15 Obscure System Preferences You Should Know About

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Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's   look at some obscure System Preference  settings that you should know about.  MacMost is brought to you thanks to a  great group of more than 900 supporters.   Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can  read more about the Patreon Campaign.   Join us and get exclusive  content and course discounts. So System Preferences is filled with different  settings for your Mac. Some of them we access all   the time and you probably know about them. But  there are so many! There are some more obscure   ones that you may not know about that are still  pretty useful. So let's go into System Preferences   and start right here at the top with your Apple  ID settings. Now you probably looking right away   here at your iCloud Settings. But if you switch  to Name, Phone, Email then you'll see information   here about you and here you've got three  checkboxes and this controls what marketing email   you get from Apple. So if you're getting too much  email from Apple all the time about new things you   can turn these off. Of if you're not getting them  at all and you'd like to you can turn them on. Next you've got this clock here at the upper  right hand corner of your screen. But how do you   control exactly what's shown there. In previous  version of macOS this was under Date & Time.   But now, in Big Sur, you go to Dock & Menu  Bar. Then scroll down to Clock. Here's where   you control what's shown here. So you  can have the day of the week, the date,   you can switch to an analog clock, use a 24 hour  clock, control whether AM or PM is shown there.   Even have the time separators flash every second  and you can have the time displayed with seconds   in addition to minutes. There's even a way here  to have the time announced. So on the hour,   half hour, or quarter hour you can  have the time spoken by your Mac. Now if you want to customize keyboard shortcuts  you, of course, would go to Keyboard. But   there's a special set of shortcuts that you  can't access there that you can get to in   Mission Control. In Mission Control there are  three different shortcuts here. Mission Control,   Application windows, and Show Desktop.  These can be set as keyboard shortcuts   but they also can be set to use one of the  two sets of modifier keys. So, for instance,   if you always use the left Command key  for shortcuts, like Command S, Command V,   you can use the Right Command, a key you may  otherwise never use, to trigger Mission Control,   Application windows, or Show Desktop. So  by switching to right Command for this,   now I can use the right Command key on my  keyboard and it brings up Mission Control. Now under Language & Region this is where you can  set what language that you use for your Mac. So,   for instance, my Mac is set to US English  and that's the only one that i've got here.   A lot of people have multiple languages  here if you switch between languages.   But a cool thing you could do is go to the Apps  section here and set a custom language only for   a specific app. So for instance, I could go in  here and say well, while Safari is going to use   my default maybe I'll use Chrome and have that  set to use a different language instead. That   can be really handy for people that have to  use multiple languages and find themselves,   maybe, always looking at the web with one  language but maybe writing in Pages in another. In Notifications you've got your settings for  Do Not Disturb. Select Do Not Disturb here on   the left and now you can have Do Not Disturb  turned automatically On or Off and set other   things. So one really handy thing here is to check  When Mirroring to TVs and Projectors. This will   turn on Do Not Disturb whenever you connect to a  projector. So if you give meeting presentations   a lot Do Not Disturb automatically goes  on and you won't see little messages, say,   from your spouse or kids while you're giving  your presentation to the Board of Directors. Now when it comes to obscure System Preferences  of course the Accessibility settings are   filled with them. There's tons of stuff in  here that a lot of people don't know about.   I'm just going to point out two. One is under  Zoom you can enable Hover Text. When you do that   you could hold your Command key down and then move  your cursor over text like this. You have a much   larger view of it. It also shows up while  typing. So you could type using a nice small   font that's appropriate for the document but  as you type you get to see it nice and big.  The other one I want to show you here is  under Display. There's Increased Contrast.   This is a very popular one nowadays because  is changes macOS Big Sur from looking like   this to looking like this. It's kind of a retro  look that a lot of people find they like this. Now let's go to Security & Privacy. In  there under General you have to Unlock   to get to these settings. There's a checkbox  for Show a Message When the Screen is Locked.   