I’ve been tracking and cataloging all the different components of System Settings for a while now, and now that the latest version of macOS is out in the wild, I wanted to dive into macOS Sonoma and see if anything new was worth noting in System Settings.
System Settings remains nearly exactly the same as it was in macOS Ventura as far as high-level sidebar categories go, but if you dig deeper you will find a few new sub-menu items that you can open with a shell script. Let’s take a deeper look at what’s new.
There’s a new AppleCare & Warranty section, which can be found under General in System Settings. This was a new section added by Apple to display AppleCare and warranty information for the existing device, as well as all devices associated with the signed-in Apple ID.
You can open it using:open x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.Coverage-Settings.extension
There are quite a few new items that have been added under Accessibility, including new menus for Hearing Devices, RTT, and Apple’s new Personal Voice feature.
You can open them using:open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.universalaccess?Hearing"open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.universalaccess?RTT"open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.universalaccess?PersonalVoice"
There are also a few additions and modifications that have been made to the Privacy & Security section. Apple has a new Motion & Fitness item for apps that have requested access to that data, as well as a Sensitive Content Warning item. They also renamed Screen Recording to Screen & System Audio Recording and added new sub-menus for FileVault and Lockdown Mode.
While FileVault and LockdownMode were listed under Privacy & Security in macOS Ventura, on macOS Sonoma they have their own sub-menus for enablement.
You can open them using:open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy_Motion"open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?FileVault"open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?LockdownMode"
Legacy commands
I tested all of the Monterey legacy commands and found that they continue to work on macOS Sonoma as of macOS 14.2
Other Settings
I’ve mostly covered the new System Settings options that can be opened via shell script, but there’s a plethora of actual new settings that users on macOS can toggle and modify.
One new setting that may interest admins is the new “Click Wallpaper to Reveal Desktop” setting. Hiding desktop icons from end-users who rely on them is probably not a great user experience. If this is something you’d like to control with a script, Rich Trouton has you covered on his blog.
Hope this helps for whatever user prompts or scripting you might need to utilize these commands for. As always, you can find the full list over in GitHub.
Happy scripting, and happy adminning!