Words by Marcin Wichary / Technology by Mihai Parparita at Infinite Mac 8 July 2025 / 8,800 words / 10 emulators
Frame of preference
A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004
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.
During the last Settings Day, I had a realization that the totemic 1984 Mac control panel, designed by Susan Kare, is still to this day perhaps the only settings screen ever brought up in casual conversation.
I kept wondering about that screen, and about what happened since then. 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.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
1984 It’s rare when software matches hardware so well. Even already in 1979, the Macintosh was envisioned as a home appliance akin to a toaster or a TV. This was documented in one of my favorite memos of all time. Get the machine out of the box. Leave the screwdriver in the drawer. There is no step three. Once you do that, open the Apple menu, and then launch the Control Panel, and you will find a small appliance hiding inside the machine, too. A European appliance, even – outside of the title bar, there are absolutely no words present here. The Control Panel is a handsome and tight design, put together by Susan Kare as the last desk accessory, just weeks before the Mac’s announcement. It feels alive, depicting a perhaps surprising amount of movement sometimes via animation, sometimes via comic book-inspired conventions: soundwaves exiting the speaker, menus blinking upon activation, a finger pressing a key, the mouse rolling on the desk. It’s also a playground of sorts for early GUI experiments: there is an early slider here, some steppers for date and time, a custom cursor, and a mini map showing a miniature desktop. The last two are in service of the most contentious addition: customizing the desktop pattern. The original Mac team was divided on this one, worrying this would lead to “abominable patterns” and therefore “ugly desktops” – an ongoing design challenge for any setting that is not about how something works, but about how something looks. Future, more garish desktop options on computers and eventually smartphones would render these early reservations quaint. This might be the best that the Mac desktop will look for about the next twenty years. But at this moment, it felt serious. The creator of MacPaint rebelled and built his app so that any custom background would be drawn over by a default 50% checkerboard anyway. But can you even make an ugly desktop pattern with just 64 black pixels to mess with? Maybe… The most surprising is the fact that the team also prepared 41 beautiful built-in patterns, but hid them inside this control panel with the only hints how to get them appearing in the manual. At this point in time, this was the only way you could truly customize your Mac to fit your personality, and it’s nice that it also happens to be one that’s fun to use, ironically perhaps inspired by MacPaint and its FatBits setting. Other controls might be slightly surprising: out of just ten settings, three are dedicated to motor memory. The two keyboard toggles make sense. Even in the early 1980s, there were keyboards – terminals or electric typewriters – whose repeating style you might have gotten used to. We already knew that once something lodges itself in your fingertips, it’s really hard to override it, even consciously, so it was clever to add customization to work around that. But the third option is for double clicking that never existed before. There weren’t really decades or even years of studies done on mouse usage, either. I imagine the creators felt it was better safe than sorry. This early Control Panel has been celebrated since, even though there are mistakes here: the inconsistent Chicago 3, the top section being one pixel too short, and an occasional uneven border. The UI, like the whole Mac, is slow and clunky – you can see the panel, the windows, even the menus struggling to be drawn with required haste. (Only the mouse pointer is speedy, and it was a small miracle how it got this way.) For people using this early Mac, this was likely frustrating as hell. Today, it feels like a perfect intro for a new little machine, the best dense collection of pixels this side of Winamp. It’s cute, it gets the job done, and it has tons of charm. Control Panel embroidery Stitched and patterned by gmatom
1986 Two years later, and a lot of that charm is gone. Susan Kare and Steve Jobs had already departed to NeXT. This is Control Panel Radio Button City Music Hall edition, 50% larger than its predecessor, exchanging some of the visuals for boring text labels. It can be disappointing to see the Mac growing up so quickly. But boring can also mean “clear”; it’s a simple case study of two extremes of UI design: attractive but mysterious vs. clunky but understandable. Perhaps Apple received feedback from early Mac adopters confused by the iconography, and unwilling to check the manual: But to me it’s more likely that the new team needed to present choices icons could not explain on their own. (Tooltips were not invented yet; they will only be popularized a decade later by Windows 95.) The main one is RAM Cache, which also happens to be an immediate betrayal of the idea of an appliance: it’s not a gentle slider or a fun customization. This here is