How To Setup New M2 MacBook The RIGHT Way

[Music] this is a new Macbook Pro and my name is Chris I'm a software developer who just picked up this new Macbook today to be used as my daily driver moving forward and in today's video I'm going to be walking you through exactly how to set up a new Macbook for success for both normal everyday use as well as use for a software development so the video is going to be broken out into three different parts the first is customizing system settings eliminating a bunch of the inconveniences that come built in with Mac OS as well as adding a lot of quality of life improvements the second part is going to be geared towards a few applications that I recommend you download immediately to your new Macbook and the third part is going to be for my developer friends out there and I'm going to walk you through exactly how to set up your new Macbook for success for software development so with that being said let's go ahead and get started now with a brand new Macbook like this the first thing we want to do is clear up this atrocious looking dock built in Mac gives you all of these applications down here and I know know for one I have zero intention of using ninety percent of these so I will go ahead and clear these out okay so our dock is all cleaned up and we only have the apps down there that we know we're going to end up using quite a bit so the first tool I want to show you how to use is the spotlight tool if this is something you haven't used before I Promise You by the end of this video you're going to be using Spotlight a hell of a lot so to open spotlight we'll go ahead and hit command space and the first thing that we're going to do is actually add something to the dock which is the applications folder so we'll go ahead and type in applications here grab this folder and I place it right next to the trash can so it's separate from these apps but very easily accessible and so what that does is that gives us access to all of our system applications right there at the click of a button the next thing we're going to do is set up our desktops using Mac os's virtual desktops but before we do that we want to make sure that we have our three finger gesture set up so again we'll open the spotlight here and type in trackpad open that up in the system settings and under more gestures here we should see the swipe up with three fingers to access Mission Control if that's not automatically set on your MacBook go ahead and change that to swipe up with three fingers now if we use that three finger gesture where we go straight up on the track pad it gives us access to this section up here where we can see we only have one desktop open right now I personally like to use three some days it gets up to four to five it depends on the workload it gets kind of hectic sometimes so I will go ahead and add two more and click anywhere off the screen to get out of there okay now that we have our virtual desktop set up the next thing we're going to do is clean up the menu bar up here in the top right so to do that we'll go ahead and open the spotlight again so command spacebar menu bar and you can select any of these that are saying show modern status and menu bars show Hearing in the menu bar they're all open the exact same tab within the settings and in here I like to always show the battery percentage that that way it's it's much easier to know exactly how much battery your computer has left now the next setting we want to change in the menu bar is if we scroll down and Spotlight here so now that we know the shortcut to open up the spotlight we don't need it in the menu bar anymore so we'll go ahead and click do not show in the menu bar and as you can see when I turn that off it removed it from the menu up here the next thing we're going to go ahead and do is open clock options and this is really personal preference if you want to use a 24 hour clock you can click that and activate that there some people do like to turn this off so they don't see the AM PM I personally keep it I I to be honest I don't mess with any of the clock settings but again MacBook is a very personal thing so if if that's your preference to change any of these by all means go ahead and do that one app you can use to take complete creative control over your menu bar is a popular app called bartender 4. it's the best for decluttering and organizing your menu bar exactly how you want and comes with powerful features you can use to rearrange hide or show menu bar icons to suit your preferences giving you ultimate control over the menu bar bartender lets you create custom menus search for specific menu bar items and access hidden icons with ease the only hiccup here is that it is a paid app and costs 14 so if that is a tool that you want to invest in I highly recommend it and now that our menu bar is all cleaned up we're going to go straight into our display settings turn automatically adjust brightness off this is a personal preference I I'm not a big fan of how the screen will automatically adjust its brightness based off of sunlight or other ambient lighting so I turn that off if you want the most accurate color profile on your Mac you can turn true tone off personally I like it so I keep it on and then we'll come into the advanced settings here and slightly dim the display on battery this is typically turned on for new MacBooks mine was turned off for whatever reason so I will leave that there and now we'll come up into the appearance section the first thing we're going to do here is modify the scroll bars so I turn scroll bars to always on that way we're always able to see the scroll bars and navigate through any window that we have open I also click jump to the spot that's clicked and this allows us to instead of having to click and drag all the time we're able to just click down here and it'll automatically snap to the section of the window that we want and now if we go ahead and click on desktop and dock there is one thing that I like to change in here and that is if we scroll down I turn off automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use now if you remember with the three finger gesture to open up Mission Control to be able to see your other desktops what this does is built in Mac will automatically rearrange your windows based off of how it thinks it should be I personally keep each desktop for a specific use now as a software developer I use my first desktop for Chrome browsers notes reading documentation things like that I use my second desktop as my development environment so vs code is always open there and my third desktop is for really anything else mainly for video editing so I keep up Final Cut Pro there and with this setting turned off it will not automatically rearrange it'll keep everything exactly how you want it okay and with that now we're gonna go straight into the lock screen and I turn this so turn display off on battery when inactive I change that to 10 minutes for both of these at this point we're gonna go straight into our notifications and make a few modifications for maximizing our productivity so with notifications open the first thing I do is I actually turn off all notifications for every single app except for the calendar and my reminders and even with the calendar and the reminders I also turn off the sound turning off the sound you still get the banner up in the top right it just won't give you the nice ding that Mac is notorious for doing so I will go ahead and I'll turn all of these off okay and now that our