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 the 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 on iPad (shown) and iPad suppresses ringtones, alerts, and system sounds but leaves alarms, timers, and media audio alone.

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.

You can enable Silent Mode on Apple Watch via Control Center (left) or in Sounds & Haptics settings (right).

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

Apple Watch lets you override Silent mode on a per-alarm basis with Break Through Silent Mode.

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.

The Mac’s Sound Effects settings let you mute alerts independently from other audio output.

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.]

Just to be confusing, Apple calls it “Silent mode” in documentation, but it appears as “Silent Mode” in all appearances in Apple interfaces. ↩

Adding a control to Control Center varies so much by platform and version that I’m going to tell you to use a search engine to find the correct instructions. ↩