Last Updated on January 12, 2019 by Mathew Diekhake

The system preferences panel of your Mac is where you can control almost all the settings on your Mac. It has icons to let you control everything on your Mac. From keyboards to mouse to user accounts — everything can be managed from there.

If you find that most of the icons on the panel are not much of your use, then you can have those removed from there. That way, the panel will only have the icons that you actually use removing others that are not of your use.

The following guide shows how you can remove settings icons from the preferences panel on your Mac. Don’t worry; you also have a way to get the removed icons back on your Mac.

Removing Unnecessary Icons from the Preferences Panel on a Mac

To do the job, you are not going to download or install a third-party app on your Mac. All you need to have is just access to the system preferences panel on your Mac, and you are good to go. Here’s how:

Click on the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your screen and select the option that says “System Preferences.” It will take you to the preferences panel for your Mac.

system-icons-sys-pref

When the preferences panel opens, you should see the panel’s options at the top of your screen. What you need to do is find and click on the option that says “View” at the top. It will expand the View menu from where you can control the view options for the panel. The option that you are now supposed to click on is called “Customize” so click on it to customize the view of the current panel.

system-icons-customize

You will expect your Mac to open a new customization panel when you click the customize option but as you can see it did not do that. Instead, you are on the same preferences panel but now with the options to customize it.

You should see a checkbox with each of the icon shown on the panel. What you can do now is checkmark and uncheck the boxes to show or hide them on the panel. For example, if you would not like for the “Keyboard” icon to show up in the preferences panel of your Mac, then you can uncheck the box for it, and it will no longer appear on the panel.

That way, you can uncheck as many icons as you want and those will no longer appear in the preferences panel. However, that does not delete them from your Mac. They continue to exist on your system, but they will just not appear on the preferences panel.

When you are done unchecking the boxes, click on the “Done” button at the top to save your changes.

system-icons-uncheck

As you can see in the following screenshot, I unchecked the box for Keyboard, and now the Keyboard icon is gone from my system panel.

system-icons-gone

Should you ever wish to restore an icon in the panel, then you can do so from the same customization panel. Just head to “System Preferences > View > Customize, ” and then you will again see the checkboxes.

I will checkmark the “Keyboard” box so that it shows up on the panel. Click on “Done” when you are done.

system-icons-restore

The checkmarked icon will now be back to the preferences panel on your Mac.

So, that was how you could remove unnecessary icons from the system preferences panel of your Mac.

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