By Glenn Fleishman

April 20, 2026 12:23 PM PT

Silence! Listen, here’s how to control sound from your devices

Every Apple device has opinions about when it should make noise. Some of those opinions are reasonable; others will surprise you at 2 a.m.! If you’ve ever wondered why your iPhone alarm blared right through Silent mode, or why your Mac doesn’t have a Silent mode at all, here’s the breakdown.

Everything that makes noise

Before telling you how to suppress, silence, or control audio output, let’s first look at what might provoke a sound and which settings control whether it’s produced. Then I’ll dig into Silent mode and other volume-control options.

Here’s what can trigger audible alerts across your Apple devices, and what controls each:

• Notification sounds: Sounds associated with notifications are governed by both Focus modes and Silent mode. You configure which apps can use sound in Settings: Notifications, either globally or on a per-app basis. Settings: Focus: Focus mode lets you choose when to suppress these sounds when that mode is active.
• Sound effects: System feedback sounds are subject to Focus mode choices on an iPhone or iPad, and to the Alert volume slider on a Mac. Silent mode applies to them on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch.
• Ringtones: For phone and FaceTime calls, both Focus modes and Silent mode will suppress ringtones.
• Alarms: Alarms are a wild card. On an iPhone or iPad, you can’t silence them with suppression settings—neither Silent mode nor a Focus mode mutes an alarm. On an Apple Watch, however, Silent mode keeps alarms, well, silent unless you’ve enabled the breakthrough option, discussed below. On a Mac, the alarm sound is controlled by the Alert volume.
• Timers: Timers respect Silent mode on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch. On Mac, they follow Alert volume.
• Emergency alerts (iPhone only): Government-originating messages, like AMBER Alerts and public safety notifications, ignore both Focus modes and Silent mode on an iPhone. Apple also offers “Enhanced Safety Alerts” for things like imminent earthquakes, though Apple’s documentation is conspicuously silent on whether these override your audio settings. (Educated guess: yes.)
• Find My’s Play Sound: If you or someone else triggers Play Sound in Find My for a device, that device always plays the Find My sound. It’s designed to help you find a lost device, so Apple bypasses all silencing. It can also help you find a device taken from you, or freak out the taker.

What the so-called Silent mode actually does

Silent mode is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. When you enable it, Silent mode suppresses ringtones, alerts, and system sounds.¹ Silent mode doesn’t disable the audio alarms, timers, music, or video audio—they all play right through it. So do Find My’s Play Sound, emergency SOS sounds, fall and crash detection alerts, and government emergency alerts. Apple’s logic is that these are sounds you either explicitly requested or urgently need to hear.

Your device may also still vibrate, as haptics are controlled separately in Settings: Sounds & Haptics.

Despite this seeming clarity, you will find device-based exceptions:

• On an iPhone or iPad, a Clock alarm ignores Silent mode entirely—it will always make noise.
• On an Apple Watch, though, Silent mode does suppress alarms unless you specifically enable Break Through Silent Mode for that alarm.
• If your Apple Watch is off your wrist and charging, Silent mode is ignored, and alarms always play—the assumption being, I infer, that if you’re not wearing your Apple Watch, you’d want to know when an alarm went off!

How to enable Silent Mode

Each type and some generations of hardware have different pathways or options to manage Silent mode:

• On an iPhone 15 Pro or later (and iPhone Air): Go to Settings: Sounds & Haptics and toggle Silent Mode on.
• Older iPhones through the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus: These models have the physical Ring/Silent switch on the side.
• On any iPad: Go to Settings: Sounds: Silent Mode.
• On any Apple Watch: Go to Settings: Sounds & Haptics: Silent Mode.

On all of these devices, you can also toggle Silent mode from Control Center: just tap the Silent Mode icon. If you don’t see it there, you’ll need to add it by customizing Control Center.²

Macs: No Silent mode for you

Macs don’t offer a Silent mode. Apple apparently assumes that if your Mac is awake and making noise, you’re sitting in front of it and can deal with it!

Instead, Macs split audio into two buckets. “Sound effects”—Apple’s long-standing term for system feedback sounds, alerts, error bonks, and the like—are controlled in Settings: Sound under the Sound Effects section. You can route them to a different audio output device, and there’s an “Alert volume” slider you can drag all the way to zero to mute them.

Everything else—music, video, app audio—is controlled by the main Output volume, adjustable via the keyboard volume keys or a Control Center slider.

Pump down the volume

One more piece of the sound output puzzle worth putting in place: on an iPhone or iPad, the hardware volume buttons normally control media volume, but there’s a setting in Sounds & Haptics called Change with Buttons that lets them also control the separate Ringtones and Alerts volume. If that’s off, you need to adjust the ringtone and alert volume with the slider in Settings.

