How to find your MacBook's diagnostic menu

Apple Diagnostics is a hidden menu you hopefully won’t need to access often. When your Mac gets into hardware trouble, it helps find what’s wrong. How to find your MacBook’s diagnostic menu.

Big Tech Apple How to find your MacBook’s diagnostic menu If your MacBook is having major hardware problems, the Apple Diagnostics menu can help make sense of what’s wrong. Apple Diagnostics can narrow that down by testing hardware inside the Mac. Despite the "diagnostic menu" wording you may see online, it isn’t something you’ll find buried in System Settings.

Before you get there, you need to know which type of MacBook you have, since the startup process differs between them. Open the Apple menu and select About This Mac. If you see Chip followed by the name of an M-series processor, you have an Apple silicon Mac.

An older model may instead show Processor followed by an Intel chip. Apple also maintains a list of Mac models with Apple silicon if you’re still unsure.