Fan control for Mac
macOS lets your Mac climb to around 100 °C before its fan really gets going. Puff keeps a gentle breeze on from the start — a Puffy slider in your menu bar, no numbers to manage.
No card, no account. Then $9 once — no subscription. macOS 14 or later.
Puff needs a Mac with a fan. MacBook Air models with Apple silicon don't have one. Tested on MacBook Pro 14-inch (M3). M3 Pro, M3 Max, M4 Pro and M4 Max: still verifying.
Same Mac, the same full load on all eight cores. For three minutes macOS ran the fan; for the next four, Puff held it at 3,750 rpm.
MacBook Pro 14-inch (M3), 16 September 2026. One Mac and one kind of load — your numbers will differ.
The cloud or the slider, whichever is closer. All the way left is Auto: the fan is macOS's again.
No sensor tables, no graphs. Puff tells you how it's doing: dozing, comfy, working, all in.
Set it as quiet as you like: when the chip gets hot enough that macOS would be running the fan faster, Puff runs it faster too. It only ever adds air.
Quit, sleep, or crash, and the fan goes straight back to macOS. It can hand the fan back when you unplug, too.
My MacBook Pro kept getting hot on my lap while its fan sat perfectly still. macOS keeps the fan quiet for as long as it can, which is the right call on a desk. On a lap it means the bottom of the machine gets properly warm before anything happens.
I wanted one slider that says: start earlier, stay gentle. So I made one, and gave it a face.
— Umut, who makes Puff
About a tenth of one percent of a single core, panel open or closed — the cloud's breathing is handed to the window server, so watching it costs nothing extra. The background service that talks to the fan takes 11 MB and sits idle until Puff asks it for something.
No account and no analytics in the app. To run the free trial, Puff sends one salted hash of your Mac's hardware ID to our licence server — never the ID itself. Payment is handled by Paddle. Privacy policy.
Payment by Paddle, in your currency, with tax handled. Your key appears the moment you've paid.
Puff is sold through Paddle, so Paddle — not Puff — is what appears on your card statement. If you don't recognise a charge, email us before your bank: we'll find it and refund it the same day.
The first time Puff moves your fan — not when you download it. Take your time setting it up; you still get all seven days.
The fan goes back to macOS, exactly as it was before Puff. Nothing breaks and nothing nags; buy Puff whenever you like and it picks up where you left it.
Puff never sets a fan outside the range your Mac itself reports, and whenever it quits, sleeps or stops for any reason, the fan returns to macOS within seconds. Running a fan faster than macOS would is what it's built to do.
It is tested on the MacBook Pro 14-inch with M3. Apple has restricted manual fan control on some M3 Pro, M3 Max, M4 Pro and M4 Max models; we're still verifying those, and this page will say so plainly once we know.
Changing fan speed needs a small system-level service. macOS asks you to allow it once, in Login Items. It only accepts requests from Puff itself, checked by code signature.
Puff itself uses about a tenth of a percent of one core. A faster fan does draw a little power, so by default Puff hands the fan back to macOS when you unplug.
Open Settings and press Remove next to Background service — that takes the helper off your Mac. Then quit Puff and drag it to the Trash. Your licence key keeps working if you install it again.
Open Puff again from your Applications folder and its panel appears. On a MacBook with a notch, a crowded menu bar can hide icons behind it: hold Command and drag Puff's cloud to the right to keep it in view.
Not on MacBook Air with Apple silicon — it has no fan. Intel MacBook Air models do have one.
No. Puff only ever adds air: when the chip gets hot enough that macOS would be running the fan faster than your setting, Puff runs it faster too, and says so. Close the lid and the fan goes back to macOS entirely.
The fan goes back to macOS. A closed lid means your Mac is either asleep or on a desk driving another screen, and neither is a lap — so Puff steps aside and picks up again when you open it. If you run in clamshell and want Puff to carry on, there's a switch for it in Settings.
At light loads, a little: Puff runs a soft breeze where macOS would keep the fan off. Under heavy load it's the other way round — in our test Puff settled 800 rpm below where macOS ended up. Drag the slider to taste, or all the way left to hand the fan back.
Those show every sensor and let you tune every curve. Puff shows a Puffy slider and a cloud, for people who want a cooler lap and no numbers to manage.