MacBook Air M2 - First 20 Things to Do! (Tips & Tricks)

**Getting to Know Your MacBook Air: 20 Essential Settings and Tips**

If you've recently acquired a new 15-inch MacBook Air, congratulations! You're now the proud owner of a sleek and powerful machine that's ready to help you tackle your daily tasks and projects. However, navigating all the features and settings can be overwhelming, especially for those who are new to using Macs or laptops in general. In this article, we'll take a deep dive into 20 essential settings and tips to help you get the most out of your MacBook Air.

**Configuring Your MacBook Air's Search Function**

One of the first things you'll notice about your MacBook Air is its powerful search function, which is provided by Siri and Spotlight. To customize your search results, simply click on the search bar in the top right corner of your screen and then select "Spotlight" from the dropdown menu. From here, you can toggle off certain features that might be cluttering up your search results, such as specific apps or files that you don't want to see appear in your search results.

**Managing Messages and FaceTime**

If you're like me, you hate getting texts and calls on both your iPhone and MacBook simultaneously. To avoid this, go into the Messages app on your Mac and select "Preferences" from the top menu bar. From here, click on the "iMessage" tab and then deselect the option that says "Notify me by..." and choose "Text message instead of iMessage." You can also do the same in FaceTime by going to the FaceTime settings and selecting which number you want to receive calls on.

**Getting a USB Hub**

One of the downsides of using a MacBook Air is its limited port selection. To combat this, consider investing in a USB hub that provides additional ports for your devices. This can be especially useful if you plan on connecting multiple peripherals to your laptop at once.

**Using an External SSD**

As you start using your MacBook Air for more demanding tasks like video editing and software development, you'll quickly realize the importance of having enough storage space. To alleviate this, consider investing in a solid-state drive (SSD) external hard drive that can provide extra storage without taking up space on your internal drive. I personally recommend the Samsung T7 SSD.

**Enabling Time Machine**

Time machine is a built-in feature on Macs that allows you to back up all of your files and data automatically. To configure time machine, go into System Preferences and select "Time Machine" from the list of available settings. From here, follow the prompts to add an external hard drive as your backup device.

**Configuring iCloud Settings**

iCloud is a cloud storage service that allows you to access your files and data across multiple devices. To configure your iCloud settings, go into System Preferences and select "iCloud" from the list of available settings. From here, you can toggle off the "iCloud Drive" feature and choose which apps sync with iCloud.

**Activating Do Not Disturb**

One of my favorite features on Macs is the ability to activate do not disturb mode for a set period of time. To quickly enable this feature, simply hold down the Option key (or Control key on older Macs) while clicking on the clock icon in the notification center. This will automatically enable do not disturb mode and silence all notifications until you manually turn it off.

**Additional Tips and Settings**

In addition to these essential settings and tips, there are many other features and functions that can enhance your experience with your MacBook Air. These include:

* Configuring your Mail app to use a specific email account

* Setting up multiple user accounts on your Mac

* Using the keyboard shortcut "Command + Shift + Tab" to switch between open apps

* Enabling Night Shift to adjust the screen brightness for better sleep quality

* Using the Spotlight search bar to quickly find files and applications

**Conclusion**

With these 20 essential settings and tips, you'll be well on your way to getting the most out of your MacBook Air. From configuring your search function to setting up iCloud and Time Machine, there are many features that can help you streamline your workflow and improve your productivity. By following this guide, you'll be able to unlock the full potential of your MacBook Air and take your computing experience to the next level.

**Favorite Apps and Accessories**

I personally recommend using the following apps and accessories with your MacBook Air:

* Microsoft Office: A suite of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications that are essential for any business or student.

* Adobe Photoshop: A powerful image editing application that's ideal for graphic designers and photographers.

* Grammarly: A writing assistant app that helps you improve your grammar, syntax, and style.

* The USB-C Hub by Anker: A compact and affordable hub that provides multiple ports for connecting peripherals to your MacBook Air.

