I’ve been a Mac user for about 20 years now. But, in 2018 I switched to a combination of Chromebook and PC use… and then I switched back in 2021. When I switched back, I purchased an M1 MacBook Air, and things were back to normal… mostly.
One thing that kept bothering me about my new Mac was that it would make a fairly loud beep noise when I plugged in my power cable. This was new; I hadn’t experienced it before, and searching online didn’t find a clear answer to why it was happening or how to stop it. And sometimes the sound doesn’t play. And other times it plays at different volumes.
I suspect this ‘feature’ was added to make it clear when your laptop was charging. In previous Mac laptops I’d had, they used the Magsafe (or earlier plugs!) charging plug, which had a small light that signalled charging status. Yellow/orange when charging, green when connected but fully charged. The M1 MacBook Air has no such light.
So, how does this work?
When a charger is connected the Mac will play the beep sound out of the internal speakers. The volume of this sound is controlled by the volume level for playing sounds out of the laptop’s speakers. This control is different than the volume for when using headphones (bluetooth or wired), and you can’t access the control when you have headphones connected. The beep completely ignores if you have headphones connected and what the volume of the headphones is.
If the beep bothers you (as it does me!), the solution is to unplug/disconnect your headphones, then mute the computer, then reconnect your headphones. Then, every time you unmute your speakers to play something without headphones, you need to remember to mute the speakers again before you plug in or connect headphones again! The volume of the internal speakers when they are enabled is the setting which controls the volume of this beep.
As far as I can tell, there isn’t a setting in System Preferences / System Settings which enables disabling this sound. I have the “Play Sound Effects Through” setting set to use my selected sound output device; e.g. headphones. This sound doesn’t respect that setting; it always plays out of the internal speakers.
Do you have a cleaner way to mute this sound? Or a way to disable it entirely? Please let me know!
Michael Henry's blog 