On an Apple Watch, which has no volume buttons, you adjust volume in Settings: Sounds & Haptics: Tap the speaker icons, or rotate the Digital Crown when the volume slider is visible.

For further reading

I suffered to understand all the interactions of Silent mode and Focus modes, so you didn’t have to, when I researched Take Control of Focus. This book explains everything you need to know about what produces banners, sounds, vibrations, and more, and how to tune, tweak, and otherwise customize Focus modes to preserve your peace of mind while getting a piece of work done—or even reading a book!

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His current books in preparation, which you can pre-order, are Flong Time, No See, and That One Matt Bors Comic. Other books include Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Jason Snell

April 15, 2026 7:30 AM PT

Solving the ‘problem’ of MacBook Neo’s popularity

The MacBook Neo is apparently a big hit. So big that Apple is reportedly ramping up production.

Now the bad news: Since the MacBook Neo is powered by the A18 Pro chip from 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, a product that’s been discontinued, there is likely a finite number of chips available for MacBook Neo production. Which is why, as reported by Tim Culpan, Apple faces a dilemma, namely: What happens when it runs out of chips to use in the MacBook Neo?

This is a really juicy question. If Apple’s hottest new Mac is limited by the number of A18 Pro chips available, there are only so many MacBook Neos that Apple can possibly sell. And if the chip isn’t being made anymore, what can the company do?

While we are all left puzzling this one, I don’t believe that this is as much of a dilemma for Apple. Even if Neo sales are higher than forecast, I do not believe that Apple simply never imagined that it might have a hit product on its hands! If there’s any company that believes in its own greatness, it’s Apple, which is why I’m pretty confident that Apple’s MacBook Neo strategy always came with a contingency plan for runaway success.

What we don’t know is what that contingency plan is. One possibility is that it would go back to its chipmaker, TSMC, and beg to get some space to build some fresh A18 Pro chips. This doesn’t make sense for a few reasons. Apple’s not using this particular TSMC chip process anymore, and TSMC’s capacity is likely sold out with business from other partners. Beyond that, the profit margins built into the MacBook Neo are based on odds and sods from the high-volume iPhone 16 Pro, not fresh new chips baked just for the MacBook Neo. If Apple asks TSMC to fire up the A18 Pro forge again, one of the main methods of making the Neo affordable disappears.

Short of there being a Mystery Chip out there that we don’t know about, I have to assume that the most obvious solution is the right one: Apple has probably always intended to replace the A18 Pro MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro model as soon as it begins scraping the bottom of the A18 bin.

Another part of Apple’s Neo strategy is a reusable design. I have to believe that the MacBook Neo was specifically designed to be updated to a new chip at very little extra cost, because every time you do major product redesigns, margins go down. That MacBook Neo was designed to last four or five years, at least, with different chips sliding in, probably once a year.

Putting a newer chip in the MacBook Neo is the obvious solution. Now, if MacBook Neo sales really are wildly beyond Apple’s greatest dreams, perhaps the company is scrambling to get an A19 Pro model ready to go. But it’s a matter of advancing an anticipated time-frame, not inventing a strategy out of nowhere. (And again, it’s a good problem to have!)

I’ve seen various arguments against this approach, but I don’t think they hold water. Will people who bought an A18 Pro MacBook Neo be bent out of shape if a newer, faster model gets released six or nine months later? I’d guess that most of them wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t care, and there are always people who are put out when new computers eclipse the one you just bought—that’s life. Would Apple risk losing the momentum of its new, hit product because a few people had their feelings hurt because Apple released a newer version of the MacBook Neo? That’s a hard no.

Another argument is that, essentially, Apple can’t release a new generation of MacBook Neo just six or nine months after it released the last one! Apple has repeatedly shown that it’s willing to ship two versions of the same product in the same calendar year—and may be about to do it again this year with the M5 and M6 MacBook Pro. Yes, it’s unorthodox, but the MacBook Neo is also a really weird new kind of Mac, and maybe the rules are different for a computer like this.

Would Apple even make a big deal out of such a move? Updating some or all MacBook Neo models to a new chip would probably amount to nothing more than a press release. Sites like this one would certainly notice and cover it in detail, but I’m not sure anyone else would notice or care.

I do wonder if Apple might extend the life of the A18 Pro model by splitting the MacBook Neo product line in two. Before the bin is entirely empty, perhaps it could upgrade the $699 model to the A19 Pro while continuing to sell the remaining A18 Pro chips in the $599 model. Then, once there are no more A18 Pros to be sold, the A19 Pro could move down on the price list. These are spec changes that we’d notice, of course, but they probably wouldn’t affect the trajectory of the MacBook Neo in the slightest.

