Disabling the Home Prompts in macOS 14.1

If you’ve recently updated your Mac to 14.1, you may have noticed some rather annoying popups that say “Home” would like to use your current location.

This is perplexing, since it appears even if the user has never used the Home app or even signed into iCloud. This is happening because macOS Sonoma introduced a new feature called Grid Forecast, which users are opted in to by default. It’s a nice feature in theory, helping you to identify clean energy sources, but the popup is a little jarring. It’s especially annoying that this can appear over and over on the same user account, even if you have clicked “Don’t Allow”.

There are a few ways to disable this. In the GUI, you can follow Apple’s instructions to:

1. Open the Home app
2. Click on the More … button
3. Choose Home settings
4. Click on Energy
5. Toggle “Show Grid Forecast” to off

You can, of course, also set this with a script. If you are logged into an account and you want the setting turned off for your account, the one-liner to disable the prompts is:

/usr/bin/defaults write com.apple.Home showHomeEnergy -bool false

If you are pushing the script out to end users through an MDM like Jamf, you have a few options. One would be to run the script with something like Outset so that it runs for every user. Otherwise, since MDMs run commands as root, you will want to run this with a script that finds the currently logged in user and runs it as that user. Here is the one I am using:

#!/bin/zsh

# Get the currently logged in user
currentUser=$( echo "show State:/Users/ConsoleUser" | scutil | awk '/Name :/ { print $3 }' )

# Get uid logged in user
uid=$(id -u "${currentUser}")

runAsUser() {  
	if [[ "${currentUser}" != "loginwindow" ]]; then
		launchctl asuser "$uid" sudo -u "${currentUser}" "$@"
	else
		echo "no user logged in"
		exit 1
	fi
}

runAsUser /usr/bin/defaults write com.apple.Home showHomeEnergy -bool false

This works well in our environment, since our users are on laptops where they are generally always logged in to their primary account. We run this as a policy on recurring check-in.

You can also use a profile to disable the prompt, as discovered by the always brilliant Richard Purves. This is what that looks like from within Jamf:

Hopefully this helps. This has been tested by myself and others in the Mac Admins Slack community since 14.1 was in beta and I have confirmed that when the script is run on 14.0, the settings stick through an update to 14.1. No promises for the future. Hopefully Apple can move this to an opt-in setting by default rather than an opt-out one so no settings change is needed in later versions!