Note: This is not an exhaustive list of apps and accessories, but rather a selection of some of the most popular and highly-recommended ones.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys my name is Brandon and today I'm going to be showing you the first 20 things you should do after unboxing your brand new 15-inch M2 MacBook Air this machine is already an excellent value but if you want to get even more value out of your machine this video should set you on the right path so I kept everything at default just so you could see how it is when you get your MacBook out of the box now the first thing we're going to do here is go up to our settings and then go to system settings and we're going to update the software if it's not on the latest version because for me mine came with Mac OS Ventura 13.3 which was not the latest software now even if you are already on the latest software you should also go to this section because you will see we have a new section here called beta updates and if you click on the I you will be able to turn beta updates on it's off by default but if you put in your Apple ID you can hop on the Mac OS Sonoma beta so this comes out to the public this fall but you can get on it early by going right here and clicking on Sonoma beta and then it will populate the update right here and the only reason I mention this is because with Mac OS 14 Sonoma you do get widgets on the desktop and you also get some amazing screensavers so I made a whole video showing the features on Sonoma if you want to check that out the next thing we need to do is change a lot of display settings so the first thing you probably noticed after watching this video is that I have a different wallpaper than what comes out of the box and this is the exclusive wallpaper for the 15 inch MacBook Air so if we go into our system settings and then go down to wallpaper you will see under pictures we have these different colors of this new Macbook Air wallpaper so we have four different colors to choose from here you can choose whichever one you like but I would highly recommend changing it from the default you could also change your wallpaper to a third-party picture from anywhere that you download it from online but a pro tip here is just go to your desktop and create a new folder and just call it wallpapers and from here we're just going to open up our fine under and we're going to drag the wallpapers right here and now that we have that and we can maybe add in a picture here we'll just add in a random picture just for an example and now under this wallpaper section in our settings go to add folder and we're going to go to our wallpapers folder right here we're going to click on choose and now it's going to always show whatever wallpapers I have in that folder right here in the wallpaper section now you don't need to have wallpapers on your favorites right here in finder I just like to have it so I can easily drag things into that folder because I like to change my wallpaper a lot anyways once you have your wallpaper saved and you have your wallpapers folder right here we're going to go to displays and you want to change your display resolution to more space because this allows you to get well the most space out of your 15 inch display so we have a big display this is going to allow us to take full advantage of that you can see the resolution if you hover over is 1928 by 1243. I also want to see my battery percentage without having to click on the battery icon so we want to go to our control center here and then go all the way down to the bottom not all the way but you will see the battery section right here you want to have this show percentage turned on now it's going to show the percentage up there in your control center slash status bar actually if you want it in the control center you can turn that on and now when you activate the control center it will show your battery in here down at the bottom but that's not really necessary I don't really go in my control center often but that is there if you would like it now speaking of the control center we might as well talk about that more as well so first off you can see all these different items that you want to either show or hide in the menu bar which the menu bar is all of this section up top the control center is just when you click into this I realized that what I said earlier could have been a little bit confusing so only when you click on this is the control center this is all the menu bar up top so if you want to clean up the menu bar a little bit this is where you do it it's inside of the control center settings so you can have your focus mode show up there that's what this little icon is it's showing my focus mode you can turn that on or off airdrop you could have that showing or hiding right there so I like to have that actually showing in my menu bar but what I do not like to have here are things like Spotlight search so this little search icon here to do that quickly just press command spacebar so since I can do that real easily I do not need that in my menu bar so we're going to take that out we'll do don't show and menu bar that cleans it up a little bit same with Siri same with time machine I don't like any of those showing up there also for clock options if you don't want to see the day and the AM PM all of that this is where you can turn that off as well all right anyways enough with that let's go on to the lock screen so we're going to go down here to where it says lock screen in our settings and from here you want to change these because I don't know about you but it drives me crazy when my device just dims after not touching the keypad or you know not typing for like two seconds so we're gonna do turn display off on battery when inactive to I'm gonna do like 20 minutes for that I I sometimes will just sit there and not be using my computer for a little bit and then come back to it and I don't like to have to re-log in or you know re-unlock my device after just two minutes you can change the screen saver when inactive right there turn display off on power adapter when inactive so I don't like having this but for maybe we'll just do like 30 minutes for that now another thing I like to change is required password after screensaver begins I like having this immediately I like the maximum security for my device we're going to put in my password and now every time my screen saver begins or my display is turned off it requires a password immediately if we head over to the appearance tab in settings we have our appearance light dark or Auto I like keep in mind on auto we have the accent color so this is going to change the accents throughout your device you will see the little you know highlights right here are purple now if I wanted to change that to Yellow it will show this is system wide so you could have that set to a specific color or you could have it be multi-color depending on the application you're in so I like to keep mine as multi-color that is the default but you can also change the highlight color like for example if I go into one of my notes and I highlight this right here you can see how it's yellow but I can change that to be a specific color so like if you have a theme maybe you have like a purple theme like I have going here now when I you know highlight that it shows as purple and then you have the scroll bar settings so you can change right there as well now something else I want to talk about are hot Corners so if you go into your display settings it's actually under desktop and dock but if you go all the way down here you will see we have a section called hot corners and what this does is it performs an action based on the corner you put your mouse in so for example if I want to lock the screen or let's not do that let's just do launch pad for example if we want to do launch pad in the top left we can have that set and then the bottom left we'll do quick note for example whereas by default it's in the bottom right so now if I just put my cursor my mouse up at the top left you can see it opens that up it performs that action and the bottom left it does that action by pulling up that quick note and allows me to type a quick note so you can set that to any of these actions that you can choose or you can just have it set to do nothing when you go in that corner and just to take this a step further if you don't want to have accidental triggers like sometimes you will put your mouse up there and it