So now you can set a message here and type  whatever you want. Somebody who looks at   your computer but the screen is locked and they  can't unlock it, they see this message. So it's   a handy way to put some contact information here  in case you loose your MacBook or maybe just a   message for any coworker that comes by your  cubicle and tries to get access to your Mac. So we go down to Sound now. There's a  setting under Sound Effects here called   Play Sound on Startup. So for decades Mac's  always played a special startup sound and   people really loved that. But for a little  while Apple removed it from macOS so Mac's   started up silently but there was an option  to turn it On. Now that's a setting here   in System Preferences, Play Sound on Startup.  So if you like that sound you can have that   turned On. But if you'd rather have your  Mac startup silently then turn it Off. Now under Keyboard, in the Keyboard tab here,  there's a setting for Press the Fn Key to   and you have four options. So the fn key is found  in different places on Mac keyboards. Most Mac   keyboards, like on MacBooks, it's at the lower  left hand corner. But the larger Mac extended   keyboards have it in the middle under the F13 key.  You can change what's done here. In the newer Mac   keyboards you actually have a globe on this key  and the characters fn. So you can go and actually   have that functionality with the fn key show Emoji  & Symbols. You can set it to Change Input Source   if that's something you need to do often it's  handy to have a key that does that. You can have   it start dictation if you press fn twice or Do  Nothing. If you have it set to Do Nothing it will   still do the thing where it's switches what the F  keys do. So depending upon this setting the F keys   will either be special functions like Screen  Brightness and Volume, or would be F1, F2, F3   shortcuts used by a lot of different apps. So you  can toggle it right here. That still happens no   matter what setting you've got. But you could also  have a quick tap on the fn key to do one of these. Now I want to show you a few things here for  Displays. You've got Resolution, Default for   Display or Scaled. Normally when you set it to  Scaled you see these five options here. But if   you Option Click on Scaled that will change  to a list and you can access many more screen   resolutions. Simply Option Click on Scaled again  to switch back to this set of five. Now when you   go to Arrangement you'll see all of your screens  here and how they're arranged and you can drag   them around. Of course if you only have one screen  you'll just see that one screen here. There's not   much you can do. But if you do have multiple  screens a lot of people don't know that you   can change what is the Primary Screen by clicking  and dragging the Menu Bar that's at the top of the   Main Screen now to another screen. Whichever one  has the Menu Bar is considered the Primary Screen.   Another thing I want to show you in Displays is  Night Shift. Night Shift allows you to shift the   colors on Displays to make them warmer after  dark. So that's supposed to make it easier for   you to fall asleep. So if you use your Mac late at  night you may want to consider using this or maybe   you just like a slightly different look of the  screen at different times of the day. So you can   set a schedule here or Sunset to Sunrise. You can  turn it on right here manually. You could change   the color temperature, less or more warm, right  here under Night Shift. It got a lot of attention   when it was first introduced a few years ago but I  find today a lot of people don't know it's there. One last one I want to show you and that's when  you go to Sharing. Under Sharing at the top here   you've got Computer Name. That's the name of your  Mac on the network. So if you're using a network   at work or even at home and you've got a problem  figuring out which Mac is which, you go here and   change this name to anything that you want. So  you can put your name or describe the computer.   Maybe you've got three MacBooks at home and they  are all called MacBook, right. You can change   it to be Gary's MacBook, etc. It's definitely a  very common question that I get, How do I change   the name of my Mac as it's shown on the network.  It's here under Sharing. A lot of people look for   it under Network or maybe under General. But  it's actually in Sharing that you find this. So that's just a look at some  of these really obscure things   that you can find in System Preferences  that are useful. There are tons more.   I encourage you to go when you have time and  look in every section of System Preferences.   Look at all of the different settings and try  to figure out what could be useful to you.   There's a little question mark button at the  bottom right hand corner. In most cases you   could click that and get descriptions of a  lot of these things to figure out what they   do. If you really want to get the most out of  your Mac it's worth it to take the time to do   this to find out all the different ways that you  can customize your Mac and change how it works.
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Channel: macmostvideo
Views: 70,535
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Keywords: mac system preferences
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Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)
Published: Fri Apr 09 2021
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