By Jason Snell

August 26, 2022 1:09 PM PT

Ways to make macOS Ventura System Settings better

Note: This story has not been updated since 2022.

So I joined in the beating on macOS Ventura’s System Settings app this week. It’s an update for an app that desperately needed a rethink… that doesn’t actually rethink things in any substantial way, just rearranges the proverbial deck chairs.

This time, I thought I’d be a bit more positive and provide some suggestions for ways System Settings could get better, assuming that what we’ve got in beta today is going to ship later this fall no matter what.

Embrace the width. Mac screens are in widescreen aspect ratios. There’s no reason for the System Settings app to be almost exactly square. (You can actually stretch it taller! But not wider.) One of the biggest confusion points in the System Settings app is that it’s very hierarchical in spots, so it’s easy to get lost. One way to make that less confusing is to embrace the metaphor from Finder’s Column view (Steve Jobs’s favorite view!) and let the app get wider, displaying multiple levels of hierarchy.

Embrace favorites and recents. So many modern apps let you mark items as favorites, and displaying recent items has been a hallmark of Mac apps for decades. Why not use these concepts to improve System Settings? I don’t know about you, but there are certain settings pages I visit all the time, and others I never visit. Displaying favorites or bookmarks of specific settings would speed up my access. Also, how frequently do you adjust a setting and then realize it’s not working for you? Adding a Recents list to the interface would speed things up further.

Break with the past. One of the ugly secrets of System Settings is that in many places, it’s just copying bad organizational decisions of past versions of macOS. In other cases, items have been swept into new weird locations that just don’t make sense anymore. The app has broken with the interface macOS has had for system preferences for two decades; maybe it’s time to completely revisit every single setting and put them in new buckets where they make sense.

Seriously, who benefits from the default web browser selection being located on the second page of the Desktop & Dock settings? (It actually made more sense in General, which is where it’s located in pre-Ventura System Preferences.) The only way you’re ever going to find it is by searching for it. At least the search function works. It’s pretty much the only way to find anything.

Give up on keeping it simple. The top level of System Settings features more than two dozen individual items, arranged in eight unlabeled subgroups, with each item ordered arbitrarily rather than alphabetically. Who are those subgroups helping? Why is Energy Saver in the same group as Screen Saver and Wallpaper but located below them? There are no good answers.

So maybe chuck it all. If the app is free to get wider and embrace the hierarchies that already exist in sections like General, perhaps the best approach is to break down all settings into top-level categories, with another list of items below them. Find a way to make the structure make sense to people browsing it. This structure would also allow items that are currently sharing space in a single awkward screen to spread out. Menu Bar items don’t need to be tucked into Control Center, Siri and Spotlight don’t need to cohabitate anymore, and Quick Actions in the Finder don’t need to be two levels down in Privacy & Security.

Apple needs to try to find a way to organize settings that make sense. Either that, or it should just give up and have the app open to a big search box.

Get consistent. Over the years as the System Preferences app grew, it became a regular Winchester Mystery House of features. Every version of macOS added on more items needing settings, so Apple threw in a tab view here, a scrolling list here, a button bringing up a modal dialog over there. I get it, but this is a new app, and it should lay down some rules and at least attempt to get things consistent, not just for now, but for the future.

So beyond the organizational structure I already mentioned, I’ll point out some other areas for improvement: Every item in the left sidebar has an icon, but the icons aren’t consistent. It’s not like the blue icons or the red icons all live together. What, if anything, do the colors signify? Presumably… something? Most icons are simple monochrome silhouettes on a colored background, but not all of them, for some reason.

Within settings, users shouldn’t have to guess at what they can click on, or what it might do. In the Sharing subsection (hidden within the top-level General setting, for some reason), each sharing item has settings hidden behind the “info” icon. Does the info icon imply settings, or just more information? In other places, this sort of information is hidden behind a button that says Advanced or Options. (Personally, I’d like to see as few click-to-see-more buttons in the app as possible, but I understand that sometimes it’s a good idea to hide items from the general public. But if you’re going to have them, be consistent.)

And yes, when I say “be consistent,” I also mean there should be a style guide that explains how all the text labels in the app should be handled. Right now it’s a melange of Title Case, Initial caps, and lowercase. Some settings are in Mad Libs style, with a sentence that’s completed by the setting you choose. Others have a label with a colon, followed by choices. Pop-up menus have different arrows at the end of them. It goes on. If there are rules for this stuff, I can’t reverse-engineer them.