does that action even though you don't want it to so you can actually set a modifier key so if you hold any key you can see it puts that right before that so for example if I do command and then you know go to the right corner so we'll just do for this example we'll do notification center so Now command and then hovering up in the top left will bring up the notification center so if I just go up there you can see it doesn't perform that action but if I hold command and then go up there it pulls up my notification center and while we're in this section I may as well just talk about the rest of the desktop and Doc settings so for the dock it takes up a ton of space first off look how many icons we have down there we want to delete the items that we're just not going to use on a daily basis like for me I never use maps on my computer so we're just going to drag that off and it's going to take it off of our dock you have to hold a little bit so for example photos I'm going to take that and drop it we're going to do the same with contacts we're going to get rid of every application that we don't use consistently there we go that already looks so much cleaner and I like having my settings close to the front and I like having my reminders right here my calendar right here I like everything before FaceTime I don't use FaceTime often but I do like having it there now you do also have these in the right so this is going to show your recents so you can turn this off so if we go into our system settings you have show recent applications and dock now you can turn that off and it will get rid of those recent applications if you don't like those showing up there you can also change the magnification so if you like a little magnifier going over it you can do that so now when I go over the app icon you can see a little magnification you can also change the size of that dock if you want it to be large or if you want it to be small I like mine right around the middle maybe on the smaller side you could also change the position if you wanted to be on the left or the right of your screen you can change that you can also do the genie effect or the scale effect when minimizing a window so we're going to minimize this window and you can see it just kind of speeds up the animation I like having scale on instead of Genie here's what Genie looks like it's just a little bit slower alright enough about the dock let's talk about this desktop because it's not looking too pretty or too organized right now so we're going to right click and the first thing I want to do is use Stacks so what this does you can see it automatically cleans up everything and it kind of categorizes everything by what it is so it's going to take a lot of files that are the same so like all of those were screenshots or screen recordings and it puts them into one stack if you click on that it will expand that stack and show you what it is now we can also do group Stacks by so you could group it by certain things if you don't want it to be by the kind of document you could do it by you know when it was opened or modified also what I want to do here is go to show view options so from here you can change the icon size so me personally I think those are a little bit too big so we're going to take it down a notch to maybe 44 by 44 you could change the grid spacing as well so if you wanted to be closer to the edge of the screen you can change that you can change the text size the label position and also if you want to show a preview of the icon or not and also the size or how many items are in there now you'll also see that we have the trash icon down here at the bottom and we do have a couple of things in there now what I like to do here is change the trash clearing to automatically empty after 30 days so if we go up into to our finder go to Advanced and then remove items from the trash after 30 days I like doing this just because it kind of puts a mental cue in my head that anything I put in the trash will be deleted after 30 days and I don't use the trash to kind of just save space in a pinch and while we're in this section I also want to talk about the finder because this is also just a complete mess when you first open it up I don't like how this looks at all so we're going to change quite a few things here so first off we'll change how the items actually look when you open up finder so by default you will see it is set to show as an icon I like having mine as a list I could just see more data I could see when it was modified the size the kind I could see all of that easily so I like having that set there but you can change it to whatever view you like and then if you want to sort it by date modify just click on this right here and it will sort by whatever you are selecting and if you want to change this by the way I just right click and you can choose to add or remove things from this section so if I don't want the kind to show up so it shows application if I don't want that showing up I could just deselect kind and now I can buy myself more space I can maybe expand these a little bit if I would like to or add something else there in its place like tags for example if I'm using tags and then this section up top also looks a little bit bad so we're going to right click right here and go to customize toolbar and from here you're going to be able to select what you want or don't want up in the toolbar so for example I don't use a lot of these things like for example tags I will never use that so we're going to remove Tags I'm just going to drag that off of it and that disappears like so and you can also add little spaces in here so like for example I really like having airdrop in here so we're going to drag airdrop we'll just put it right next to the share icon and then this right here the the sort by I don't like having that there either so we're going to delete that and we can do the same for the favorites over here on the left hand side so you can right click and remove that from the sidebar or you can go to your finder settings and then just go to sidebar and you can just deselect what you don't want to show under favorite so like for example I don't need airdrop there I have it up top I also don't like having tags locations or iCloud right there so I'm going to turn all of those off actually will keep the hard drive section showing right there that way it shows my hard drive and everything that's on it or if I connect an external one it will show right there so now looks a lot cleaner you could also move these around if you would like to so for example if I want to move these all above recents I can do that and also the recents folder I'm not a big fan of that so what we're going to do here is actually create a better recents folder by using a smart folder so we're going to go to the finder go up to file and we're going to go to new smart folder and from here we're going to click on this little plus and we're going to set our parameter so if I want it to be for example my recent files what we're going to do is go right here and we're going to do let's just say last open date or last modified date one either one so we're just going to do last Open dates we'll do within the last 30 days and you'll see it starts to show a lot of things that were open in the last 30 days but some of these might not be what I want like I don't want applications to be in there I may not even want you know folders to be in there I may just want it to be specific files so what we're going to do is hold option and this plus turns into these three dots and what we're going to do is Click on that I know this is getting a little bit Technical and you didn't sign up for this but just bear with me for a second so we're going to set any to none so we're going to set it to the kind being application so you can see it removes all the applications we're going to click on plus and we're going to do the same thing we're going to do kind and now we're going to select what we do not want to show up in our smart folder so for example I'm going to do let's just say folder I don't want folders to show up so now it's just going to show like specific files and now just click on Save and now we have a new smart folder we'll call this recents and we'll add this to the sidebar and now we have a much better recents folder than what we had before so I can go ahead and remove this favorites and now we have our recent smart folder that we have set up and if you want to