The bell rings again when you start a Mac. Four years ago, some wayward engineer in Cupertino was bothered by the sound of the bell as a new day began. As he had the keys to the church, he climbed the bell tower, and cut the rope that moved the bell. And the bell stopped ringing.
Some neighbors were relieved not to hear it, but many others found it missing. It was no longer the same to start the day in silence, watching the apple-shaped moon go away in the dark night sky to give way to a new day. But a new engineer, nostalgic for that sound that had accompanied us for so many years, has found the keys to the bell tower, forgotten in some drawer of Apple Park, and has put the rope back, ringing the bell again, to the joy of many neighbors. Colorin Colorado…
Apple has officially decided to bring back the initial sound when booting a Mac with Big Sur macOS, four years after removing it in a previous version of the operating system.
The classic Mac sound was removed from Apple's line of computers with the introduction of the MacBook Pro 2016 with Touch Bar. Since then, macOS has been silent on launch.
But now the bell so characteristic that marked an era in Apple computers is ringing. It is the first change observed when starting a Mac for the first time after installing the beta from macOS Big Sur.
Based on posts from developer forums running the first beta, it appears that the startup sound is available at all the company's Macs, both desktop and laptop. It seems that users can turn the sound on and off, as there is now a new "Play sound on startup" option in System Preferences. Something that should always have been like this.
A few months ago, already explained that in a recent update of macOS Catalina, the famous startup bell was already installed in a hidden way, and it required entering a command in Port to activate it. With macOS Big Sur officially returns.