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QUICK TIP: How to Hide System Preference Panes in macOS

Dennis SellersTech Tips

posted on Sep. 30, 2020October 14, 2020

Sometimes you may need to hide the Systems Preferences in macOS to prevent unwanted changes (I’m looking at you, wife ‘o mine!). Here’s how:

1) Go to the Apple Menu and choose System Preferences.

Screenshot of System preferences View menu — You can customize which system preferences to show

2) Under the View Menu, click Customize.

3) Checkmarks will appear on all the System Preferences items/panes.

Screenshot of system preferences pain with hide and show checkboxes — Checkboxes indicate which items are shown or hidden

4) Deselect a pane and click Done.

If you later decide, you want to “un-hide’” a pane, just reverse the process.

These instructions apply, for the most part, to other versions of macOS besides Catalina. However, I’m using Catalina on a 16-inch MacBook Pro for this tutorial.

the authorDennis Sellers

Contributing Author

Dennis has over 40 years of journalism experience and has written hundreds of articles. For the past 20-plus years, he's been an online journalist, covering mainly Apple Inc. He's written for MacCentral, MacWorld, MacMinute, Macsimum News, Apple Daily Report, and is now contributing editor at Apple World Today.