14+ Tips for Getting Started with a New Mac (and older Macs)

In this video, I’m going to show you 14 tips. So actually, it’s going to be more than 14 tips, I ended up adding another one at the very end of the video. But I’m going to show you 14 plus tips on setting up a new Mac. Now I’m going to show you with Mac OS Ventura. But a lot of these tips will work with older versions of MacOS, not all of them, but a lot of them will work with older versions of Mac OS as well. Let’s take a look at some of my recommendations for setting up a new Mac. Let’s go over to my Mac.

So I have a MacBook Air here and it is running Mac OS Ventura. Now for the most part, this is set up as a default Mac when you first open it up out of the box. Now my first tip actually does deal with Mac OS Ventura, what Apple did with MacOS Ventura is they changed, I’m going to go to the Apple menu here, they changed our System Preferences into System Settings. Basically, we have all of the same settings and more, but they moved things around. So what you’ll want to do is, you’ll want to learn how to use the search here, you want to embrace search. As an example, time machine, if you’re used to an old Mac, you actually had a time machine preference pane. Well, if you look here, you’re gonna see that we do not have it. Well, all you have to do is just go over to search here, and then type in time machine, you’re gonna see a pull up here, and when I click on it, it does open up to that setting. So now I can go and add a backup disk. Also, I can see where this is in the system settings. This is located when I click on the care here, this is located in my general settings. So when I go and click on the X here, and I go over to General, you’re gonna see that I have a time machine. So you’re gonna want to embrace search here, they did move some items around, and search comes in quite handy. Also, as time goes on, and we get new Mac OS versions, you’re going to see more settings in here. So I’m going to guess that search is going to become your friend.

Now the second tip is use time machine. So I’m going to go back over to my general settings here, and we’re going to go over to Time Machine, what you’ll want to do is just buy an external hard drive from BestBuy or Amazon or maybe you have an old hard drive, plug it into your Mac and your Mac will automatically detect that. And if it’s a new hard drive, what it’ll do is it’ll set up for time machine on its own. But let’s say you have an old one, all you have to do is just plug it into your Mac, and then you go over to add backup disk, and then select that disk, and then click on Setup disk. From that point on your Mac will be backed up to that hard drive, it backs it up every hour. So you want to make sure that you have a time machine backup.

My third tip is to enable safari to remember your usernames and passwords. I’m going to close this, and we’re going to go over to Safari, what we need to do is we need to go to our safari settings. This is preferences for an older Mac. So I go up under Safari here, and you’re going to see settings again, this was preferences, I click on it, we have a new window that opens up. And now I just go over to autofill. And I want to make sure that usernames and passwords are selected. Then when I enter in a username and password or even update one Safari will remember that now here’s the bonus, you’ll want to make sure that you enable this in iCloud as well. So I go up to Apple here, we go over to our system settings. And then I click on my name here to get my iCloud settings. And we go over to iCloud here.

And we go over to password and keychain. And I make sure that this is turned on when this is turned on. And your Mac remembers a username and password, you can access it on your iPad or your iPhone. So it’s going to be shared through iCloud it is encrypted. So you don’t have to worry about anybody stealing your usernames and passwords. I’ve been using it for a number of years and it works great. Let’s go back over to my system settings here. Another feature that I like to turn on is to always show the scroll bar. When I’m looking at my system settings here. When I scroll up and down, you’re going to see that the scroll bar here appears. But when I move my cursor away, it disappears. To get it back, what I have to do is I have to scroll up or down. Now in past versions of Mac OS and I’m going several years back, this scroll bar always was shown well we can turn that back on and this is not a MacOS winter feature. This has been around for a while now. All we have to do is just go over to our search. I’m not going to go and try and find it or dig through here. I’m just going to go and search for it. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to search for scroll

In

bars, you’re going to see scroll bar behavior. It’s located in my appearance settings, select it. And then you’re going to see show scroll bars. And what we need to do is we need to select Always, when this is turned on, no matter what app you’re in, if there’s a scrollbar, it will always show. So let’s go ahead and turn it on. And now let’s go over to my accessibility, we have a lot of settings in here. So there’s going to be a scroll bar. When we look at this, you’re going to see that that scroll bar is always showing, we can also see that the scroll bars over here to the left again, always showing it does not disappear.

So if you’d like to always show your scroll bar, all you have to do is just search for scroll bar up here in the search. Another option I like to do is always show the menu bar.

When we go into an app and go into full screen mode, I’m going to go to Safari here. And let’s open this up in full screen mode, watch what happens to my menu bar, it’s going to disappear.

The only way that I can get it back is by moving my cursor up, it comes back, I move my cursor away, it disappears. Again, what I like to do is I like to always show that menu bar, well, we can turn this on. To do that, what we do is we go over to our system settings again. And then what we have to do is go over to our desktop and dock under desktop and dock you’re going to see menu bar.

And then what we do is we set it to never instead of full screen only right now what it’s going to do by default, it’s going to hide the menu bar in full screen only, I don’t want it to hide at all. So what I do is I selected never here. And now when I go into full screen mode, watch what happens to my menu bar.

