Refreshes itself
Every second, or every thirty — your choice. The timer carries leeway so the kernel can batch its wakeups, and it stops entirely when the Mac or its displays go to sleep.
It doesn't twitch
The reading is smoothed and held inside a dead band, and the digit field is a fixed width — so the number moves when your Mac does, and everything beside it in the menu bar stays exactly where it was.
Menu bar only
No Dock icon, no window of its own, no onboarding. Opens at login if you'd like. The Dock icon is there if you want it, off by default.
Keeps itself current
Checks for new versions and installs them in place, each one cryptographically verified before it is allowed anywhere near your Mac.
4.9 MB of Swift
Straight onto IOKit. No Electron, no helper daemon, no runtime — memory you will never notice, and one reading of the sensors costs well under a millisecond.
- Free
- Native Swift
- No account
- No subscription
- No Electron
- No telemetry
- Signed & notarized
Give your Mac a face.
Every feature, no licence key, no strings.
Download BurnMyMac 1.0.0- Requires
- macOS 13.0 or later
- Released
- 2026-07-26
- Signature
- Developer ID · stapled
- SHA-256
3dd3070bf1dd6cfdcc7c3a239fe13802d9dee04845fc576a1b5e73e03177aa3a
BurnMyMac asks for no permissions at all — reading the thermal sensors needs none. There is no first-run prompt, no System Settings pane to visit, and nothing is sent anywhere.
From here on it keeps itself up to date — it checks for new versions and installs them in place, each one cryptographically verified.