modify this again at some point just right click on it and go to show search criteria and you can change all of those parameters right here oh and something critical that you should change about finder is what opens up when you open a new finder window like what is the first thing you see so for me for example it's recents that is default I don't like that so what we're going to do is go to finder and then go to settings and right here under General you need to change new finder window and what that opens so like for me for example I probably wanted to open up documents I go in there a lot so now every time I open up finder it's going to open up documents instead of that resets and speaking of finder if finder ever stops responding if you want to relaunch it you can see that there's really no way to close out of it but if you press on option and then right click on finder you have the option to relaunch finder so that is really handy if it ever stops responding and you need to open up finder fresh and if you're ever dragging files and you just need a quick and easy way to open up a new finder window to maybe drag one item to another you know find our window just press command in and that's going to open up a new finder window and then you can drag things really easy from one to another or of course you could press on command T to open up a new tab in that selected finder window okay so one thing I really should have changed earlier because it's been driving me crazy this whole time is go to your settings and go to trackpad we're going to change our tracking speed our click and basically how we scroll so the tracking speed is going to be how quick your tracker moves right here so it's pretty slow by default for me at least so I'm going to knock this up to pretty fast so now you can see my mouse moves around a lot faster and I like that you could also have the click to be light medium or firm that's nice to keep as default now something right here is tap to click so if you want to tap with just one finger without having to actually click down on the trackpad you can set this so for example if I go to that and now I go to scroll and zoom all I have to do is simply tap one time and you can see it Taps on that whereas if I had this deselected I don't do that I have to actually click down fully on the trackpad so that is an option I personally like keeping that off but you can keep that on also the secondary click you could have this to be like if you're coming from Windows for example you could set this to the right corner that way it's more of like a right click instead of just kind of a two click on the track band so now it's like a right click and if I do two fingers that does not do the same thing I like keeping this at default but for lookup and data detectors I like doing this to tap with three fingers so look up is essentially like for example if I go into a Finder right here and I want to see a preview of this I can either press on the space bar or I can now do a three finger tap so now I can do a three finger tap and it previews that or I can look up something like if I go into Safari for example and I go to a website if I want to see a quick preview of that website I can now use three fingers and just simply tap on the trackpad and I will see a preview of that website before actually going on to it and then going over to scroll and zoom I personally do not use natural scrolling I like the you know scroller I like scrolling down when my hand goes down but you can change this to whatever you would like you can kind of test it right here in this section and then under more gestures you can set your launch pad your app expose all of that but one thing I want to change that's not in this section is under the accessibility settings and then if we go down to pointer control you will see that we have a section here under trackpad options for use trackpad for dragging I like having this set to on and with three finger drag so what this does is now if I set that I can move this this little window right here without clicking by just taking my three fingers and simply putting them right there and then I can move this window around really easily with a three finger drag instead of having to click it so this is a must do option in my opinion for the trackpad I think it makes moving applications and just moving anything much easier you should also know how to quickly take a screenshot and screen record so to do this just press shift command 3 so we're going to press shift command 3 and that will quickly take a screenshot if you press shift command 5 that will pull up the window to quickly screen record your device so you will see that you have screen record a selected portion or the entire screen and you have these other options over here capture is what's considered taking a screenshot and record is for a video and you also have options right here so you can set certain options the next thing you want to do is add another fingerprint to your touch ID so we have Touch ID here in the top right of the MacBook Air and sometimes you may want to have another finger unlock your Mac so if you want to go into settings Touch ID and password and you will see you have finger one from when you set up your Macbook to begin with but you could add another one by clicking on ADD fingerprints maybe you can use the index finger from your other hand maybe you could use your middle finger for example that's really easy one to touch right there you can set that up like so and then also if you have an Apple Watch like I do you can set up to unlock your Mac quickly with an Apple Watch I would highly recommend and having this enabled if you do have an Apple Watch just put in your password and now every time you lock your device you can unlock it quickly just by having your Apple watch on your wrist the next thing you need to do is set up essential applications to open automatically on Startup so there's applications that you probably use like every single time you're on your MacBook and you may want to have those automatically already running once you start up your Mac so to do that just go to General and then go to login items and from here click on the plus and select which items or applications you want to run and speaking of files opening automatically one thing you might not like in Safari is how every time you download a song or a picture it just automatically opens and that drives me crazy so to turn that off just go into your settings and Safari go to settings and then down here at the bottom we have open safe files after downloading I would recommend turning that off and while you're in here you might as well change these other Safari settings as well and same with tabs if you want your tabs to show as separate or compact you can change that and you can see what they look like this is how compact looks more like the iPhone or you can change it to separate where it looks like the old school style for Mac tabs now the next thing you might want to do is use the spotlight search for well pretty much everything so if you press on command spacebar because again we don't have that up in the status bar anymore because we cleaned up that status bar earlier so command plus the space bar is how you get the spotlight search you can move this around as well so what you want to do is literally use this for everything if you have a web result that you want to find do that here if you want to do a math problem like for example nine times one nine nine two three four five you can see the result right there in line in the spotlight search you can even run shortcuts from here for example if I start typing shortcuts it can open up the shortcuts application quickly or I can actually run shortcuts from the spotlight search you can see some of the ones it shows right here and that's another thing every single application I open up on my Mac I open it up via the spotlight search like for Final Cut for example if I wanted to do that I just start typing it in and then I press enter and it will open up the application quickly same with Safari any application you can do that with easily now you might also notice that we're seeing a lot of very random results let's change that if you go into settings and then Siri and Spotlight and then scroll down you will see you have Spotlight where you can take out certain things from the search results if you don't want them showing and kind of cluttering up everything when