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I’ve been pretty fortunate, in that over the past few years, I’ve been able to purchase and use
a number of new Mac computers as part of my business. One of the best things about Macs
is that they come out of the box, pretty much ready for you to just get up and running with,
but I have learnt some things over the years about how I like to set
mine up - certain settings I always like to change, features I like to toggle on and off,
that I feel personally make my Mac experience that bit better. And so in this video, I’m going to
share some of those settings with you, hopefully they will make your Mac experience better too.
OK, let’s get into it.
So, the first thing you’re going to do when you setup a new Mac is you’re going to start
downloading things like apps, and other useful files. There is a Safari setting that, by default,
is enabled on your Mac, whereby any files that your Mac considers ‘safe’, like movies,
pictures, sound files and PDFs, will automatically open when you download them to your computer,
and personally, it drives me insane. It’s really easy to switch this feature off.
Open Safari, head to Preferences, and here in the General tab,
uncheck this ‘open safe files’ box down here at the bottom.
That way, when something is downloaded, it will literally just get downloaded to your computer,
and will wait for you to open the file at a time of your choosing instead.
The Mac dock is pretty iconic, especially if you’re more familiar with Windows computers,
and with good reason, it’s a helpful, visually pleasing tool that Mac users will use every
single day. But, I like to make some changes to mine, to make it a bit more user-friendly,
so let me show you what I do. First up, to get to these changes,
go to System Preferences, then Dock and Menu Bar. You can of course change the size of the dock,
from large down to comically small, so it’s worth playing around with this option to find something
that works well for you. You can also change the position of the dock if you wish, I personally
prefer to have mine at the bottom of the screen, but if you’re more of a left or right of the
screen person, this is where you can set that up. I then ensure that Automatically Hide and show
the dock is ticked on, and that’s because I’d personally prefer that when I’m working in an app,
that app can go all the way to the bottom of the screen, rather than being restricted due to the
dock, I simply have to hover my cursor at the bottom of the screen to have the dock show up.
I like to have indicators for open apps visible, so I tend to keep this ticked on,
and that’s going to show me a little black dot under an app to illustrate that an app is
currently running on my machine, it’s helpful if you’re closing down apps for example, and
you’re not sure what you’ve currently got open. And I untick this ‘Show recent applications
in Dock’ option. With that selected, there would be a section to the right of the dock
that shows me which apps I’ve had open recently, with the idea that I can quickly access those
apps again if I need to, I just find that to be annoying and so I have it switched off.
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If you own more than one Mac, perhaps a desktop and a laptop, or if you own a Mac and an iPad,
provided they both fall within the requirements for this to work,
I’ll put something up on the screen now with a list of the different compatible models,
you can use Universal Control. Universal Control is an absolute game-changer of a feature, that
Apple rolled out earlier this year, and the idea is very simple. Control multiple Macs and iPads
with the same keyboard and mouse, whilst also allowing you to drag files between them.
So in my setup for example, I’ve got a Mac Studio that I’m using as my main Mac, and then I’ve got
this M1 Pro MacBook Pro on a stand to the right of it. Now without Universal Control, I’d either
need a separate mouse and keyboard, or I’d be constantly reaching across to use it. But here,
I just move my cursor over to the right of my main display, and it switches over to my MacBook,
and I can then use my mouse and keyboard over here instead. And sometimes, I grab my iPad,
and drop it below my display here, and then I can use my mouse and keyboard to control my iPad too.
Setting this up is easy. Provided you’ve got compatible devices, head into System Preferences,
then Display, and ensure that all tick boxes are ticked in Universal Control. You may also need
to choose Add Display, and ensure that the relevant devices that you‘d like to connect
to are all selected in here. On Ipad, head into Settings,
then General, then Airplay and Handoff, and toggle on Cursor and Keyboard (Beta).
Back on your main Mac, the one that you plan on using the keyboard and mouse from,
back in System Preferences and Displays, you can drag the displays around on the screen to get them
in the exact right position to match your setup. And that’s it. With that done, you should be
able to move your cursor between the different screens, and use your keyboard to type across
multiple devices. You can also do things like change the volume and brightness of
a device using your keyboard, and even drag and drop files from one device to the other.
