Snow Leopard · classic · classic settings

Mac OS X System Preferences: the icon grid the Mac used for twenty years

Before System Settings there was System Preferences, a window of icons in four rows: Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System. This page walks that grid as it stood in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.5 Leopard, explains what each pane did, and links every one to a window you can open. It is the classic counterpart to the macOS entry in the simulator.

Newest release here
Mac OS X 10.6
Versions you can open
2
Top-level sections
25
Rows in the tree
340
Mac OS X 10.6 home screen in the simulator
Open Mac OS X 10.6 in the simulator →

How Mac OS X organises its Settings

The Personal row held Appearance, with the Blue or Graphite look and scroll-bar behaviour, Desktop & Screen Saver, Dock, Exposé & Spaces for the window-management gestures and virtual desktops, Language & Text and Spotlight. The Hardware row was CDs & DVDs, Displays, Energy Saver, Keyboard, Mouse, Trackpad, Print & Fax and Sound. Each pane opened in the same window and the toolbar's Show All button returned to the grid.

Internet & Wireless carried Network, Bluetooth and Sharing, where Screen Sharing, File Sharing and Remote Login were switched on. The System row held Accounts, with Login Options and Login Items, Date & Time, Software Update, Speech, Startup Disk, Time Machine and Universal Access, the name accessibility went by until Mountain Lion. Security was a short pane: password after sleep, FileVault and the firewall.

What changes between versions

Two releases are here. Leopard 10.5, from 2007, introduced Spaces, Time Machine and the unified grey window. Snow Leopard 10.6, from 2009, kept the grid almost unchanged, which is why the two rungs share their twenty-five panes; the differences are inside them. The simulator shows the same layout for both, so the version rail is a check on wording rather than structure.

Three settings worth knowing the path to

  1. System Preferences > Exposé & Spaces > Enable Spaces

    Virtual desktops, new in Leopard, with a grid you set yourself and a menu-bar switcher. Mission Control replaced the pane in Lion, so this is where the idea started.

  2. System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items

    The list of apps that open at login, under the account's Login Items tab. Today the same list is buried under General in System Settings; here it was one click from the user.

  3. System Preferences > Energy Saver > Computer sleep

    Separate sliders for computer sleep and display sleep, with a checkbox to spin down hard disks. Modern macOS hides most of this behind Battery.

Questions people ask about Mac OS X settings

What replaced System Preferences?

System Settings, in macOS Ventura, which moved from an icon grid to a sidebar of panes. The simulator's macOS entry shows that layout from Ventura to Golden Gate; this entry keeps the grid.

Where was accessibility in Mac OS X?

In the Universal Access pane, on the System row, with VoiceOver, Zoom, display contrast and the keyboard and mouse aids. It was renamed Accessibility in Mountain Lion.

Is this the real Snow Leopard?

It is a simulation of System Preferences with the panes and wording of 10.6 and 10.5. The user name, network and printer shown are sample values and no applications run.