{"id":48529,"date":"2025-07-17T14:15:18","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T18:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=48529"},"modified":"2025-07-17T14:15:18","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T18:15:18","slug":"a-history-of-mac-settings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/17\/a-history-of-mac-settings\/","title":{"rendered":"A History of Mac Settings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marcin Wichary<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Adam Engst<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Wichary is best known for Shift Happens<\/em><\/a>, his multivolume masterwork about keyboards, edited by TidBITS contributor Glenn Fleishman. While Shift Happens<\/em> is a visual tour de force<\/em>, it is limited by the constraints of paper.<\/p>

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<\/a> 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Dr. Drang<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Marco Arment<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I still can’t find anything in the System Settings app.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n