you search the next thing you need to do is configure your messages and your FaceTime because I don't know about you guys but I hate when my MacBook rings at the same time as my iPhone or I don't like getting a text message on multiple devices maybe it's just me but if you're like me and you don't want that just go into messages for example and then go to settings iMessage and then deselect how you can be reached for Messenger so I'm going to deselect my phone number and pretty much every email maybe I'll have one email in there that I want to receive messages from but I definitely do not want my phone number my messages that are specifically meant for my phone number to go to my computer and then if we go into FaceTime same thing let's go into our settings and then right here you can see you can be reached by I do not want my phone number to be able to be reached by FaceTime on my MacBook and we're going to deselect everything except for maybe one email and also we have calls from iPhone right here you might want to turn that off as well now the next tip is something a little bit more practical and that is to get a USB hub if you want to have extra ports so on the MacBook Air you do not get as many ports as you do on a MacBook Pro so you might want to consider getting a USB hub this is going to allow you to get more USBC ports maybe an HDMI port and SD card slots I will leave some of my favorites Linked In the description below but this is something you might want to consider getting for your MacBook now you'll also probably want to get an external SSD so for me for example if I go into my system settings in general and then to storage you can see I only have 245 gigabytes of space that's going to run up quickly if I'm going to download a lot of applications and maybe do some light video editing so I might want to get an X external SSD that way I can save all my files on that external device and it's not taking up my internal storage and again I will leave my favorite ones Linked In the description below I personally use the Samsung t7 SSD and speaking of storage and files you might want to also use time machine to back up all of your files now for this I would recommend maybe not getting an SSD because you will need a lot of space and a hard drive will be cheaper so you can maybe get a four terabyte hard drive for like 100 bucks and just use that for backups so if you go to your settings here and in this same general section you have a time machine and from here you want to add your backup disk and you will be able to back up all your files on a daily or weekly Whenever you set basis that way all of your files are backed up on an external drive and then the last thing I'll mention is that you want to configure your iCloud settings as well so if you go to your iCloud section up in the top of your settings and you want to go to iCloud and then go down to where it shows iCloud drive and from here it's 5 trying to have iCloud Drive sync this Mac but you want to have desktop and documents folders turned off you don't want all of your desktop and documents files being in iCloud because that way you know unless you have two terabytes of space this is just going to run through all of your storage and iCloud so I recommend turning this off and you can also change which Apps sync to the iCloud drive and one last tip I want to give you is a quick and easy way to activate do not disturb so I use this all the time instead of going into here and then going to focus and then turning on do not disturb that takes too long you can do this with one simple click so if you hold on option and then click on the time right here that's going to automatically enable that so you can see I didn't go in there and do not disturb is turned on and if you want to turn it off again just option and click on the time the notification center right there and it will turn it off so there you have it those are more than 20 things and kind of settings you should change after getting your brand new 15 inch MacBook Air I will have some more advanced tips and also some applications you should install on your MacBook at a later date so if you want to see those make sure to subscribe to the channel and if you enjoyed this video if you found it helpful at all I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soonwhat's up guys my name is Brandon and today I'm going to be showing you the first 20 things you should do after unboxing your brand new 15-inch M2 MacBook Air this machine is already an excellent value but if you want to get even more value out of your machine this video should set you on the right path so I kept everything at default just so you could see how it is when you get your MacBook out of the box now the first thing we're going to do here is go up to our settings and then go to system settings and we're going to update the software if it's not on the latest version because for me mine came with Mac OS Ventura 13.3 which was not the latest software now even if you are already on the latest software you should also go to this section because you will see we have a new section here called beta updates and if you click on the I you will be able to turn beta updates on it's off by default but if you put in your Apple ID you can hop on the Mac OS Sonoma beta so this comes out to the public this fall but you can get on it early by going right here and clicking on Sonoma beta and then it will populate the update right here and the only reason I mention this is because with Mac OS 14 Sonoma you do get widgets on the desktop and you also get some amazing screensavers so I made a whole video showing the features on Sonoma if you want to check that out the next thing we need to do is change a lot of display settings so the first thing you probably noticed after watching this video is that I have a different wallpaper than what comes out of the box and this is the exclusive wallpaper for the 15 inch MacBook Air so if we go into our system settings and then go down to wallpaper you will see under pictures we have these different colors of this new Macbook Air wallpaper so we have four different colors to choose from here you can choose whichever one you like but I would highly recommend changing it from the default you could also change your wallpaper to a third-party picture from anywhere that you download it from online but a pro tip here is just go to your desktop and create a new folder and just call it wallpapers and from here we're just going to open up our fine under and we're going to drag the wallpapers right here and now that we have that and we can maybe add in a picture here we'll just add in a random picture just for an example and now under this wallpaper section in our settings go to add folder and we're going to go to our wallpapers folder right here we're going to click on choose and now it's going to always show whatever wallpapers I have in that folder right here in the wallpaper section now you don't need to have wallpapers on your favorites right here in finder I just like to have it so I can easily drag things into that folder because I like to change my wallpaper a lot anyways once you have your wallpaper saved and you have your wallpapers folder right here we're going to go to displays and you want to change your display resolution to more space because this allows you to get well the most space out of your 15 inch display so we have a big display this is going to allow us to take full advantage of that you can see the resolution if you hover over is 1928 by 1243. I also want to see my battery percentage without having to click on the battery icon so we want to go to our control center here and then go all the way down to the bottom not all the way but you will see the battery section right here you want to have this show percentage turned on now it's going to show the percentage up there in your control center slash status bar actually if you want it in the control center you can turn that on and now when you activate the control center it will show your battery in here down at the bottom but that's not really necessary I don't really go in my control center often but that is there if you would like it now speaking of the control center we might as well talk about that more as well so first off you can see all these different items that you want to either show or hide in the menu bar which the menu bar is all of this section up top the control center is just when you click