A History of Mac Settings
As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox.
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Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
Wichary is best known for Shift Happens, his multivolume masterwork about keyboards, edited by TidBITS contributor Glenn Fleishman. While Shift Happens is a visual tour de force, it is limited by the constraints of paper.
In contrast, Frame of Preference animates these historical interfaces in a charmingly interactive way. Each illustration is actually a fully emulated Mac from that era, thanks to Mihai Parparita’s Infinite Mac project. So you don’t just read about Susan Kare’s original Control Panel; you open it on the virtual Mac’s screen. Instructions in the text are shown with odd squares that turn out to be empty checkboxes—complete the action described, and you get a highlight and checkmark. If you click the Details button on the label by the emulated Mac, you’ll find “extra stuff to play with.” As you work your way through the evolution of control panels, you’ll encounter nine Macs and a NeXT Cube.
Last week, I was going to be out with my MacBook Pro all day, and I wanted to make sure it was fully charged. I had noticed that it was typically charging up only to about 80%, and I assumed that was because Sequoia was doing some clever battery-life-lengthening thing. I wanted to turn the clever thing off so I could get the battery to 100% just for that day.
You will probably not be shocked to hear that I didn’t find the solution by simply opening System Settings and scanning the Battery panel—I had to do a Kagi search for it. It wasn’t that the toggle was buried several layers deep or that it was outside the Battery hierarchy. No, the problem was that Apple had put the toggle in a place where toggles—or any kind of control or data entry field—don’t belong.
I still can’t find anything in the System Settings app.
Previously:
- System Settings in Sequoia
- System Settings
- Infinite Mac
- A Visual History of System Preferences
- Battery Health Management for Mac
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DESIGNERS don't, and shouldn't dislike Settings. Settings are important for the How of the Thing, they're critical for ensuring the *way it works* best serves the needs of a user; who the product's creator will never meet. DESIGNERS embrace settings because they make the product better to use, and more functional. They are the ergonomics of utility.
DECORATORS hate settings. DECORATORS are hung up on dictating things look, and behave a specific inalterable way, because the decorative value is an expression of their personal aesthetic tastes, and any alteration of it is a repudiation of them personally.
Guess which type of person has come to dominate the industry consciousness of what Design is as a practice, and a trade, in the post Canonisation of Saint Jony of Apple, and the scriptural ascension of the concept of "Opinionated Design".
@Someone nailed it.
I would go further and say that a GOOD decorator isn't a dictator, they take into consideration the tastes of the person who will be living in the space. A bad decorator comes in and decorates it the way they like it.
Even a good decorator has some consideration for how things work. Can't just take all the knobs off cabinets that were designed for knobs just because it looks better. A good decorator works together WITH the designer.
Apple has been taken over by bad decorators.
Sorry but this really irks me. Just recently on a large monitor, I went to the screensaver section of settings. Giant wide monitor, but no, Settings only expands in portrait mode, like a phone. On a desktop. In a view where there are potentially literally hundreds of items, horizontally scrolling.
And they expect me to believe someone actually “designed” this, put any thought at all into the fact that this is a desktop computer and not a phone.
The core of macOS is rotting away and they just keep painting over it with their “biggest redesign ever” every other year.
@Bart Ever tried settings.app on a system with 4 displays connected. It's a joke. Yet another example of macOS increasingly being premised on having a single display only.
I just went to the Settings App on the Mac to check out the Battery setting that Marcin Wichary wrote about. I could not find the Battery setting right away and I typed "Battery" in the search field. Guess what? It found "Lock Screen" and "Screen Saver" but not the actual Battery section. I know it was right in front of my eyes but the logic of the sections and subsections eludes me and I tend to always type what I want to find. So much hidden stuff and the find does not work properly. Do people at Apple actually use their own operating system?