It always shows I’m going to close this window. And now we’re going to go back over to my settings. Let’s stick with the menu bar. I also like to reduce the transparency. If you are a veteran with the Mac, you probably can remember when the Mac had a gray menu bar here. Well now what it does is it has a transparency to it and it picks up the colors from the background. Same thing with the dark, what what we can do is we can have a go back to that old style where it’s always gray. This was the old style of Mac, it did not pick up the colors from the background in here. To do that, all we have to do is just go to our system settings and we go over to our accessibility settings. And then from here, what we do is we go over to display and under display, we have reduced transparency. When I turned this on, watch the menu bar up here, it’s going to turn gray, turn it on.

And we can see that my menu bar is great like an old Mac, it does also reduce the transparency and the dock. Some people may like this, if you’re nostalgic, you may like this, all you have to do if you want to turn it back off is just tap on sided to turn it back off. While we’re in our display here, there’s a few more settings in here that you may want to turn on, you can adjust the menu bar size, you can make it a little bit larger, you do have to log out if you change those. So when I click on Default here, what it’ll do is it’ll ask me to log out I’m not going to do that. So I’m just going to leave it large here. But you can make the menu bar a little bit larger here, we can also increase our pointer size.

This is the size of the cursor. So now all we need to do is just slide this over to the right and watch what happens with my pointer, we can see it is getting larger.

So I’m going to bring it back down to my smaller size. Actually, I’m just going to bring a little bit in the middle here, so it’s a little bit larger. Another option we have here, which is on by default is we can shake the mouse pointer to locate the cursor. So when I shake my pointer here, I have a trackpad. I’m just moving my finger real quick, you’re gonna see that the cursor gets large. I stop and it gets small. I probably use that on a daily basis looking for the cursor, especially with multiple monitors. Another option I like to use in this setting here is show window title icons. Now what is this? Well, in past versions of Mac OS, when we went to a Finder window and we went to a folder,

what we were able to see in the name here was a folder icon, the actual icon for a folder. Now, since Mac OS Monterrey It might even be Big Sur but what they did is they hide that folder. The only way that I can get it back is by mu

With my cursor up towards the name here, and then you’re going to see that cursor or I’m sorry, that folder there, I move my cursor away, it disappears. I like to always show that folder there, what we can do is we can always show that to do that, we just go over to our settings. Again, we’re in our display for accessibility. And you’re going to see an option here show window title icons. When I turn this on,

we can now see that folder there, no matter what folder I’m in, we can see the icon there. This will come in handy. When I go to my last tip, which is adding the Applications folder to the dock, we just drag that folder over to the dock, you’ll see that shortly. Another option to turn on is modifier keys for zoom, I’m going to close this. And what we’re going to do is go back over to our accessibility settings.

We go over to zoom here. And with Zoom, what we’re able to do is zoom into the display. As an example, if I go over to maps here, I’m looking at the streets, I can’t read the streets, I would like to zoom in well, when we zoom in,

the street names still stay small, I can’t read those street names, I want to actually zoom in. Well, this is where

the modifier key for scroll gestures can come in. For zooming. All we have to do is just turn this on here. And when we turn it on, if we hold down the CTRL key and swipe up with two fingers, it’ll zoom into the display, I swipe back down two fingers, it’ll zoom out. So I’m going to do that I’m going to hold down the control key and watch what happens. I swipe up or zooming in.

I swipe down, zooms out. And it’s zooming in to where my cursor is. So if I go to the upper left hand corner, it’s going to zoom into the upper left hand corner, I zoom out. So how does this come into play? Well, let’s go back over to my maps. Again, I can’t read the streets. If I just use the standard zoom, the street names still stay small. Watch what happens when I hold down the CTRL key and the swipe up I can easily read those street names. So I back down and it brings it back to its normal size. So you can easily zoom in and out just by holding down the control key. Let’s take a look at the trackpad. There are a few settings that I like to do with the trackpad as well. I go back over to my system settings. And then we go down to trackpad here, under trackpad, there are a couple of things that I like to turn on. Actually, I’d like to turn off one of them and turn another one on. What I like to turn off is force click with force click, what we can do is press on the trackpad a little bit harder. And then what will happen is we’ll get quick look, we’ll go look up, we can also change the speed of our media controls, I don’t like that, I just want to use the trackpad, as a click, I just click on it and it does what I needed to do. Well, all we have to do is just turn the slider off. And now no matter how hard I press on that trackpad, it’s just going to do what I want it to do, it’s not going to go into a secondary mode with quick look or look up. So if you’re having a problem with the trackpad, and it’s doing stuff that is unpredictable, what it may be doing is going into force click, you may be pressing just a little bit too hard. So just go and turn that off. What I also like to do is turn on tap to click with tap to click, when I turn this on, all I have to do is just tap the trackpad, I don’t actually have to click it, I can just tap it with my finger to do anything. So if I wanted to close this, instead of clicking on this red dot, all I have to do is just tap on it. Now let’s go over to my finder, there are a few tips that I like to use with the Finder.