into this I realized that what I said earlier could have been a little bit confusing so only when you click on this is the control center this is all the menu bar up top so if you want to clean up the menu bar a little bit this is where you do it it's inside of the control center settings so you can have your focus mode show up there that's what this little icon is it's showing my focus mode you can turn that on or off airdrop you could have that showing or hiding right there so I like to have that actually showing in my menu bar but what I do not like to have here are things like Spotlight search so this little search icon here to do that quickly just press command spacebar so since I can do that real easily I do not need that in my menu bar so we're going to take that out we'll do don't show and menu bar that cleans it up a little bit same with Siri same with time machine I don't like any of those showing up there also for clock options if you don't want to see the day and the AM PM all of that this is where you can turn that off as well all right anyways enough with that let's go on to the lock screen so we're going to go down here to where it says lock screen in our settings and from here you want to change these because I don't know about you but it drives me crazy when my device just dims after not touching the keypad or you know not typing for like two seconds so we're gonna do turn display off on battery when inactive to I'm gonna do like 20 minutes for that I I sometimes will just sit there and not be using my computer for a little bit and then come back to it and I don't like to have to re-log in or you know re-unlock my device after just two minutes you can change the screen saver when inactive right there turn display off on power adapter when inactive so I don't like having this but for maybe we'll just do like 30 minutes for that now another thing I like to change is required password after screensaver begins I like having this immediately I like the maximum security for my device we're going to put in my password and now every time my screen saver begins or my display is turned off it requires a password immediately if we head over to the appearance tab in settings we have our appearance light dark or Auto I like keep in mind on auto we have the accent color so this is going to change the accents throughout your device you will see the little you know highlights right here are purple now if I wanted to change that to Yellow it will show this is system wide so you could have that set to a specific color or you could have it be multi-color depending on the application you're in so I like to keep mine as multi-color that is the default but you can also change the highlight color like for example if I go into one of my notes and I highlight this right here you can see how it's yellow but I can change that to be a specific color so like if you have a theme maybe you have like a purple theme like I have going here now when I you know highlight that it shows as purple and then you have the scroll bar settings so you can change right there as well now something else I want to talk about are hot Corners so if you go into your display settings it's actually under desktop and dock but if you go all the way down here you will see we have a section called hot corners and what this does is it performs an action based on the corner you put your mouse in so for example if I want to lock the screen or let's not do that let's just do launch pad for example if we want to do launch pad in the top left we can have that set and then the bottom left we'll do quick note for example whereas by default it's in the bottom right so now if I just put my cursor my mouse up at the top left you can see it opens that up it performs that action and the bottom left it does that action by pulling up that quick note and allows me to type a quick note so you can set that to any of these actions that you can choose or you can just have it set to do nothing when you go in that corner and just to take this a step further if you don't want to have accidental triggers like sometimes you will put your mouse up there and it does that action even though you don't want it to so you can actually set a modifier key so if you hold any key you can see it puts that right before that so for example if I do command and then you know go to the right corner so we'll just do for this example we'll do notification center so Now command and then hovering up in the top left will bring up the notification center so if I just go up there you can see it doesn't perform that action but if I hold command and then go up there it pulls up my notification center and while we're in this section I may as well just talk about the rest of the desktop and Doc settings so for the dock it takes up a ton of space first off look how many icons we have down there we want to delete the items that we're just not going to use on a daily basis like for me I never use maps on my computer so we're just going to drag that off and it's going to take it off of our dock you have to hold a little bit so for example photos I'm going to take that and drop it we're going to do the same with contacts we're going to get rid of every application that we don't use consistently there we go that already looks so much cleaner and I like having my settings close to the front and I like having my reminders right here my calendar right here I like everything before FaceTime I don't use FaceTime often but I do like having it there now you do also have these in the right so this is going to show your recents so you can turn this off so if we go into our system settings you have show recent applications and dock now you can turn that off and it will get rid of those recent applications if you don't like those showing up there you can also change the magnification so if you like a little magnifier going over it you can do that so now when I go over the app icon you can see a little magnification you can also change the size of that dock if you want it to be large or if you want it to be small I like mine right around the middle maybe on the smaller side you could also change the position if you wanted to be on the left or the right of your screen you can change that you can also do the genie effect or the scale effect when minimizing a window so we're going to minimize this window and you can see it just kind of speeds up the animation I like having scale on instead of Genie here's what Genie looks like it's just a little bit slower alright enough about the dock let's talk about this desktop because it's not looking too pretty or too organized right now so we're going to right click and the first thing I want to do is use Stacks so what this does you can see it automatically cleans up everything and it kind of categorizes everything by what it is so it's going to take a lot of files that are the same so like all of those were screenshots or screen recordings and it puts them into one stack if you click on that it will expand that stack and show you what it is now we can also do group Stacks by so you could group it by certain things if you don't want it to be by the kind of document you could do it by you know when it was opened or modified also what I want to do here is go to show view options so from here you can change the icon size so me personally I think those are a little bit too big so we're going to take it down a notch to maybe 44 by 44 you could change the grid spacing as well so if you wanted to be closer to the edge of the screen you can change that you can change the text size the label position and also if you want to show a preview of the icon or not and also the size or how many items are in there now you'll also see that we have the trash icon down here at the bottom and we do have a couple of things in there now what I like to do here is change the trash clearing to automatically empty after 30 days so if we go up into to our finder go to Advanced and then remove items from the trash after 30 days I like doing this just because it kind of puts a mental cue in my head that anything I put in the trash will be deleted after 30 days and I don't use the trash to kind of just save space in a pinch and while we're in this section I also want to talk about the finder because this is also just a complete mess when you first open it up I don't like how this looks at all so we're going to change quite a few things here so first off we'll change