How To Use M2 Mac Mini! (Complete Beginners Guide)

well it's your lucky day you may have just ended up buying a Mac Mini or more particularly this M2 Mac Mini or the M2 Pro Mac Mini and you might be trying to figure out how you can actually use it now these are brand new devices or even if you bought a super old Mac Mini these things last a very long amount of time but especially the m models are very solid so in this quick video I'm going to show you exactly how to use this Mac you know including kind of setting it up I'm assuming you already at least plugged it in and you know went through the setup but we'll go ahead and start off with the outside of the specific Mac so at the very top you have your Apple logo which is great there's no I O there's nothing to touch or anything on the top on the front there's not really too much else going on either there's a little like power light at the very front that you can barely see so you can sometimes see if your Mac is like in sleep mode you know it usually only has like two colors that it kind of Cycles through but beyond that there's no ports on the front like the Mac Studio on the side here there's no other i o and on the side here there's no other i o either but on the back there is basically all the ports you could ever you know will choose from in your whole entire life so if I go and zoom in you can kind of get an idea of exactly what we're working with so in this case you can see we basically have starting from the left our power button so we can quickly power on or you know power off our Mac in you know certain situations by clicking this power button we do need to make sure it's plugged in but by clicking this you'll basically have the ability of powering it on now you also have your AC adapter here so this is where you're going to plug your Mac in if you actually want to go ahead and you know get power to it so this is basically our power cord we have an ethernet cord as well now ethernet is great if you want a wired you know internet connection now normally most people will go Wi-Fi but you do get better speeds most the time if you actually plug it in which is super nice you have depending on the Mac Mini that you get if you get the M2 Pro one you will end up having four USBC ports here but here we have two so keep that in mind and this is the cheapest one you could buy so in this case we have two so these ports are great if you actually go ahead and want to plug storage in or you want to transfer data between one device or the other typically what I do is I plug in a dongle here that gives me SD card access and I can plug in my SD card to these devices it's exactly pretty much I do with my Max and you know any other Mac for the most part these also do great with monitors so I think you can do two to three displays on the specific Mac which is great so in this case you do have the ability of plugging in multiple displays on this Mac which is awesome but I would probably consult with your specific you know documentation of your Mac because I know with the M1 Mac Mini I believe you can only do one device you know One display you have another HDMI port here which is great so that frees up another extra Port so if you wanted to use an HDMI ported device we can just plug it in here and you'll be fine this little you know portion down here is I think the exhaust fan so it'll just take out all the hot air which is nice on the right side this is awesome you have two USB a ports and a headphone jack on the back of this device so that is actually really awesome so basically we have a lot of i o here that you can just cycle through you probably won't even need a dongle if you don't need an SD card but if you need an SD card you might want to you know attach an extra dongle but you have a lot of stuff here now if you actually want to go ahead and actually we'll take a look at the bottom there's nothing really else going on it's pretty much just a flat side this is like rubberized so it'll just stay in place as you use it which is really nice but now if you actually want to go ahead and connect your Mac to an actual monitor you do need a few different things so one you will need the AC adapter here and two you will need a USBC or a dongle like a usb-a to a lightning or you know maybe another port to plug in a Wired Mouse wireless mouse wired keyboard whatever you want to do because you will actually need to set it up those things do not come natively in the box you'll have to buy them separately so to start off what you want to do and then in this case what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and take our AC adapter which came in the Box it's this little thing that has like two holes next to it and we are going to plug it into this specific portion of our monitor or our Mac Mini so we're going to go ahead and take our you know two prong whatever this thing is the AC adapter and we are going to plug it in until it kind of snaps into place right there now you can find these all over the place if you lost yours you know they're available they're very very standard now we are also going to go ahead and find an HDMI cord or you can also plug in like I mentioned a you know a USBC Port if you have it but in this case our reminder is a little bit older we have an HDMI cord so now what we can do is we can go ahead and pretty much just plug in our HDMI port into our HDMI cord like this and that is pretty much step two now the last step is basically plugging in your you know how you're going to to navigate through your whole entire system so in this case I do have a magic keyboard and a Magic Mouse so for me to go ahead and set these up with this it's a very basic process the first thing you want to do is go ahead and plug in and basically power on your specific Mac so go ahead and you know power it on and you should hear a little boot up sound sometimes maybe not it really just depends if it doesn't boot up then that's kind of an issue and there we go I can see it from my monitor that it's actually putting up so in this case once it's powered on you can go ahead and grab some sort of lightning cord if you want to if you're using one of these types of keyboards so in this case I'm going to be using this specific you know lightning Port so I'm going to go and take this lining Port here I'm going to plug it into the USB C Port that we had right here and then what you can do is you can go and grab the lightning Port here and go ahead and plug it into the size or at least with the you know lightning Port of these devices so if they're Wireless that's a different type of way of setting it up but if they're wired or they have the ability of being charged up all you have to do is go and plug them in one time to your specific Mac menu like this you can go and unplug it do the exact same thing with your