My Mac is stuck on Auto, and I'm unable to select Dark Mode. Any clues?

Hi MC36,

Thanks for reaching out using Apple Support Communities. We're here to help.

We understand you're having trouble changing appearance settings from Auto to Dark. Happy to help with this

We see you came from the related article, 'How to use Dark Mode on your Mac.' This article is linked at the top of the page and is the best resource to review regarding Dark Mode. Just a few questions to see if we can get to the bottom of this.

Have you been able to use dark mode on this Mac previously? What does it look like when you try to enable dark mode?

Does the issue persist after restarting the Mac?

Do you have any restrictions or administrative profiles that could be preventing settings from being changed?

One step that can be helpful in isolating the issue is to create a new user account on the Mac to test with. If the behavior does not occur on the new user account, this tells us a setting or application is impacting behavior on the existing user.

Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Let us know if you are able to give this a try!

Hey MC36,

Thanks for following up.

Since it seems the issue is user specific, another thing we can do to isolate the issue is to see if it occurs in Safe Mode.

Start up your Mac in safe mode

The steps can be found in the article above, follow the appropriate steps for your Mac. A few resets may be applicable as well. If you have a Mac with an Intel processor, resetting the NVRAM and SMC may be helpful. If you have a Mac with Apple Silicon, no need for these steps.

Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac

How to reset the SMC of your Mac

Feel free to let us know the results of these steps.