
To boot from a particular drive, select it and click Continue under it. Immediately after you see “Loading startup options…,” the Mac displays the new Startup Manager, which shows icons for all the bootable drives, along with buttons for Options, Shut Down, and Restart. If you have multiple boot drives and wish to switch among them, you’ll want to use Startup Manager. Unfortunately, Apple is still a little fast and loose with terms, so we’ve tried to list all of the ones you might see. Instead, press and hold the power button until the screen shows “Loading startup options…” and displays the Startup Manager. The most important part is that you no longer have to press a key combination during startup. Needless to say, obscure key combinations aren’t the friendliest way to help someone who may already be stressed out about their Mac not working, so Apple improved things for the new M1-based Macs. Most notably, pressing Option displays the Startup Manager and lets you pick a boot drive, Command-R starts up from macOS Recovery, Command-Option-P-R resets the NVRAM, Shift starts up in Safe mode, D opens Apple Diagnostics to check the hardware, and T starts up in Target Disk Mode.

For many years, Macs have relied on sets of keys held at startup to enable specific modes.
