Mac Mondays was born on August 13, 2018. Unrelatedly, its birthday is now also my wedding anniversary.

The first entry was about System Preferences, the Mac application for specifying system-wide user experience settings. To date, I’ve published 235 editions of Mac Mondays using a Mac that contained System Preferences.

I really appreciate how Apple has carried the value of “preferences” in high regard, and I hold strong in my respect for each person’s unique set of needs, preferences, and expectations about how technology should work for them.

However, a tide has turned as Apple last year scrapped System Preferences and introduced System Settings, an application styled after the Settings experience on iPad.

While many of the same options present in macOS Monterey and earlier are still available in succeeding versions of macOS, they were significantly reorganized in the design of System Settings. The ensuing confusion — for me and for my clients — around this design and where to find things was one of the reasons I opted not to upgrade to macOS Ventura.

Now, after a yearlong boycott of Ventura and patience in awaiting bug fixes to its successor, macOS Sonoma, Apple has released version 14.2 and I decided it was good enough to welcome my upgrade. And so I did. Last Thursday, the Sonoma installer took all of 25 minutes to bring my M1 iMac up to date. I upgraded my license to Bartender and have found only a few bugs among my other applications.

Based on my overall positive experience, I’ve opened the gates for clients and friends who have heeded my discouragement over the last year and now welcome them to upgrade to Sonoma, too, if their Mac supports it.

On account of this new leaf, it seems appropriate that my first post is about System Settings. Perhaps I can help you find some of the settings that migrated to new sections and build your familiarity with this new application.

A New World Order

Perhaps one of the most obvious changes is that most of the settings that were previously in General have moved to Appearance. Additionally, in System Settings, General is now a bunch of subsections and doesn’t itself contain any settings. Some of the categories there used to have their own preference pane, like Software Update and Time Machine, while others were hidden in a different pane.

Additionally, most of the content of the former About This Mac, including the Storage report and its recommendations, has moved to General > About and General > Storage.

Meanwhile, it’s no longer possible to hide or reorganize the panel names in System Settings. Did you even know that it was possible in System Preferences to arrange the choices alphabetically? You could also hide specific items and then use the View menu or Search field when you needed to open them.

You can still get an alphabetical list in the View menu, but the arrangement of titles in the sidebar is now static. The only significant difference from a window design perspective has to do with vertical size.

You may recall that System Preferences resized its window based on the content height, requiring minimal scrolling. System Settings shifts to a vertically resizable window and invites the user to scroll through settings in each pane that has more than fits in the chosen window size.

Also, as of Sonoma, System Settings brings back the back and forward buttons that were present in System Preferences. These enable you to easily navigate to other panes and sections you recently viewed.

Search is Your Friend

As you get acquainted with System Settings, I highly encourage you to use the Search field at the top. After such an upheaval, at least Apple has invested in making search work well.

Suppose you’re looking for the Default web browser setting. This used to be in the General pane of System Preferences. As you know, that’s now represented as Appearance, but “default web browser” doesn’t sound like a visual setting.

Enter browser in the search field and you’ll see Default web browser appear below Desktop & Dock. Notice how settings panes listed in search results each have an icon and settings within them do not.

Click on the desired result to jump directly to that setting, which its own listing about two-thirds of the way down in that settings pane.

Giving Permission

Some settings require additional permission to save, such as various toggles in Privacy & Security. In System Preferences, panes requiring additional permission featured a lock in the bottom left corner and the prompt, “Click the lock to make changes.”

This feature is gone. In its place, you can freely peruse the settings in any section. When you try to make a change that requires special privileges, a prompt for your password or fingerprint appears. Granting permission in this context enables you to make additional changes in the same settings pane without additional prompts.

All the same freedoms that were true in System Preferences are present in System Settings. That is, I still encourage you to explore the choices in each category and discover what changes you might make so your Mac behaves in alignment with your needs, preferences, and expectations.

As always, let me know if you have trouble finding something in particular or wonder how to effect a particular outcome.