how the items actually look when you open up finder so by default you will see it is set to show as an icon I like having mine as a list I could just see more data I could see when it was modified the size the kind I could see all of that easily so I like having that set there but you can change it to whatever view you like and then if you want to sort it by date modify just click on this right here and it will sort by whatever you are selecting and if you want to change this by the way I just right click and you can choose to add or remove things from this section so if I don't want the kind to show up so it shows application if I don't want that showing up I could just deselect kind and now I can buy myself more space I can maybe expand these a little bit if I would like to or add something else there in its place like tags for example if I'm using tags and then this section up top also looks a little bit bad so we're going to right click right here and go to customize toolbar and from here you're going to be able to select what you want or don't want up in the toolbar so for example I don't use a lot of these things like for example tags I will never use that so we're going to remove Tags I'm just going to drag that off of it and that disappears like so and you can also add little spaces in here so like for example I really like having airdrop in here so we're going to drag airdrop we'll just put it right next to the share icon and then this right here the the sort by I don't like having that there either so we're going to delete that and we can do the same for the favorites over here on the left hand side so you can right click and remove that from the sidebar or you can go to your finder settings and then just go to sidebar and you can just deselect what you don't want to show under favorite so like for example I don't need airdrop there I have it up top I also don't like having tags locations or iCloud right there so I'm going to turn all of those off actually will keep the hard drive section showing right there that way it shows my hard drive and everything that's on it or if I connect an external one it will show right there so now looks a lot cleaner you could also move these around if you would like to so for example if I want to move these all above recents I can do that and also the recents folder I'm not a big fan of that so what we're going to do here is actually create a better recents folder by using a smart folder so we're going to go to the finder go up to file and we're going to go to new smart folder and from here we're going to click on this little plus and we're going to set our parameter so if I want it to be for example my recent files what we're going to do is go right here and we're going to do let's just say last open date or last modified date one either one so we're just going to do last Open dates we'll do within the last 30 days and you'll see it starts to show a lot of things that were open in the last 30 days but some of these might not be what I want like I don't want applications to be in there I may not even want you know folders to be in there I may just want it to be specific files so what we're going to do is hold option and this plus turns into these three dots and what we're going to do is Click on that I know this is getting a little bit Technical and you didn't sign up for this but just bear with me for a second so we're going to set any to none so we're going to set it to the kind being application so you can see it removes all the applications we're going to click on plus and we're going to do the same thing we're going to do kind and now we're going to select what we do not want to show up in our smart folder so for example I'm going to do let's just say folder I don't want folders to show up so now it's just going to show like specific files and now just click on Save and now we have a new smart folder we'll call this recents and we'll add this to the sidebar and now we have a much better recents folder than what we had before so I can go ahead and remove this favorites and now we have our recent smart folder that we have set up and if you want to modify this again at some point just right click on it and go to show search criteria and you can change all of those parameters right here oh and something critical that you should change about finder is what opens up when you open a new finder window like what is the first thing you see so for me for example it's recents that is default I don't like that so what we're going to do is go to finder and then go to settings and right here under General you need to change new finder window and what that opens so like for me for example I probably wanted to open up documents I go in there a lot so now every time I open up finder it's going to open up documents instead of that resets and speaking of finder if finder ever stops responding if you want to relaunch it you can see that there's really no way to close out of it but if you press on option and then right click on finder you have the option to relaunch finder so that is really handy if it ever stops responding and you need to open up finder fresh and if you're ever dragging files and you just need a quick and easy way to open up a new finder window to maybe drag one item to another you know find our window just press command in and that's going to open up a new finder window and then you can drag things really easy from one to another or of course you could press on command T to open up a new tab in that selected finder window okay so one thing I really should have changed earlier because it's been driving me crazy this whole time is go to your settings and go to trackpad we're going to change our tracking speed our click and basically how we scroll so the tracking speed is going to be how quick your tracker moves right here so it's pretty slow by default for me at least so I'm going to knock this up to pretty fast so now you can see my mouse moves around a lot faster and I like that you could also have the click to be light medium or firm that's nice to keep as default now something right here is tap to click so if you want to tap with just one finger without having to actually click down on the trackpad you can set this so for example if I go to that and now I go to scroll and zoom all I have to do is simply tap one time and you can see it Taps on that whereas if I had this deselected I don't do that I have to actually click down fully on the trackpad so that is an option I personally like keeping that off but you can keep that on also the secondary click you could have this to be like if you're coming from Windows for example you could set this to the right corner that way it's more of like a right click instead of just kind of a two click on the track band so now it's like a right click and if I do two fingers that does not do the same thing I like keeping this at default but for lookup and data detectors I like doing this to tap with three fingers so look up is essentially like for example if I go into a Finder right here and I want to see a preview of this I can either press on the space bar or I can now do a three finger tap so now I can do a three finger tap and it previews that or I can look up something like if I go into Safari for example and I go to a website if I want to see a quick preview of that website I can now use three fingers and just simply tap on the trackpad and I will see a preview of that website before actually going on to it and then going over to scroll and zoom I personally do not use natural scrolling I like the you know scroller I like scrolling down when my hand goes down but you can change this to whatever you would like you can kind of test it right here in this section and then under more gestures you can set your launch pad your app expose all of that but one thing I want to change that's not in this section is under the accessibility settings and then if we go down to pointer control you will see that we have a section here under trackpad options for use trackpad for dragging I like having this set to on and with three finger drag so what this does is now if I set that I can move this this little window right here without clicking by just taking my three fingers and simply putting them right there and then I can move this window around really easily with a three finger drag instead of having to click it so this is a must do option in my opinion for the trackpad I think it makes moving