notification settings are set to the exact way that we want them we'll go ahead and start customizing the finder which is Mac os's built-in file management system so to get there we'll use the spotlight tool Again by pressing command space typing in finder and opening up a finder window here the first thing we need to do is go up to view show path bar and view show status bar this allows us to see exactly where we are within the directory within the file management system it also gives us a glimpse into how much storage we have available and so with the finders still open we will go ahead and customize the toolbar up here so you can right click up here click on customize the toolbar and you can get rid of the things that you don't intend on using so I don't use tags so you can just drag and drop it out of there the two tools that I know I use a lot are sharing and air dropping so I will click and drag these up into the toolbar so now that our finder appearance is all set what we're going to do is actually go into the finder settings so with the finder open we'll we'll click on finder go to settings and in here make sure that open folders in tabs instead of Windows is checked some new Macs this comes unchecked and what that does is that whenever you open a new finder window you're going to have a brand new window open versus when this is checked you'll be able to see tabs within a single finder window from there we'll go on over into the advanced finder settings and we will click show all file name extensions and we will also change when performing a search to search the current folder this is a personal preference but I know most of the time when I'm searching through the finder I know essentially which directory the file is going to be in so I want to be able to search that folder directly and not have to search the entire Mac the last thing to do here is check remove items from trash after 30 days I feel like 30 days is enough of a time frame to know whether or not you need to remove something that you just put into the trash so we'll have that checked and our finder window is all set timeout Pro tip with the finder if we go up to go hold the option button and click on Library this is a folder that's typically pretty difficult to find so what we can do is we can grab this library from the file path that we just activated and drag it up into our favorites alright so now that our Mac system settings are all set up to the way that we want them we're going to move over into the applications that you have to download immediately on any new Macbook now if you're a multitasker like me you probably have a bunch of different windows open at the same time and let's be honest here Mac os's default split screen view is kind of terrible not to mention you could really only do left to right split screen so one of the first apps that I like to download on new MacBooks is an app called rectangle this is free and open source and it allows you to set a bunch of different keyboard shortcuts to quickly snap your screen exactly how you want it and you're not limited to the left or right you can also snap the screens to the corners or top to bottom it's really whatever whatever your preference is now another app that is an absolute must have for your new Macbook is this app called Mackie by default you're only able to copy one thing to your clipboard at a time whereas with Mackie which is a clipboard manager you're able to copy multiple things to your clipboard and paste them whenever you'd like now before we get any further into the video I do want to give a quick shout out to mubert AI just to throw this out there they're not sponsoring this video but it is a really cool piece of tech that I've been getting a lot of use out of and I feel like other people should have access to it too so mubert is an Innovative platform that uses artificial intelligence to generate unique and customizable music on demand which is perfect for Content creators businesses students marketing departments really anyone who's looking for a copyright free customizable Music Experience and believe it or not all of the music that was used in this video today was generated using mieber AI so if that is something that interests you and you want to give it a try for yourself I've included a link in the description below this video as well as a bunch of links to the other apps that we talked about in the description as well and now moving on to the final recommended app which is called app cleaner with app cleaner when you go to drag an application to uninstall it not only removes that app but it also scans system for any leftover files and deletes those two transitioning for my developer friends there's a lot we could cover here but for time's sake we will only cover the basics in this video to get started the first thing we will do is upgrade our terminal to iterm 2. this has been my terminal of choice for as long as I can remember it is extremely customizable and to be honest it offers way too many additional features to go over in one video so we will just get it installed and running and save the customization for another video if that's something you're interested in go ahead and comment down below and I will make sure to get that video made once I term 2 is installed go ahead and open up the terminal and type git to initialize the get command line developer tools on your machine and now with your terminal setup you can install your entire node and JavaScript ecosystem the best way to do this is with node package manager or npm for short to install npm go to the npm docs copy the code and paste it into your terminal now if you're on a Mac you may have to type in sudo before the command in order to install npm global once installed you can type npm dash dash version to double check that it is installed and see which version of npm you're running the final thing we'll cover in this video is vs code which in my opinion is the best code editor out there for web development and it's been my primary code editor for years to download vs code go to their website and download the package once downloaded and installed a few extensions I recommend to enhance your workflow include prettier which automatically formats your code to make it look clean and consistent es7 react Snippets which provides shortcuts for common react code Snippets Auto rename tag for automatically renaming HTML tags when you change either the opening or the closing tag and live server which allows you to see changes you make to your code instantly in the browser and so with that our MacBook Pro is now set up for developers and non-developers we've got our quality of life improvements taken care of and all of our weird inconveniences that come built in with the Mac eliminated so hopefully you got a lot of value out of this video hopefully your MacBook is all set up to the way that you like it and if you did get value from this go ahead and hit the like button down below subscribe and I will see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Tomshack

Views: 413,653

Keywords: Setup, macbook setup, new macbook, macbook apps, macbook pro apps, best apps, set up macbook, macbook air setup, macbook installation, macbook for programming, macOS settings, best macbook settings, best macbook pro settings, best macbook air settings, setup macbook air, setup macbook pro, macbook m1, macbook m2, macbook pro m2, m2 macbook air, m2 macbook air setup, m2 macbook pro setup

Id: WbklMGq59DU

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2023