Mac Kung Fu, 2nd Edition

Tip 269

Scrap the Mac Start-up Chime

Macs are distinctive among the computing fraternity in the melodious chime they make while booting. While PCs that do nothing more than beep might look on enviously, the fact is that the chime isn’t always welcome—boot your MacBook Pro in a library, for example, and several annoyed faces will willingly hand out censure.

Creating a Silent Boot

Here’s how to deactivate the chime. Because there’s no official way of doing this (via a hardware switch, for example), the following solution is a hack that works by muting your computer’s volume when you shut down and then unmuting it when you log in again upon rebooting. Unfortunately, this works only if you don’t have FileVault turned on, because that uses a different ...