It is a phenomenal productivity tool, and well worth getting it setup.
I understand why notifications are important, especially on iPhone and Watch,
but on devices like your Mac, and even your iPad, I’d be willing to bet that most people would be
quite happy receiving fewer notifications. I don’t need an alert each time my antivirus
software has downloaded new updates, or to be told about every junk email that lands in my inbox.
So, I tend to toggle most notifications off, whilst leaving the crucial ones on.
To do that, open System Preferences, and choose Notifications & Focus.
I then tend to go through all of these options, disabling the ones
that I know aren’t going to be needed by me. You can see here that there are loads of apps,
and some are going to be useful, FindMy for example, Messages. But Music isn’t
an app that I’d ever want a notification about, nor is Books, and so these are the
kind of apps that I’m definitely going to be going into and toggling notifications off for.
Whether you use the built-in trackpad on your Mac, or an external mouse, you’re going
to want to configure both of them to have them running the way that suits you best. To do that,
open up System Preferences, and choose Mouse or Trackpad respectively, depending on what you use.
For Mouse, I like to keep the scroll direction natural, but you could invert it if you want to.
I also do use a secondary click, which I’ve got setup on the right side of my Apple mouse.
I don’t use smart zoom personally, as I found I was triggering it by accident a bit too often,
but it’s there if you want it. I also like to play around with the tracking speed to
get it just how I like it, I actually tend to go one to the left of centre, personally.
Under more gestures, I tend to leave off swiping between pages, but leave swiping between apps on,
and leave double tap to mission control on. With the trackpad, I leave most things on,
including Tap to click, which is an absolute must have for me personally.
On trackpad, I tend to prefer my tracking speed to be a little faster than I do on my mouse,
and I typically keep most of the scroll, zoom and gestures toggled on,
with the exception of App expose, which I’ve just never really gotten on with personally.
I also use a trackpad gesture which isn’t included in this menu, it’s actually in System Preferences,
then Accessibility, and Pointer Controls, then Trackpad Options. I tick Enable Dragging,
and then With 3 finger drag, and that allows for a quick and easy way
to use three fingers to grab any window or item on my Mac, and drag that item around.
I totally get that not everybody is comfortable with cloud services like iCloud, and that’s fine,
but I’m totally bought into it, and with that in mind I like to ensure that iCloud is working for
me, to keep my computer running with as little clutter as possible, as well as ensuring that
everything is backed up in the cloud, should I need it in the future. The way that you do that,
is you head into System Preferences, then choose Apple ID. Down here at the bottom of the menu,
there is a checkbox called Optimise Mac Storage, and I always ensure that this is selected. Doing
this will look to optimise the available storage on your Mac, by allowing all of iCloud Drive to be
stored locally on your machine, provided you have space, but then automatically making older files
exist only in the cloud, therefore freeing up space on your machine.
Then, if you head into the Apple menu in the top left, then choose About this Mac,
then Storage, and then Manage, you can see that you have a number of optimisation
options which you can configure. You can store files in iCloud, including photos,
optimise storage for content you’re watching on Apple TV, empty the bin automatically after
a set period of time, and reduce clutter by sorting through files and deleting any
especially large ones, which is definitely something worth doing from time to time.
When you set your new Mac up, you’re going to be prompted to setup a password for the computer
itself, and you of course also have the password you’ll have setup for your iCloud account,
so minimum 2 passwords that you’re going to need to remember,
but then you’ve most likely got passwords stored in your iCloud Keychain as well.
So, one of the first things you should absolutely be doing with your new Mac, is enabling TouchID,
assuming that you’ve got a Mac that’s got access to that. If you’re on an M1 Mac, you’ve definitely
got access to Touch ID, it’s either going to be built into the laptop keyboard up here in the
upper-right, or it’s going to be built into the separate keyboard like this one here.