the equivalent of asking you to open the machine and poke at it with a screwdriver, next to some components with “high voltage” stickers on them. Even the user manual spends many words to help little. People of a certain age who used DOS machines still recoil at the mention of HIMEM.SYS and needing to pre-portion scarce computer memory so precisely that it required pencil-and-paper calculations. Perhaps this was unavoidable when running computers in this era. But it’s hard seeing it on a Mac in particular, and if you think this is just a temporary detour before things get better… no. Things will still get so much worse. This addition to the panel is one portent of the troubled 1990s of the Mac, but the other one points toward a brighter future: a simple AppleTalk on/off toggle. One day, every computer will be networked. A cynical part of me thinks the labels appeared here just so “AppleTalk” could be mentioned by its trademarked name. But maybe it deserved it. Hiding somewhere else inside this version of a Mac is an app beautifully named Chooser where you can do what back then must have felt like future: choosing any printer on the network, all powered by AppleTalk. What else to add on the UI front? A lot of these radio buttons could have been replaced by sliders, but perhaps sliders have not yet proved themselves. Any UX writer will also tell you: avoid “your” and “my” in user interface strings: it’s never clear whether it’s the computer talking to you, or you talking to yourself. And yes, the previously “secret” way to see predesigned desktop patterns now has an affordance. I also found a few non-English versions of this window. People dealing with internationalization, will recognize that mixture of love for languages mixed with the terror of having to support them. The truth is that each language requests something new from you and you can see it here, even so early: different capitalization, accented characters, hyphens, and that age-old trope – a German word that barely fits.
1987 But things get complicated even without languages. There comes a time in your life where settings simply stop fitting on the screen, and then you’ll find yourself with a really tricky bargain. As the old saying goes, a reward for good work is more work. And a reward for creating a nice settings surface? It’s settings. More settings. In 1987’s Mac OS, the refreshed control panel’s sidebar hierarchy is done relatively well, reusing some of the visual vernacular from the Finder. It probably had to be done since apps can install their settings next to the four original icons. But new freeway lanes mean new traffic. A scrollable area controlling another area that can also be asked to scroll? This is a UI blank check, infinite room you can fill with infinite stuff. The temptation to add yet another radio button will be much higher than if that radio button had to be fought over, discussed, or traded off against another one. Look at all of that space in Keyboard and Mouse panels – don’t you just want to fill it with more options? (An astute reader using macOS will check out how many keyboard and mouse settings exist today, 30+ years later.) If you organize your junk drawer, the stuff in the drawer stops being junk. And perhaps settings need to feel like junk – like the place behind the TV with cables and dust bunnies you visit only occasionally and always under duress. This is a choice you sometimes have to make not as much for your users, but for you, the designer. Case in point: What used to be four sections in 1987 grew to be 10+ by 1990, including some Sounds to choose from (as clunky and amateurish as their compatriots in Windows 3.0), and date and time brought back from exile. But then again, there are some wonderful additions, too. The Map, with its cheap but charming blinking lights, will be a Mac staple for years to come. “Besides being useful and educational, the Map CDEV illustrates Apple’s intent to make the Mac a truly international computer,” quoted one book. CloseView, with its strange capitalization (Apple outsourced this feature to a different company) is one of those options that can show by example that accessibility is for everyone. It’s genuinely useful for many things, including everyday pixel-peeping. It’s still there on macOS in 2025, now simply called Zoom. I use it all the time. Good accessibility means you can also click on labels to activate the radio buttons. It’s this panel perhaps, with all its complexities, its necessities to explain and involve keyboard shortcuts, and its mission to do good by people, is what might make someone want to become a settings designer. Otherwise, Control Panel visually feels more clunky than ever. The whitespace in the Keyboard panel, the strange size of the Mouse panel, the curious alignment of Startup Device all suffer because they’re being squeezed into one size. To solve that, Apple designers will soon try a different idea. (Outside of settings, it’s worth checking out the beginnings of the MultiFinder with its ugly icon in the upper right corner. It’s hard to imagine computers and specifically Macs with their overlapping windows not having multitasking – but up until then only one app could be running, with only desk accessories in the Apple menu being able to run concurrently.)
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