So you just bought a new Mac and you’re wondering what you can do to really customize it and make it your own? Well, I’ve been using MacBooks for years now and over that time I have found a few things that really improve my MacBook experience. These are things that make my time on my MacBook more productive, more customized, and more simple. Here are the top 7 settings that you can change on your new MacBook Pro M1 to make your experience as efficient and effective as possible.
Personalize Your Mac
Personalizing your Mac is a great first step in getting everything set up properly. The first two things I like do is set a custom desktop background and change my settings to night mode. To change your desktop picture, open system preferences, click “Desktop & Screen Saver,” and then click the plus in the bottom left corner.
This will allow you to look through your images and select the picture you like for your background. You can also choose one of the Apple backgrounds too if you’d prefer.
Now, I prefer to use dark mode because it feels less distracting to me. It also helps to save battery when I’m not plugged in to power. To set dark mode, open your system preferences, click “General,” and then select “Dark” under appearances.
Dark mode is also beneficial because it puts less strain on your eyes. If you’re like me, and you spend most of your day working on your computer, using dark mode is going to ensure that your computer screen is as calming and warm as possible.
Another thing I do at night is turn on night mode. This warms up your computer screen even further to reduce the negative effects of blue light. To do this, click the double slider icon in the top right corner of your screen, then click “Display,” then click “Night Shift,” to activate that warmer screen.
The next thing I do to personalize my Mac is take almost everything out of my dock. Instead of using my dock to open apps, which I find makes my Mac look cluttered and unorganized, I press command and the space bar at the same time on my keyboard. This opens up the spotlight search. From there, I can simply type in whatever application I would like to open and it opens it automatically for me. I find that this is a much simpler approach to finding and opening apps than just having everything in my dock at all times.
Configuring iCloud
Now that we’ve got our set up customized a bit, let’s make sure our iCloud is setup properly. iCloud is a great service because it will backup all of your MacBook settings and a lot of the apps as well. Now, Apple gives you a small amount of iCloud storage for free just for having an account, but you’ll probably need to pay for more storage if you want to really back up all of your settings and apps. To choose what will be backed up to the cloud open the system preferences, click “Apple ID,” and then select “iCloud” on the left side of the window. On that screen you can check whatever you would like to be backed up to the cloud. You can also see how much iCloud storage you’ve used here as well.
If you’re running low on storage, you may need to turn off photo backup to save some space. If you have photos from your iPhone and your iPad, those will all sync to your Mac, taking precious iCloud space in the process. For other ways to backup your data, check out this video I made on iCloud alternatives:
Custom Trackpad Settings
One cool thing about MacBooks is that they allow you to customize specific settings like your mouse speed and how gestures on your trackpad affect your screen. To customize your trackpad settings, open system preferences, then click “Trackpad.”
You’ll see here that you have all sorts of options when it comes to making customizations. How you prefer to set things here is really up to you. You also have a variety of gestures that you can set up to be certain movements with your fingers. Mess around in here for a while and choose settings that really feel natural for you.
You can make the same customizations for a mouse as well if you use a mouse instead of the trackpad. To find those settings, click the “Mouse” tab in your system preferences.
Adding the Downloads Folder to Your Dock
If you’re like me and you are constantly downloading things to your downloads folder, you may find it helpful to add the downloads folder to your dock. I have found that this saves me quite a bit of time when I’m downloading things to have all of those downloads right there in the dock to access quickly.
To add your downloads folder to the dock, open up finder, click the downloads tab and drag it down into the dock. From there, right click the downloads folder and change the view setting from automatic to fan. This will allow you to see a preview of all of your most recent downloads so you can quickly drag those files to wherever you’d like for them to be.
Customizing Hot Corners
A newer feature that your MacBook offers is hot corners. Hot corners allow you to drag your mouse into a corner of your screen to start a certain action. You can customize these corners to do whatever you’d like when you move your cursor to that specific corner. To set hot corners, open the system preferences and type hot corners in the search bar.
From here, you can click each corner and select a specific action to happen. One cool thing to note is that holding the command key on your keyboard while selecting an action will make it so your hot corner will only activate if you hold command while moving your mouse to the corner. This is a great way to ensure that you don’t accidentally activate a hot corner if you didn’t want to. Instead, hold the command key and drag your cursor to the corner so your hot corner is intentional.
Adding More Desktops
One of my favorite features of MacOS is being able to have multiple desktops open at once. This is a super awesome way to stay organized while still being able to keep multiple apps open at once. Instead of having a lot of apps on one screen, you can separate them out on different desktops to reduce the clutter and keep a simple workspace. With multiple desktops you can swipe back and forth between desktops quickly using gestures. To add a new desktop, swipe up with 3 fingers on your trackpad or push the desktop button on your keyboard, (it’s f3 on my keyboard.) Then, press the plus button to add a new desktop. This feature makes organizing my open apps so much easier.
Notifications
Lastly, I disable just about all of the notifications. I’ve found that notifications on my Mac are great at distracting me and keeping me from doing what I am supposed to be doing. I prefer to keep notifications on my phone and iPad so that I can keep my Mac notification free to maximize my productivity. To disable notifications, open your system preferences and select, “Notifications & Focus.” From there, you can toggle through your different apps and adjust which apps can send notifications and what those notifications look like.
Final Thoughts
I hope these few tips help you maximize your productivity on your new MacBook Pro M1. These are all things that have made a huge difference for me and if you set them right I know they can make a difference for you as well. If you are interested in more topics about your MacBook, check out these videos from the State of Tech YouTube channel:
