94 Macworld • January 2022HELP DESK
The first setting keeps your Mac
from going to sleep while plugged in
unless you explicitly choose Apple
> Sleep. This way, you can eject
your drive manually before putting
the Mac to sleep. While this adds
cognitive overhead, it will prevent
drive integrity problems.
The second option disables
macOS from attempting to put hard
disk drives (HDDs) to sleep; it has
no effect on SSDs. An external HDD
may correctly respond to this effort
by the Mac to reduce usage that can
reduce its lifespan, but apparently
not all HDDs interpret macOS’s
command correctly, so it can cause an
unintentional unmounting, too.
With a fresh external drive, you can
test which of the two settings should
be used separately or together, and
then use Disk Utility’s First Aid feature
to ensure that the drive’s logical
structure remains intact if its volume
or volumes unmount incorrectly
during testing.HOW TO DISABLE THE
CAMERA SHUTTER SOUND
ON AN iPHONE OR iPAD
Apple tries to simulate the experience
of a snapshot camera when you
take a picture in the Photos app on
an iPhone or iPad by issuing a littleclick sound. Many of us prefer to
avoid that sound.
Remarkably, there’s no click on/
off switch in the Camera settings!
Instead, you have one of three
alternatives:Enable Live Photo: If you’re hearing
a click, you don’t have this feature
turned on, which retains some still
images from before and after the
point at which you take a pictures,
providing some animation – and
audio. If the click were on, it would
be captured in a Live Photo. You can
have Live Photo always on when
you launch the Camera by enabling
Settings > Camera > Preserve
Settings > Live Photo.
Mute switch: With the hardware
Ring/Silent switch set to Silent, the
snapshot sound is disabled. You can
flip this switch on and off at will if you
prefer to have the click off sometimes
and on at others. However, the Silent
switch is a system-wide mute, so no
iPhone sounds will be made.
Set system volume to zero: You can
also or instead set your alert sounds
volume to zero. If Settings > Sounds
& Haptics > Change with Buttons
is enabled, you can use the Control
Center or the side volume down
button. However, if that switch is