applications and just moving anything much easier you should also know how to quickly take a screenshot and screen record so to do this just press shift command 3 so we're going to press shift command 3 and that will quickly take a screenshot if you press shift command 5 that will pull up the window to quickly screen record your device so you will see that you have screen record a selected portion or the entire screen and you have these other options over here capture is what's considered taking a screenshot and record is for a video and you also have options right here so you can set certain options the next thing you want to do is add another fingerprint to your touch ID so we have Touch ID here in the top right of the MacBook Air and sometimes you may want to have another finger unlock your Mac so if you want to go into settings Touch ID and password and you will see you have finger one from when you set up your Macbook to begin with but you could add another one by clicking on ADD fingerprints maybe you can use the index finger from your other hand maybe you could use your middle finger for example that's really easy one to touch right there you can set that up like so and then also if you have an Apple Watch like I do you can set up to unlock your Mac quickly with an Apple Watch I would highly recommend and having this enabled if you do have an Apple Watch just put in your password and now every time you lock your device you can unlock it quickly just by having your Apple watch on your wrist the next thing you need to do is set up essential applications to open automatically on Startup so there's applications that you probably use like every single time you're on your MacBook and you may want to have those automatically already running once you start up your Mac so to do that just go to General and then go to login items and from here click on the plus and select which items or applications you want to run and speaking of files opening automatically one thing you might not like in Safari is how every time you download a song or a picture it just automatically opens and that drives me crazy so to turn that off just go into your settings and Safari go to settings and then down here at the bottom we have open safe files after downloading I would recommend turning that off and while you're in here you might as well change these other Safari settings as well and same with tabs if you want your tabs to show as separate or compact you can change that and you can see what they look like this is how compact looks more like the iPhone or you can change it to separate where it looks like the old school style for Mac tabs now the next thing you might want to do is use the spotlight search for well pretty much everything so if you press on command spacebar because again we don't have that up in the status bar anymore because we cleaned up that status bar earlier so command plus the space bar is how you get the spotlight search you can move this around as well so what you want to do is literally use this for everything if you have a web result that you want to find do that here if you want to do a math problem like for example nine times one nine nine two three four five you can see the result right there in line in the spotlight search you can even run shortcuts from here for example if I start typing shortcuts it can open up the shortcuts application quickly or I can actually run shortcuts from the spotlight search you can see some of the ones it shows right here and that's another thing every single application I open up on my Mac I open it up via the spotlight search like for Final Cut for example if I wanted to do that I just start typing it in and then I press enter and it will open up the application quickly same with Safari any application you can do that with easily now you might also notice that we're seeing a lot of very random results let's change that if you go into settings and then Siri and Spotlight and then scroll down you will see you have Spotlight where you can take out certain things from the search results if you don't want them showing and kind of cluttering up everything when you search the next thing you need to do is configure your messages and your FaceTime because I don't know about you guys but I hate when my MacBook rings at the same time as my iPhone or I don't like getting a text message on multiple devices maybe it's just me but if you're like me and you don't want that just go into messages for example and then go to settings iMessage and then deselect how you can be reached for Messenger so I'm going to deselect my phone number and pretty much every email maybe I'll have one email in there that I want to receive messages from but I definitely do not want my phone number my messages that are specifically meant for my phone number to go to my computer and then if we go into FaceTime same thing let's go into our settings and then right here you can see you can be reached by I do not want my phone number to be able to be reached by FaceTime on my MacBook and we're going to deselect everything except for maybe one email and also we have calls from iPhone right here you might want to turn that off as well now the next tip is something a little bit more practical and that is to get a USB hub if you want to have extra ports so on the MacBook Air you do not get as many ports as you do on a MacBook Pro so you might want to consider getting a USB hub this is going to allow you to get more USBC ports maybe an HDMI port and SD card slots I will leave some of my favorites Linked In the description below but this is something you might want to consider getting for your MacBook now you'll also probably want to get an external SSD so for me for example if I go into my system settings in general and then to storage you can see I only have 245 gigabytes of space that's going to run up quickly if I'm going to download a lot of applications and maybe do some light video editing so I might want to get an X external SSD that way I can save all my files on that external device and it's not taking up my internal storage and again I will leave my favorite ones Linked In the description below I personally use the Samsung t7 SSD and speaking of storage and files you might want to also use time machine to back up all of your files now for this I would recommend maybe not getting an SSD because you will need a lot of space and a hard drive will be cheaper so you can maybe get a four terabyte hard drive for like 100 bucks and just use that for backups so if you go to your settings here and in this same general section you have a time machine and from here you want to add your backup disk and you will be able to back up all your files on a daily or weekly Whenever you set basis that way all of your files are backed up on an external drive and then the last thing I'll mention is that you want to configure your iCloud settings as well so if you go to your iCloud section up in the top of your settings and you want to go to iCloud and then go down to where it shows iCloud drive and from here it's 5 trying to have iCloud Drive sync this Mac but you want to have desktop and documents folders turned off you don't want all of your desktop and documents files being in iCloud because that way you know unless you have two terabytes of space this is just going to run through all of your storage and iCloud so I recommend turning this off and you can also change which Apps sync to the iCloud drive and one last tip I want to give you is a quick and easy way to activate do not disturb so I use this all the time instead of going into here and then going to focus and then turning on do not disturb that takes too long you can do this with one simple click so if you hold on option and then click on the time right here that's going to automatically enable that so you can see I didn't go in there and do not disturb is turned on and if you want to turn it off again just option and click on the time the notification center right there and it will turn it off so there you have it those are more than 20 things and kind of settings you should change after getting your brand new 15 inch MacBook Air I will have some more advanced tips and also some applications you should install on your MacBook at a later date so if you want to see those make sure to subscribe to the channel and if you enjoyed this video if you found it helpful at all I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soon\n"