Be clear. Scroll down to the bottom of the Wi-Fi preference pane and click on Advanced for… something advanced? Turns out it’s the list of Wi-Fi networks you’ve seen before, so you can grab their passwords, set if you want your Mac to automatically join them, or remove them from history. (All of that information is hidden under a More button, so you have to click on each individual item to see or change its status, which seems like another interface mistake.)

But scroll further down in that Advanced modal dialog box, and you’ll find… settings! Namely, the ability to show legacy networks, and whether to require administrator authorization to change settings. Your Wi-Fi MAC address is also there.

When I say “be clear,” I’m specifically talking about labels that say “Advanced” instead of explaining what you’ll see when you click. Perhaps there should be something labeled Show Known Networks, and another something labeled Advanced Settings for the truly advanced settings that are hiding beneath a very long scrolling list?

Consider more than one mode. Are some of the macOS settings just… too nerdy for most people? Almost certainly. So here’s an idea: Why not create a mode that only displays the most important settings that users should have access to? Then let users choose to switch to the more cluttered version of the app that shows everything. Advanced users will just turn the feature on and be done with it. But it could make things easier for regular users who probably don’t need to look up the MAC address of their Wi-Fi.

Multiple selections are good. So many settings in groups are individual and hierarchical. For notifications and privacy settings, for instance, there’s no way to select a big group and apply changes to them all at once. Wouldn’t it be nice to select a dozen apps and turn Notifications off or on for all of them at once? (At least the Privacy & Security sub-sections let you quickly flip an on/off switch; Notifications requires you to click into each individual item, then make choices, then back out.)

It’s… a lot

Look, I know what I’m describing is a big job. But when I first heard rumors that Apple was replacing the System Preferences app, I assumed that this was the job that was being done. Unfortunately, the Ventura beta shows that a lot of this work has not yet been done.

I don’t know what’s behind some of the mystifying features of the System Settings app. I suspect that the team who worked on this app was given some very questionable marching orders from high up. What I do know is this: The idea of making macOS settings work more like iOS and iPadOS isn’t a bad one. That’s not the issue here. In fact, iOS would probably benefit from a lot of the changes I’m suggesting, too.

But first things first.

By Jason Snell

August 24, 2022 2:59 PM PT

Last updated February 10, 2026

I got a new Smart Lock

When I bought a Smart Lock I didn’t expect it would last less than four years. But I have to be honest: As much as I enjoyed the changes to my life that having a smart lock on my front door enabled, the Yale Assure SL was not stable enough for my family and me to rely on.

The biggest issue turned out to be a lack of reliability. As the Assure SL’s batteries drained, it would become occasionally incoherent. It would stop auto-locking, fail to auto-unlock when a family member returned home, and sporadically lose connection to the home network. Sometimes I could solve this by rebooting the lock by pulling out a battery and then putting the battery back in. Still, over time I realized the only real solution was to put in four fresh AA’s and wait for the lock to become unreliable again.

In the intervening time, the smart lock category has also improved. Earlier this year, Schlage released the Encode Plus, which uses Apple’s Home Key feature to let you use an iPhone or Apple Watch to unlock the door by tapping.

However, global supply-chain issues meant that the Encode Plus sold out quickly and wasn’t available in stores until recently. (They are now slowly popping up at various locations if you keep an eye out.) I was fortunate to get one from Six Colors reader Eric, who had an extra, and I installed it last week.

Unlocking my front door by tapping my watch to it is pretty awesome. I was even able to set it up by tapping my iPhone on it. The lock works directly with HomeKit, and doesn’t require an extra plugged-in bridge as the Yale lock did. (It also apparently supports the Thread home-device radio standard, which should give it better battery life in the long run.)

As the Yale lock taught me, it’s going to take a while for me to be confident about how good this lock is. So far, mostly so good. The hardware especially feels much more sturdy. The motor that slides the deadbolt seems powerful and reliable in a way the Yale model never did. There’s even a physical key to unlock the door in case of emergencies!

However, there are a couple of areas where the Schlage lock doesn’t match up to the Yale model. Yale’s lock came with a door-close sensor, so the lock would know whether the door was closed or not. Schlage doesn’t, meaning that I can’t tell remotely if the door was left open entirely. (I’m looking into the Eve Door & Window to replace this functionality.)

More importantly, the Home app doesn’t offer an “automatically lock” feature that locks the door after a timeout period. (You can set this in the Schlage app, but I paired the lock directly with HomeKit and the Home app and was reluctant to install the Schlage app for fear that it might adversely interact with the HomeKit setup. However, I eventually did install the app and it seems to have worked just fine.)