keyboard go ahead find the lightning you know Port which is right at the very end of this one go and plug it in just like this and that is all you're going to have to do your device should now be detected with these you know keyboards and the mouses and you are almost ready to go so now we're going to make our way over to our Monitor and we're going to go ahead and show you a little bit around that device too so now we are at the monitor so as soon as you boot it up you won't get all this stuff I think it just booted up exactly what I had before but essentially when you first boot it up you'll see a bunch of different stuff on your screen now I'm assuming you already went through your initial setup phase so keep that in mind when you first screw it up for the very first time you may end up getting some sort of like pop-up display that shows you exactly like you know setup connect to Wi-Fi whatever just go and go through that setup that's very basic and it's just a bunch of personal and it's just a bunch of personal information anyway so that's really all you need to go through now starting off at the very top if you're very new to Mac OS I'll give you a quick breakdown the very top you'll see your little top bar basically you'll see an Apple logo up here which gives you more information we'll talk about that in a second and some other settings throughout the application that you're actually in so here we were in chess so it gives us a few other options up here at the very top left if you go up here you do see and I know it's a little hard to tell but you can see your date and time your Wi-Fi connection you can search for a lot of stuff within Spotlight search you can go into your control panel here and you can edit up your Wi-Fi Bluetooth connections you can see your display if you have the toggle of it you know I did actually you know tinkering around with your display you have that ability here too and you can increase or decrease the sound in this case my Mac Mini does have a built-in speaker but in this case you can also you know kind of change around with your monitor if you want to use your monitor speaker you can also change around that too now you will also see the dates and the time settings up in the top right so that's also very cool you have that ability and you can change around all these widgets now your home screen will have a bunch of different stuff inside of it so as you download files or you download whatever things will be placed here you can also I think drag and drop certain things you know from your bar down here to your main display here looks like it doesn't work every time but you do have that capability you can right click on your magic mouse or on your keyboard as well and you can basically create folders and whatnot on your home screen now at the very bottom you will see your dock now this is one of the most important areas of your specific Mac because this is where you're going to tinkering around probably see all your applications the most so these are completely configurable if you want to remove something you can just right click on it for some reason the right click is not working on my magic mouse but you can right click on it and you can remove it which is really cool and you can basically drag and drop it so if you want to get this out of here you can do that and there's a lot of stuff you can do here you can also if you if you want you can click on the launch pad which is right over here and you can see all the applications that are on your Mac so ones that are currently supported that are in your applications folder will show up here so you can swipe through them and kind of get an idea too which is really cool so that is a quick breakdown that's really all you need to know at least for a quick you know introduction your main web browser of choice is going to be Safari so if you want to search for anything you can go and search for applications you can or you can search on the web you can also double click the top here and you can move around these windows basically of any application by clicking at the very top and kind of dragging it around you can also exit out of the application like they can hear you can minimize it and you can full screen the application by going like this you can click the Escape key or sometimes in some applications to exit out or you can swipe up like this now those are basically the things at a high level but if we go ahead and make our way over to our Apple logo up here you'll see a few things you can see about this Mac which will basically tell you exactly what type of Mac that you have which is awesome you can go into force quit which I don't really recommend you can you know lock your screen you can shut down restart your computer but if we quickly go into system settings and the scenario that I probably wouldn't want the majority of people to be kind of familiar with so if we go and look here I should have probably made my you know screen a little bit you know higher in font or whatever but here if you have an iPhone it's very similar to that so you will see a bunch of information here basically just stating you know sound Wi-Fi Bluetooth so this is where you're going to spend probably a little bit of time kind of configuring around with a specific option so what I would recommend doing here for the most part is just going up here to General clicking on software update and basically getting in the habit of updating your Mac whenever you have the update so if there's a big update you don't have to necessarily update to it but if you have these smaller ones you know like security fixes whatnot I would probably recommend updating your Mac because that's probably what's going to you know end up keeping your Mac as secure as possible for as long as possible so that is pretty much it those are pretty much the main up those are pretty much the main things to keep in mind on basically how to use your Mac at this point all you have to do now is just kind of dive deep in you know start using it and you know hopefully you can start being a pro at your Mac so that pretty much covers it up you have any other thoughts or questions let me know in the comment section below hit the like button not me so much but definitely hit that subscribe button more importantly with everything else I love every single one of you guys hopefully I'll catch you guys in the next video peace out till then [Music] thank you

Channel: Simple Alpaca

Views: 257,689

Keywords: simplealpaca, simple alpaca, SimpleAlpaca, Simple Alpaca, mac, mac mini, mac mini review, m2 mac, m2 mac mini, m2 mac mini review, how to use mac, how to use mac mini, how to use macbook, how to use imac, how to use mac mini m2, how to use m2 mac, how to use m2 mac mini

Id: FKx_hhKoYyI

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023