Let’s go and open up a new Finder window. So I’m looking at my downloads here, I would like to see how many actual files are in here. Well, in order to do that, what we can do is we can show our status bar, there’s actually two different views that I like to turn on our path bar and status bar. To do that, all we have to do is just go over to view in the menu bar. And then you’re going to see a

path bar. I select this to turn it on. And now I can see the path of that folder. So I can see that my downloads is in my Johnny Appleseed folder, which is in my users folder, which is in Mac OS Ventura.

So this will help you learn the hierarchy of your computer. Now on top of that, what I also like to do is show the status bar when I show the status bar it also shows down at the bottom and I can easily see how much space is on my computer or available and I can see how many items are in this folder. So right now I have 25 items and this

So we’ll show at the bottom of every Finder window. So if I open up a new Finder window, and we go over to applications, I can see that I have 42 applications. And this Applications folder is located in Ventura. So it helps me learn my folder hierarchy. And I can easily see how many items in there, it doesn’t take up that much space. And when you’re our view, and your icons, your apps as icons or folders as icons or documents as icons, you can also go over to the right here and change the size.

Now let’s take a look at our desktop. I like to turn on desktop stacks are almost done. Here, we got one more after this, I like to turn on desktop stacks. If you have a lot of files on your Mac, you know that your desktop or I should say if you have a lot of files on your desktop, this can get to be pretty messy. While with desktop stacks, what your Mac will do is try to keep that organized, it’ll stack all of the similar file types, all of my images will be in one stack all of my Numbers, documents will be in another stack. To turn the sun, all we have to do is just go up under view again in our finder. And then we do have to make sure that we click on the desktop, we cannot be in a Finder window, we do have to be on the desktop. And then what we do is we go up to View here, and we go to use stacks.

When I select this, we can see that it placed all of my images into a stack. All of my PDF documents are in a stack. And then all of my spreadsheets are in a stack, I want to open up one of these stacks, all I have to do is just click on. Let’s go ahead and click on images, I can see all the images. I click on it again to close it. I want to see all my spreadsheets. Click on it, I can see all the spreadsheets I want to see all of my PDF documents as well I can open up more than one stack.

So this is an easy way of keeping all of your files organized on your desktop.

Now my last tip is add in the Applications folder to the dock. I’m going to open up a new Finder window when we add our applications folder to the dock we can access all of our applications from within any app, we just go to our dock. So how do we do that? Well, basically we just open up our applications folder, we can see that we have my little folder here, this is what I turned on, all I have to do is just drag this folder here down to my dock to the left side of the trash, we don’t want to throw it away, of course, but I dragged to the left side of the trash. Let’s go ahead and do that. And watch what happens. I just click and drag.

And the dock is going to make room for here. I let go. And now my applications are in the dock. So now

if I want to open up an application, all I have to do is just click on Applications here. And I can see all of my different applications. And again, I can do this from within any app because it’s in the dock. I don’t have to be in the Finder to open up my applications, I can just go down to my dock here to open it up.

Now I’m going to end with a little bonus tip here. This is not for everyone. But when we go down to the Finder here, when we click on the Finder, it opens up a new Finder window. By default, your Mac will open to recents. And some people like this, I actually like it to open up to a specific folder, I want it to open up to my users folder. That’s what I like. Well, we can change the behavior here we can have all new Finder windows opened up to any folder that we want. So how do we do that? Well, basically, we just go up to our finder settings. If you’re on an older Mac, you have to go to finder preferences. And then from here, what we do is we go over to our general, this is our general tab, and you’re going to see New Finder windows show. And by default, it’s going to be set to recent, all I have to do is just select which folder I want. I’m going to go to

my user folder here, I select it. And now instead of opening up to my recent folders, when I open up a new Finder window, let’s just go ahead and close this. And I click on the Finder window here. Now what it does is it opens up to Johnny Appleseed. I change my view over to column this is one of my favorite views and I can just click on the folder to see what’s in that folder. I opened up a new Finder window, instead of going to recent, it’s going to go to my user folder.

So those are 14 tips are actually more than 14 tips for setting up a new Mac. You don’t have to use all these but I can tell you what some of the favorites are. Always Show the scroll bar. That’s one of my most popular videos on YouTube. People seem to love the idea of always showing the scroll bar. This was an old trick back in or this is how the default behavior was back.

In the early days of the Mac, I also highly recommend configuring Time Machine or just plugging in a hard drive of course, and then adding the Applications folder to the dock. You also want to enable zoom. So then you have access to display zoom just by holding down the control key. What you may want to do also is turn off force click if the trackpad is confusing you maybe what you’re doing is pressing on a little bit too hard. This is what happens with me and I’ve been using the Mac for 30 years. I love the trackpad, I don’t have a mouse, but that force click always throws me off. So I just like to turn that off. I also love to have tap to click on you also may want to increase the pointer size. If you have a hard time seeing the pointer, just increase the size of it.

And if you want to reduce the transparency, you can do that as well. So those are 14 plus tips on setting up a new Mac and with a lot of these tips. You can also use them on an old Mac and you do not need to use Mac OS winter for most of them. A lot of these will work across or with older Mac OS versions. So those are some tips for setting up a new Mac. I hope they help