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Control Center Is Improved—and Highly Customizable—in macOS 26 Tahoe

Control Center has been on the iPhone since iOS 7 and came to the Mac in 2020 with macOS 11 Big Sur. For years, Mac users could only turn individual controls on or off. With macOS 26 Tahoe, Apple completely overhauled Control Center, letting you remove, rearrange, resize, and add controls, including ones from third-party developers.

If you’ve mostly ignored Control Center on your Mac, it’s worth a fresh look. The big appeal is quick access to a lot of settings without taking up precious menu bar space, something MacBook users especially feel the pain of. Now that it’s customizable, it’s genuinely more useful.

Open and Use Control Center

To open Control Center, click its icon in the right side of the menu bar, or use the Fn-C keyboard shortcut. It always opens in the top-right corner of your screen.

You may notice a colored dot next to the Control Center icon from time to time. Orange means your microphone is in use, green means a camera is active, purple means system audio is being recorded, and an arrow means an app is accessing your location.

Controls come in a few flavors. Some, like Dark Mode and Screenshot, are simple toggle buttons. Others, like Display Brightness and Sound Volume, are sliders. And some, like Display, open a separate panel with additional options.

Customize Control Center

To start customizing, skip System Settings. Instead, open Control Center and click the Edit Controls button at the bottom. This puts a ⊖ button on each control, adds eight empty slots at the bottom, and opens the Control library.

From here you can:

Remove controls: Click the ⊖ button on any control to remove it. You can always add it back later, though finding it in the library can be tricky if you don’t remember what it was called.
Resize controls: Control-click a control and choose Small, Medium, or Large. Small takes one slot, Medium takes two side-by-side, and Large takes four, either as a 2×2 grid or a 4×1 row.
Rearrange controls: Drag controls to reorder them. You can only move a control to a spot where it fits, so you may need to resize others to make room.
Add new controls: More on this below, but you add controls from the Control library that appears to the left of Control Center when you click Edit Controls.

When you’re done, click Done at the bottom of the Control library.

Adding Controls to Control Center

Apple gives you two ways to add controls from the library:

Drag a control directly into the spot you want in Control Center.
Hover over a control, click the green ⊕ button, and choose Add to Control Center. You can also choose Add to Menu Bar if you want even faster access.

To browse what’s available, scroll through the All Controls collection, filter by category in the sidebar, or search by name.

Most controls come from Apple, but there are two notable exceptions:

Third-party controls: Independent developers can build their own. For example, Flexibits’ Cardhop adds controls for searching and adding contacts.
Shortcuts: Apple’s Shortcuts app lets you launch any app, run any shortcut, or display a collection of shortcuts right from Control Center. If you’re not sure where to start with Shortcuts, any AI assistant can help you build one.

Don’t stress about experimenting. If things get messy, you can always reset Control Center to its defaults in System Settings > Menu Bar by scrolling to the bottom and clicking Reset Control Center.

One last thing worth knowing: a small notification may occasionally appear at the top of Control Center. It’s a privacy alert letting you know if an app has recently used your location, camera, screen recording, or something else Apple thinks you’d want to be aware of. Click it for more details.