How to remove hard drive icon from Mac desktop

only2goats wrote:

Thank you!. The problem was that there was no "Preferences" option visible in Finder. ... Apparently the older operating systems, such as Monterey, don't show the Preferences menu item.

Yes it does. In Monterey you do Finder > Preferences > General to hide or unhide certain items (like the drive icon) on the Desktop.

In later versions of macOS (I believe starting in Ventura) it was changed to Finder > Settings > General.

It's normal to have the internal drive as an icon on the desktop on Mac.

But if you really don't want it, you can open Finder, click on the Finder Menu ➜ Preferences ➜ General and uncheck the Hard Disks check under "Show these items on the desktop".

Preferences is found in the Finder menu at the very top left when you have a finder window opened or are just sitting at the desktop with nothing else opened.

The menu bar at the top will have the word "Finder" at the top left next to the Apple icon. That is a menu. Under which Preferences or Settings appears depending on which macOS version you are actually running.

If you are running Monterey, it should say Preferences

click here ➜ Change Finder preferences on Mac - Apple Support

Click on the desktop, choose Settings from the Finder menu, open the General tab, and uncheck the box for it.

(263202)

As others have already told you, it is normal practice to have the "Mac" drive icon on the desktop. It makes it easy to navigate to and manage folders & files on your drive.

Without that drive icon the only way to navigate and manage your drive would be via the "Finder" icon in the Dock. Just don't remove the Finder icon from your Dock! (The Finder icon is that two-toned blue face icon showing on the left side of the Dock in your screenshot.)

You may want to keep this link as a reference to help you learn about your Mac -> macOS User Guide for macOS Monterey

Originally, Macs always showed drive icons on the Desktop. Somewhere along the line, Apple changed things such that drive icons were hidden by default, and you had to change Finder > Preferences… (called Finder > Settings… in Ventura and later) to get them back again.

The icon itself has changed over the years, from the 2D, black-and-white, floppy disk icon of the original 128K Mac released in 1984:

to the the stylized "photorealistic" 3D gray-scale icon of a mechanical hard drive in Monterey, to a sleeker stylized icon that suggests an external SSD, in Tahoe. I don't know whether Apple has gotten around to changing "Macintosh HD" to "Macintosh SSD" to reflect the fact that no modern Macs ship with internal mechanical hard drives.

ArsTechnica – RIP to the Macintosh HD hard drive icon, 2000–2025

only2goats wrote:

I'm a new Mac user

Note that the Mac handles menu bars a little differently than Windows does. Where Windows has separate menu bars for each application, attached to that application's windows, the Mac has a system menu bar, located at the top of the screen. It shows the menus for the current application. There are various ways to make the Finder the current application, but note that it is possible for an application that has no windows open to be the current one. (Like Chrome was in the screenshot that you posted.)

That may account for the trouble you had finding the Finder's Preferences.

You may find the following useful:

Mac User Guide - Apple Support

including the section:

Switched from Windows to Mac? - Apple Support

A lot of the pages of the Mac User Guide have pull-down menus that let you select the particular version of macOS you want to learn about. Some of the pages don't go back as far as Monterey, but many do.

I'm a long-time Windows user and I'm trying to learn this OS - MacBook Air Monterey 12.7.8.

[EDIT]. A Google search also turned up: Mac tips for Windows switchers - Apple Support .