How to Turn Off Find My Mac
Find My Mac is an incredibly valuable aspect of iCloud that allows you to find your Mac by using another Apple device’s Find My app, or through iCloud on the web. Aside from the obvious anti-theft aspects that make Find My Mac so important, the majority of users are more likely end up using Find My Mac to track down a misplaced laptop bag, or a lost travel luggage scenario. Find My Mac is great, but there are some situations where you might want to turn it off and disable Find My Mac. Typically you’d need to turn off Find My Mac if you’re sending it into Apple or providing it to a repair center, in which case you’d want to backup your Mac first.
Disabling Find My Mac is simple but it’s buried within a bit of a maze of settings, so let’s dive in and find where to go to toggle the feature off.
How to Disable Find My Mac
You can turn off Find My Mac by venturing into the System Settings of MacOS, here’s where to look in MacOS Sequoia, macOS Sonoma, and MacOS Ventura.
- Pull down the Apple menu
- Select ‘System Settings’
- Click on your name at the top of System Settings sidebar
- Click on ‘iCloud’
- Click “See All” to view the rest of the settings
- Click “Find My Mac”
- Click on the Turn Off button next to Find My Mac
- Confirm that you want to turn off Find My Mac by entering your password
With Find My Mac disabled, the Mac will no longer be trackable with the Find My service, and the iCloud protection is disabled. That also means it will no longer show up on the “Find My” maps features throughout iOS, ipadOS, and MacOS.
If you’re disabling Find My Mac because you’re sending the Mac in for repair, or because you plan on selling the computer, or transferring ownership, don’t forget to backup all of your important data first.
On the other side of things, you can also enable Find My Mac with the same process but by clicking to enable the feature, by going Apple menu > System Settings > your name > iCloud > See All > Find My Mac > Turn On
And by the way, you might also be interested in disabling Find My iPhone for the iPhone and iPad side of things.