What I don’t expect Apple to do is allow the Neo to lose its momentum by making it unavailable for some period of time while it works on its chip shortage. If that means eating into margins, it’ll do that. If that means making a quick chip change, it’ll do that. But Apple strikes me as a company with a killer instinct, and it knows it’s taking the entire cheap PC laptop market to the woodshed right now. I don’t think it’s going to pause for a moment.

Well, maybe for a moment. It should pause just long enough to ensure that the bin of A19 Pro chips is nice and full, so it doesn’t get into this situation again next year.

By Glenn Fleishman

April 13, 2026 9:30 AM PT

Change what Time Machine backs up

Time Machine used to be a mess. I would try it with each new macOS release, get frustrated, and give up. My incoming email from readers was sometimes dominated by Time Machine problems, particularly when Apple transitioned from HFS+ to APFS as the Mac’s default startup volume file system. At one point, Time Machine volumes had to be formatted as HFS+ even after APFS became the default startup volume format.

Which is why I’m so pleased that Time Machine generally—generally, mind you—now performs as I would expect as part of my backup-and-archive systems.¹ I use Backblaze for encrypted Internet-hosted backups, Carbon Copy Cloner for nightly local clones, and Time Machine for continuous archiving and backups. I also use Dropbox and iCloud Drive for nearly all of my documents.

Often, however, I want to exclude something—or a lot of somethings—from Time Machine. A file or folder is too big (like Parallels virtual machines), a volume contains a clone of another volume (and thus should be ignored), or some data changes so frequently that it’s not ideal to archive using Time Machine.

Here’s how you can control what Time Machine archives.

Via the main System Settings interface

Open System Settings and go to General: Time Machine. Click Options. The Exclude from Backups list shows everything you’ve added, and anything Apple has included. You can drag items in or click the + (plus) icon to open a file or folder (or volume) selector. Select an item and click – (minus) to remove it.

As you can see from my list, I have many external volumes, and all of them are excluded from Time Machine—all external volumes are added to this list by default, and I’ve left it that way. After many, many hard disk drive failures, including a mirrored RAID, I no longer own enough local capacity to back up all my volumes. I put less-critical files on external volumes and rely on Backblaze.

You may also note that a couple of external volumes have Time Machine icons. Those are included in Time Machine by default, and if you select one, the – (minus) icon is grayed out. Typically, the only entry besides those volumes Apple automatically includes is /Users/Shared/adi, which is related to Apple’s digital commerce—that folder can be removed from exclusions, but I don’t know any good reason to.

Dial in your Time Machine exclusions

If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can also get to know tmutil, which provides text-based control over the same features presented in the Time Machine settings, plus quite a lot else. (In all of these examples, replace /path/to/item or similar with the actual path, of course!)

For instance, if you want to exclude a file or folder, but also may want to move that item later, use:

tmutil addexclusion /path/to/item

Wherever you relocate that item to, the exclusion follows. Or, if you want to use a fixed path and make sure it is invariant, same as the Exclude from Backups, use:

sudo tmutil addexclusion -p /absolute/path/to/item

The sudo command will prompt you to enter an administrative password because it requires elevated system privileges. The -p flag forces the time machine to excluse a path rather than a file.

A neat tip, if you didn’t know it: you can use the Finder to copy absolute paths for items:

1. In the Finder, select a file or folder.
2. Hold down the Option key and choose Edit.
3. Note the Copy “name” as Pathname option: choose it. You can also press Command-Option-C.

The Clipboard stores a path that can be quite short for a local volume, or verge on the absurd for files or folders on iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or other cloud-accessible systems. For instance, take a gander at:

/Users/glenn/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Aperiodical\ Projects\ \(iCloud\)/Flong\ Time\ No\ See\ Book/Figures/01\ Flong\ Time/flongs-per-year-chart.png

If you’d like to use the command line to check on items that are excluded or included, you can use:

tmutil isexcluded /path/to/item

You can use shell-based wildcard expansion, too, so if you did a lot of fussing with inclusion and exclusion in nested folders, you can enter the first part of the path, like ~glenn then use ./* to get a list with [Excluded] or [Included] before each directory at that level of the path, like tmutil isexcluded ~glenn/*.²

For further reading

Joe Kissell has written loads about Time Machine in Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, including strategies, complements, and alternatives.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His current books in preparation, which you can pre-order, are Flong Time, No See, and That One Matt Bors Comic. Other books include Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]