My upgrading path to Apple Silicon — Part 8

System Settings — Part 2

Welcome back!

Last time, we dipped our first tentative toe into macOS Sonoma’s System Settings. Today, we continue our journey. Brace up!

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Network

All base settings were good enough here for me. Scrolling down to the bottom and tapping on Advanced… I was doubtful on whether to activate the setting that asks for an administrator’s permission to turn on/off Wi-Fi. I do not think I need that for now, but I can see the security implications of this choice.

Wi-Fi speed was, initially, very slow even compared to the older Mac. Finally, it was the router that needed to be changed, after which I achieved speeds of around 800 Mbps in download. Few troubleshooting options are available if the hardware is not the culprit:

1. Hold down Option and tap on the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. This opens a popup menu with a lot of information about your connection, but every so often it seems to also give it a refresh.
2. Turn off Wi-Fi completely, wait 30 seconds, then turn it on again.
3. The good old restart or log-out followed by a log-in.

If all these fail, consider contacting your ISP to check if something else may be improper.

Both Bluetooth and Network options were fine to me. Simply dragging the pointer from the other Mac’s trackpad immediately connected it to the new one through the shared keyboard & trackpad feature. This was simply brilliant!

Notifications

At the time of setup, there were few things to do here, so I made a note to check back after installing new apps. In any case, I turned off every notification from the Home app, since I have no item supporting it.

These are my basic options:

The first and the last ones are set thus for privacy reasons, while the other two follow energy saving and awareness habits.

Below that is a list of your installed apps and a summary of the notifications they are allowed to send. Tapping on any of them will open the panel dedicated to that specific app. The options available within may vary, but are generally the following:

• Allow Notifications followed by a switch. Toggling this off will disable the rest of the panel.
• Choose the notification style: None, Banners, Alerts. Banners appear and then automatically slide away, while Alerts require the user’s intervention.
• The next section contains a variable number of options depending on the app:
  
  • Allow time-sensitive alerts lets apps send time-sensitive notifications. For example, when you select this option for the Calendar app, notifications for events that require your immediate attention are shown. To show these notifications when a Focus is on, you must also set the option for the Focus in Focus preferences.
  • Show notifications on Lock Screen displays notifications receive while the Mac was sleeping as soon as you wake it up, right in the login window. I would disable most of them.
  • Show in Notification Centre lists recent notifications in there (access it by either tapping on the date and time in the top-right corner or by gently sliding with two fingers from the right edge of the screen towards the centre. I would keep this active at all times, to be sure I don’t miss anything.
  • Badge application icon shows a number in a red circle over the top-right corner of the app’s icon in the Dock. This is quite useful and I would leave this active
  • Play sound for notification will play the sound chosen in the global settings.
• The next section contains only two rows, Show previews and Notification grouping. For the first one, I have the global setting on “When Unlocked”, which will propagate to all apps, unless I override them singularly. The other options are “Always”, “Never”, and “Default” (which goes back to the global settings). For the grouping, which was introduced I believe in Ventura, or possibly in Monterey, there is a local setting for each app, but there is no global one that I could find. Every app that you have not set otherwise shows “Automatic”, which I believe means “per app”. The two options are “By Application” and “Off”.

Time now to browse through all apps to check whether something needs to be changed. If you have allowed certain websites to send you desktop notifications, you will find them listed here as if they were apps themselves. They will show fewer options, namely Lock Screen, Notification Centre and play sound.

For some reason, I had notifications for the Goodnotes app turned off. Will investigate what the issue is. In iMovie, I changed the display from Alerts to Banners.

Between iMovie and Mail, there is this app called Kerberos, which I have no idea what could be. Definitely, I have no such named app in my Applications folder, neither on the user nor on the system level. macOS expert Howard Oakley of the Eclectic Light blog told me that Kerberos is an old Unix thing, designed to let you sign in just once to everything, then authorise using a system of tickets. It is barely used now, and I left its settings untouched.

Messages and Weather, instead, have one extra row in the third section of the table view called Allow critical alerts. This is not documented in the macOS User Guide, and I believe it is tied to either verification codes, or to Favourite contacts, or to Focus modes. Any hint at what this may be is appreciated.

Finally, I changed the Wallet app notification style to Alerts, since I do not want to miss it when I pay with Apple Pay or something like that.

Bottom Line

In the next episode, we will continue our exploration of System Settings.

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I hope you found it useful. If you did, please leave a like, share it, subscribe to be notified of upcoming articles! Please share your experience setting up your Mac down in the comments, and have a great day!