HomeKit does offer an Automation that automatically locks the door when there’s nobody left in the house, but just because my son’s playing video games in the back of our house doesn’t mean I want my front door left unlocked.

Fortunately, being a HomeKit lock has its advantages. I was able to create a simple home automation that triggers when the lock is unlocked. The shortcut then waits 120 seconds and… locks the door.

Yes, I’m also using HomeKit’s “if everyone leaves” automation as well as another automation that supposedly unlocks the door when it detects that any of the residents of the house have returned. I’m not entirely confident about how reliable that one will be, but I’ll be monitoring it.

Still… it’s a brave new smart lock world. And Home Key, which works on phones from the iPhone XS generation and newer and Apple Watch Series 4 and newer, works like a dream. The old lock had gotten so unreliable that I was keying in our door code every time I came home. Those days are over.

Now for the final test: To see if this lock behaves well when its batteries run down, and if it warns me to change them before anything bad happens.

By Jason Snell

August 24, 2022 9:52 AM PT

Apple invites media to in-person event Sept. 7

Note: This story has not been updated since 2022.

Well, there we go. Apple’s having an event on September 7, the Wednesday after Labor Day here in the U.S., just as it did in 2016.

More interesting: It’s an in-person event for some members of the media (including me), so the event is at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino. It appears that just as at WWDC, a negative COVID test before the event will be required. But unlike WWDC, it seems that masks are optional at this event.

It remains to be seen just how much of the event is actually “live” at the Steve Jobs Theater. It strikes me as more likely that the media will just watch a pre-taped event, as was the case at WWDC, followed by a hands-on area in the theater lobby where we’ll be able to examine the products that were announced.

It’s possible there will be a minimal live component, like an introduction, but I doubt Apple will ever go back to the full-on live events they held back in the day. There’s too much benefit for the company to produce tightly packaged videos of all its announcements.

In any event: It begins!

By Jason Snell

August 22, 2022 6:00 AM PT

Apple brings Self-Service Repair to the Mac

Note: This story has not been updated since 2022.

Apple’s Self-Service Repair program, which was launched in April, provides Apple parts, manuals, and (optionally) tools so that anyone so inclined can repair their iPhone themself. On Monday, the company announced that it’s extending that program to cover the Mac.

Beginning later this week, Apple will offer manuals, replacement parts, and tools for the M1 MacBook Air and all three M1 MacBook Pro models. (Apple says other models, including desktop Macs and more recent laptops, will be added in the future.)

At launch, Apple is supporting some specific repair types, though others will be added as the program goes along. For this first round of Macs, you’ll be able to perform replacements for many items, including the audio board, battery (for MacBook Air), bottom case, display, keycaps, logic board, speaker, top case, Touch ID board, trackpad, fans (for MacBook Pro), MagSafe (for MacBook Pro), and the antenna modules. (Apple says there will be a MacBook Pro battery replacement available in the near future.)

The cost of repair parts varies widely. An audio board replacement might cost $12, and speakers $29, while the logic board for a 32-core GPU MacBook Pro with 32GB of memory and a 1TB hard drive would run more than $1900. However, depending on the part, Apple will buy back the broken part and refurbish it for re-use in another repair, making that $1900+ logic board repair cost a little less than $600. (If Apple doesn’t reimburse you for a part, they’ll still accept it and recycle it if you want to send it back to them.)

Of course, there are lots of ways to repair Macs. There’s the Apple Store, Apple’s mail-in repair program, a network of 5000 authorized Apple repair providers, and more than 3500 independent repair providers. But for some people, whether it’s because of geography or predilection, fixing a broken Mac is something they’d rather do themselves. And with this program, Apple will provide them with official Apple replacement parts and instructions.

It’s not surprising that the program is starting with laptops. Compared to the iPhone—or an iMac, for that matter—the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro seem much more accessible and less daunting to repair. But Apple will still offer a selection of tools for the job for sale, as well as providing a rentable $49 toolkit that you can keep for a week while performing the repair. But of course, if you’ve got an existing toolkit from a provider like iFixIt or Newer, you can use those too.

And if you’re not in the U.S. and are looking at this program with envy, there’s good news—Apple says the program will also be expanding to Europe later this year.

The complete list of repairs is below:

Continue reading “Apple brings Self-Service Repair to the Mac”…