Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let
me show you the basics of using System Preferences on your Mac.
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So System Preferences is how you control settings on your Mac.
You can get to it a number of different ways. By default you should see System Preferences in
your Dock. But it's always available in the Apple Menu. You just select System Preferences. System
Preferences shows you categories of preferences by icon. So you can see the icons like General,
Desktop & Screensaver, and Dock & Menu Bar. The icons are arranged in three different groups
with third party System Preferences at the bottom. At the top though you should see your name
and information that applies to you as the user of this Mac account. You also see the
very important Apple ID System Preferences here. You click that and it will take you
to Preferences that have to do with your Apple ID, iCloud, and other Apple services.
Whenever you're looking at a category of preferences you can always click on this button
here to go back to the main System Preferences screen. There are other ways to view the System
Preferences. In the View Menu you can change from Organize By Categories to Organize Alphabetically.
Notice under View you also have a list of all of the different categories here. So you can simply
jump to one by selecting it from this list. If you want you can even customize what you see.
So in View, Customize you now get checkboxes next to everything. If you want to Hide something you
can uncheck it and now click Done and you could see that's gone. But it's still available here.
Another thing you could do is Search. But you can search for more than just the name
of the individual System Preference. For instance in General here is a setting for
the default web browser. Now if you forget where that is you could simply search for it.
You could see it comes up here as a result and it shows you where it is located. You could
click here or here then to get to it. So once you're inside one of the categories, also called
a Pane as in a window pane, you can change your preferences using a variety of different
things. For instance here's a checkbox for Allow wallpaper tinting in windows. For Show Scroll Bars
there are three radio buttons. A radio button is basically like a checkbox but it's a series of
them and only one can be selected at a time. Sometimes there are dropdown menus like for
Default web browser I can choose one of these to install browsers from this menu. Other times
there are custom controls like for Appearance I could go to Light, Dark, or Automatic. You
can see it kind of works like a radio button but has a custom picture instead of a little circle.
In some of these the controls get even more complex. In Dock & Menu Bar you have a Sidebar
here on the left. So if you want to control things that have to do with Dock & Menu Bar you
have this selected and you can see various controls here. Here you see some Sliders
for size and magnification. If I wanted to look at Control Center settings I click on one of these
items in the Sidebar. I would just go through each one of these for various different settings.
Desktop & Screen Saver has another complex set of controls. There's a whole list here of pictures
that you can scroll through and set one as your Desktop background. But this is also a Drag and
Drop area. So you can drag and drop a photo into here. At the top here you can actually see there
are two different tabs for this System Preferences pane. A Desktop tab and a Screen Saver tab.
So it changes what's underneath here. So it's kind of a deeper level. You can see the same thing
say in Spotlight where there's Search Results and Privacy. For Security & Privacy there's a whole
set at the top. General, FireVault, Firewall, and Privacy. So as you can see you can go pretty deep
into System Preferences. There's a lot more than what you see just here at the top level.
Now one way System Preferences is fundamentally different from the Settings app in iOS is that
you will not find App settings there. Instead you'll find those in the individual apps. So
here I am in Mail, for instance, and I can go to Mail Preferences and this is where I get to
preferences that have to do with this app. The same thing with Safari. I go to Safari
Preferences in the Safari app. I won't find Safari settings in System Preferences.
There are a couple of other ways to access System Preferences. One is by using one of the
Menu Bar icons at the top. Sometimes those have direct access to the Preferences. For instance
here's the Bluetooth icon and you could see I can select that and go to Bluetooth Preferences. It
opens up System Preferences right to Bluetooth. If you have System Preferences in the Dock you
can click and hold on it and an alphabetical list of System Preferences will pop-up. You can select
one right from that list and it will jump right to it. If you're a power user one of the things
you want to do occasionally is go through System Preferences and look in every single category. Go
through each item here. If you don't know what it is maybe try it out. Or use the little question
mark icon at the bottom to bring up Help so you can read about what each thing is.
This is how you discover new functionality on your Mac or ways you can customize it that you didn't
know existed before. A lot of times I'm asked how I know everything that I know about a Mac.
This is one of my tricks. It's to simply explore. Go through all of System Preferences and look and
see what's new. I do that every time Apple comes out with their annual major update of macOS.