You might have set TouchID up when you configured your Mac, but even so, I’d recommend setting
up some additional fingers or thumbs for it, I believe you can have up to 3 in total on a Mac. Go
to System Preferences, then Touch ID, and follow the steps to add other fingerprints in as needed.
Also, if you’ve got an Apple Watch, you can enable the Watch to unlock your Mac. Head to
System Preferences, then Security and Privacy, and ensure that this option, ‘Use your Apple Watch to
unlock apps and your Mac’ is enabled. Then, so long as you’re wearing your unlocked Apple Watch
whilst using your Mac, it will use the proximity of it to allow the Mac to be securely unlocked.
New Macs, especially those with Apple silicon, are lightning quick when it comes to getting
powered up, but even then, it makes sense to take some control over what apps are allowed
to automatically fire themselves up, when you switch your Mac on. There’s a section of
your Mac where you can choose this for yourself. Head to System Preferences, then Users and Groups,
and then choose Login Items. Essentially, if an item is in here without a tick, it means that
the software is going to open automatically as a full app, when you power up your computer. So
Moom for example, which is an excellent windows manager, will open up automatically to it’s main
menu screen. If I tick this Hide box here, Moom will still open, but it will do so discreetly,
running in the background instead, which is actually how I’d want it to open.
If I want to stop an app like Moom from automatically opening each time I power on my Mac,
I would highlight it and use the minus button down here to remove it.
Likewise, if I want to add an app in, I can press the Plus button, and then choose that
app from the Applications menu, and that app will open automatically, each time I power on my Mac.
Safari is a phenomenal browser, especially on Mac, but it’s a bit overcautious about
things by default. For example, when you go to download something on a brand new Mac,
don’t be surprised if you get a message asking if you want to allow downloads from that particular
website, and then having to do this for each and every website that you visit from that point on.
You can however override this. In Safari, go to Preferences, then choose Websites, and down
here at the bottom, where you have the ‘When visiting other websites’ option, choose Allow.
Now, any legitimate websites that you visit should only download items to your computer
when you manually choose to download something, so you should be perfectly safe doing this,
but if you’d prefer to keep the manual control, you could of course leave this as ‘ask’ instead,
and manually build up a collection of ‘approved’ sites in this window here.
The final tip I like to incorporate is configuring Finder to work the way
that I like it to, and there’s a few things that I like to change in here.
The first is that any important folders, like the folder where I keep all of my paperwork and
scripts for example, I like to have that included in the Favourites bar on the left hand side, so
that I can access it quickly whenever I need to. If you want to add a folder to favourites, simply
click and hold to select it, and drag it over to the Favourites section of the sidebar in the left,
positioning it wherever you’d like it. If you right-click on a folder that’s already in here,
you can choose Remove from Sidebar if you need to remove it at a later date.
I also like to add a couple of options in at the bottom of the Finder windows, to help with
navigating around the Mac. With a Finder window open, if you go to View up here at the top,
and ensure that both Show Path Bar and Show Status Bar are toggled on, you’ll see these two bars at
the bottom of every Finder window. One shows you the path used to get to the current window,
which is helpful if you need to navigate your way back from a particular folder, while the other
shows you a count of items in the current folder, and the space you have left on the current drive.
Finally, I like to use List view, but I want each Finder window to automatically default
to List view when I open a new window, and not to revert to icons, so what I can do is
right-click anywhere in the Finder window, and choose Show View Options. I’ll ensure that Open
In List View is toggled on, and down here at the bottom, I’ll press the Use as Defaults button,
to ensure that this is how folders open up from now on. If you prefer icons, follow the
same steps, but ensure that you’re looking at a folder with icons before following these steps.
So there you go, 10 configurations that I always ensure I look at, each time I’m setting up a new
Mac. Remember, this could be for a new Mac, or even a Mac that you’ve had to wipe and reformat.
What about you, any Mac configurations that you always use when setting up a brand new Mac?
Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it. And as ever, if you found this video useful,
do please consider leaving me a like, and subscribing to my channel for more content
like this in the future. See you on the next video.