How to turn your Mac startup chime back on

The discovery of a simple Terminal command will allow users to bring back the iconic Mac startup sound.

The startup chime was a central part of Apple marketing and an iconic sound associated with the Mac. An update in 2016 removed the startup chime and was thought to be lost to the product for good, unil now.

An update to macOS Catalina has appeared to restore the sound to the operating system, but left it muted. A twitter user discovered this, and shared a video and a sudo command to bring it back.

WHAT THE HECK THIS WORKS????????????

Run sudo nvram StartupMute=%00@9to5mac @Appleinsider https://t.co/zAw0yCPwbA
— (@DylanMcD8) February 21, 2020

AppleInsider has tested this on a few machines, and it works with most. It failed to work on a 2018 Mac mini with 10-gig Ethernet, but did work on an i7 2018 Mac mini with gigabit Ethernet. Similarly, it worked on a 2018 15-inch i9 MacBook Pro, but didn't on a 2016 i7 15-inch MacBook Pro. It worked on every late-model iMac we tried.

How to turn your Mac startup chime on

Open the Applications folder
Open the Utilities folder
Launch the Terminal application
Enter sudo nvram StartupMute=%00 in the terminal, and hit return

If you want to remove the chime after re-activating it, use the command sudo nvram StartupMute=%01 in terminal.

A terminal command was discovered shortly after the removal of the chime in 2016 that restored the chime, but was removed in a macOS update. It is unknown if the chimes return was intentional, or will be removed yet again in a future update.

42 Comments

M68000 7 Years · 887 comments

About 4 years ago

Outstanding ! Thanks for posting. It works on my 2018 MacBook Air with current Catalina. I noticed it’s not real loud but having it back is great. The chime gives the Mac character, may sound corny to some but it does.

elijahg 18 Years · 2842 comments

M68000 said:

Outstanding ! Thanks for posting. It works on my 2018 MacBook Air with current Catalina. I noticed it’s not real loud but having it back is great. The chime gives the Mac character, may sound corny to some but it does.

I love the sound too! I remember rebooting a room of Macs with Apple Remote Desktop years ago, it extended the sound out by a good 5 or 6 seconds because they didn't all reboot simultaneously! The volume is (or used to be, probably still is) controlled buy the level the system volume is at at shutdown.

GiffelDK 4 Years · 1 comment

M68000 said:

Outstanding ! Thanks for posting. It works on my 2018 MacBook Air with current Catalina. I noticed it’s not real loud but having it back is great. The chime gives the Mac character, may sound corny to some but it does.

Just turn up the volume of the internal speakers :-) If you have external speakers connected, disconnect them then turn up volume, connect external speakers again.