macOS Sonoma introduced a stunning visual feature borrowed directly from the Apple TV: Aerial Screen Savers. These are gorgeous, slow-motion, 4K video loops of cities, landscapes, and underwater environments that play smoothly on your lock screen. To keep the variety fresh, macOS is configured by default to automatically cycle through the catalog, downloading massive new video files (often over 1GB each) in the background every few days.
While these videos are visually breathtaking, they are an absolute nightmare if you are using an entry-level MacBook Air with only 256GB of internal storage. If macOS continues to silently download these massive 4K video files week after week, your hard drive will rapidly fill up with gigabytes of unusable video data, eventually causing the entire operating system to crash due to a lack of virtual memory space.
You can dive into your Lock Screen settings to completely disable the automated downloading behavior, forcing your Mac to stick with a single, lightweight image or a locally stored video.
How to Stop macOS from Downloading New Screen Savers
You must turn off the automatic rotation feature to stop the background network activity.
- Open the System Settings (or System Preferences) via the Apple Logo in the top-left menu bar.
- Scroll down the left sidebar and click on Screen Saver.
- Look at the top of the right-hand pane. If you have a category like “Landscape” or “Cityscape” selected, you are using the Aerial feature.
- Look closely for a toggle switch labeled Show as wallpaper (this links the screen saver to the desktop).
- More importantly, look at the options below the categories. If you see an option that says “Shuffle All” or a dropdown menu labeled Shuffle, click it.
- Change the setting from “Every Day” or “Every 12 Hours” to Never.
- Alternatively, simply select one specific, static video (like the default Sonoma Valley) instead of a “Shuffle” category. If the download cloud icon is already gone, it will never download another file.
Your Mac will immediately cease its background video scraping. It will continue to use the exact screen saver you have currently selected indefinitely, completely preserving your limited hard drive space and your internet bandwidth.