Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's
look at some obscure System Preference settings that you should know about.
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So System Preferences is filled with different settings for your Mac. Some of them we access all
the time and you probably know about them. But there are so many! There are some more obscure
ones that you may not know about that are still pretty useful. So let's go into System Preferences
and start right here at the top with your Apple ID settings. Now you probably looking right away
here at your iCloud Settings. But if you switch to Name, Phone, Email then you'll see information
here about you and here you've got three checkboxes and this controls what marketing email
you get from Apple. So if you're getting too much email from Apple all the time about new things you
can turn these off. Of if you're not getting them at all and you'd like to you can turn them on.
Next you've got this clock here at the upper right hand corner of your screen. But how do you
control exactly what's shown there. In previous version of macOS this was under Date & Time.
But now, in Big Sur, you go to Dock & Menu Bar. Then scroll down to Clock. Here's where
you control what's shown here. So you can have the day of the week, the date,
you can switch to an analog clock, use a 24 hour clock, control whether AM or PM is shown there.
Even have the time separators flash every second and you can have the time displayed with seconds
in addition to minutes. There's even a way here to have the time announced. So on the hour,
half hour, or quarter hour you can have the time spoken by your Mac.
Now if you want to customize keyboard shortcuts you, of course, would go to Keyboard. But
there's a special set of shortcuts that you can't access there that you can get to in
Mission Control. In Mission Control there are three different shortcuts here. Mission Control,
Application windows, and Show Desktop. These can be set as keyboard shortcuts
but they also can be set to use one of the two sets of modifier keys. So, for instance,
if you always use the left Command key for shortcuts, like Command S, Command V,
you can use the Right Command, a key you may otherwise never use, to trigger Mission Control,
Application windows, or Show Desktop. So by switching to right Command for this,
now I can use the right Command key on my keyboard and it brings up Mission Control.
Now under Language & Region this is where you can set what language that you use for your Mac. So,
for instance, my Mac is set to US English and that's the only one that i've got here.
A lot of people have multiple languages here if you switch between languages.
But a cool thing you could do is go to the Apps section here and set a custom language only for
a specific app. So for instance, I could go in here and say well, while Safari is going to use
my default maybe I'll use Chrome and have that set to use a different language instead. That
can be really handy for people that have to use multiple languages and find themselves,
maybe, always looking at the web with one language but maybe writing in Pages in another.
In Notifications you've got your settings for Do Not Disturb. Select Do Not Disturb here on
the left and now you can have Do Not Disturb turned automatically On or Off and set other
things. So one really handy thing here is to check When Mirroring to TVs and Projectors. This will
turn on Do Not Disturb whenever you connect to a projector. So if you give meeting presentations
a lot Do Not Disturb automatically goes on and you won't see little messages, say,
from your spouse or kids while you're giving your presentation to the Board of Directors.
Now when it comes to obscure System Preferences of course the Accessibility settings are
filled with them. There's tons of stuff in here that a lot of people don't know about.
I'm just going to point out two. One is under Zoom you can enable Hover Text. When you do that
you could hold your Command key down and then move your cursor over text like this. You have a much
larger view of it. It also shows up while typing. So you could type using a nice small
font that's appropriate for the document but as you type you get to see it nice and big.
The other one I want to show you here is under Display. There's Increased Contrast.
This is a very popular one nowadays because is changes macOS Big Sur from looking like
this to looking like this. It's kind of a retro look that a lot of people find they like this.
Now let's go to Security & Privacy. In there under General you have to Unlock
to get to these settings. There's a checkbox for Show a Message When the Screen is Locked.
So now you can set a message here and type whatever you want. Somebody who looks at
your computer but the screen is locked and they can't unlock it, they see this message. So it's
a handy way to put some contact information here in case you loose your MacBook or maybe just a
message for any coworker that comes by your cubicle and tries to get access to your Mac.
So we go down to Sound now. There's a setting under Sound Effects here called
Play Sound on Startup. So for decades Mac's always played a special startup sound and
people really loved that. But for a little while Apple removed it from macOS so Mac's
started up silently but there was an option to turn it On. Now that's a setting here
in System Preferences, Play Sound on Startup. So if you like that sound you can have that
turned On. But if you'd rather have your Mac startup silently then turn it Off.
Now under Keyboard, in the Keyboard tab here, there's a setting for Press the Fn Key to
and you have four options. So the fn key is found in different places on Mac keyboards. Most Mac
keyboards, like on MacBooks, it's at the lower left hand corner. But the larger Mac extended
keyboards have it in the middle under the F13 key. You can change what's done here. In the newer Mac
keyboards you actually have a globe on this key and the characters fn. So you can go and actually
have that functionality with the fn key show Emoji & Symbols. You can set it to Change Input Source
if that's something you need to do often it's handy to have a key that does that. You can have
it start dictation if you press fn twice or Do Nothing. If you have it set to Do Nothing it will
still do the thing where it's switches what the F keys do. So depending upon this setting the F keys
will either be special functions like Screen Brightness and Volume, or would be F1, F2, F3
shortcuts used by a lot of different apps. So you can toggle it right here. That still happens no
matter what setting you've got. But you could also have a quick tap on the fn key to do one of these.
Now I want to show you a few things here for Displays. You've got Resolution, Default for
Display or Scaled. Normally when you set it to Scaled you see these five options here. But if
you Option Click on Scaled that will change to a list and you can access many more screen
resolutions. Simply Option Click on Scaled again to switch back to this set of five. Now when you
go to Arrangement you'll see all of your screens here and how they're arranged and you can drag
them around. Of course if you only have one screen you'll just see that one screen here. There's not
much you can do. But if you do have multiple screens a lot of people don't know that you
can change what is the Primary Screen by clicking and dragging the Menu Bar that's at the top of the
Main Screen now to another screen. Whichever one has the Menu Bar is considered the Primary Screen.
Another thing I want to show you in Displays is Night Shift. Night Shift allows you to shift the
colors on Displays to make them warmer after dark. So that's supposed to make it easier for
you to fall asleep. So if you use your Mac late at night you may want to consider using this or maybe
you just like a slightly different look of the screen at different times of the day. So you can
set a schedule here or Sunset to Sunrise. You can turn it on right here manually. You could change
the color temperature, less or more warm, right here under Night Shift. It got a lot of attention
when it was first introduced a few years ago but I find today a lot of people don't know it's there.
One last one I want to show you and that's when you go to Sharing. Under Sharing at the top here
you've got Computer Name. That's the name of your Mac on the network. So if you're using a network
at work or even at home and you've got a problem figuring out which Mac is which, you go here and
change this name to anything that you want. So you can put your name or describe the computer.
Maybe you've got three MacBooks at home and they are all called MacBook, right. You can change
it to be Gary's MacBook, etc. It's definitely a very common question that I get, How do I change
the name of my Mac as it's shown on the network. It's here under Sharing. A lot of people look for
it under Network or maybe under General. But it's actually in Sharing that you find this.
So that's just a look at some of these really obscure things
that you can find in System Preferences that are useful. There are tons more.
I encourage you to go when you have time and look in every section of System Preferences.
Look at all of the different settings and try to figure out what could be useful to you.
There's a little question mark button at the bottom right hand corner. In most cases you
could click that and get descriptions of a lot of these things to figure out what they
do. If you really want to get the most out of your Mac it's worth it to take the time to do
this to find out all the different ways that you can customize your Mac and change how it works.