Macbook Pro 2021 - First 10 things to do ( Beginner Tips & Tricks )

if you've just won the lottery or taken out a bank loan or maybe you're swimming in money like scrooge mcduck and you've just bought yourself a brand new apple macbook m1 in 2021 or early 2022 you probably want to know how to get your money's worth out of it well that's what this video is all about i'm going to give you guys 10 things that you should know straight off the bat to get the most out of your brand new mac so number one is a tool that i'm actually using to make this video that you're watching so check this out command shift 5 brings up your screenshot options now you can screenshot the entire screen you can screenshot a folder within the screen and you can screenshot a customized part of the screen and you can also capture the entire screen in a video format now if you're in a lot of online meetings and maybe you're dozing off mid-meeting and you want to find out what people were saying in the meeting you could record it using this tool so it's very useful what i'm going to do though is record the entire screen not just the selected portion of the screen so that i can show you guys what i'm doing on the computer as i'm going through the settings and stuff so let's do that now click that click record and there we go the screen now is being recorded now tip number two so some of you might be coming over from windows like i did way back in 2015 and the tips i'm going to show you guys today are going to be extremely useful for you if you are jumping ship because a lot of them are things that i wish someone had told me way back in 2015. anyway check this one out if you're used to right clicking on icons on the desktop and files to bring up the options it's different on mac you actually push two fingers down on a folder or a file or a program to bring up the options but if you can't get out of that habit of right-clicking on things you can set it up here on the track pad if you want and this is how you do it so you go to the top left corner go to system preferences here you want to go to trackpad and here where it says secondary click you use the drop down menu and you can customize the bottom right corner of your trackpad to be your right click so if we do that now whenever we right click in the bottom right corner it brings up the options just like a windows pc that could be very useful for you if you just cannot shake the right click tip number three rein in your icloud so if you've just bought yourself a brand new mac all is well and good and it will be for quite a while until one day you'll get a message from apple saying hey you know that icloud thing that's been running on your computer since the beginning well yeah that's nearly full and we're gonna need you to go ahead and give us some more money for some more icloud because what's actually been happening is it's been backing up all your files and folders and photos and loads of other stuff to the icloud what you need to do on day one is customize actually what it's doing so this is how you do that so you go to your apple logo top left corner again go to system preferences again and from here you want to go to internet accounts click on that and then on this page you can actually link multiple different accounts if you want to but the one we're looking at today is icloud so we click on icloud on the left hand side and you can see here all of the boxes that are ticked are being backed up to the icloud the one that's going to take up the most storage is this one here the icloud drive at the top so if you hit options here these are the things that are actually on your computer that are going to be backed up and this one here desktop and documents folders those are the killers those are the ones that are going to take up the most amount of space especially if you've got more than one apple mac so have a look at this menu think wisely about what you want backed up and what you don't want backed up i do recommend unticking desktop and document folders unless it's absolutely necessary for you i think the better way to do this to make sure you don't fill up that drive too quickly and get that message too early is to back things up manually when the time is right for you so i was using my 2015 macbook for years without doing this and to be honest i probably should have done this on day one but nobody told me but i'm gonna tell you so this little bar across the bottom here it has a bunch of stuff by default and some of this stuff you might never need for example apple music if you're using deezer or tidal you might want to get rid of this and this is how you do it so you can either do the two finger tap or the right click whatever you set up go to options and you can remove it from the dock it's super easy to do and what i recommend you do with the dock is have the apps that you use the most so you can see on my one here i've got premiere photoshop audition and lightroom those aren't there as standard and those are things that i use every time i use this computer so what you want to think about is what do you need on the dock so go through these remove the things you don't need for example apple tv i don't need that get rid of that then what we can do is go to the launch pad which is here on the dock click that and here are all the apps if there's anything here that you think you will use a lot then it's worth dragging it down onto the dock for example let's say calculator let's bring that down drag that onto the dock now it's there i can bring that up whenever i want spend some time make sure you customize that dock so you can fine tune your usage of your macbook and don't worry about deleting things because they will always be there in the launch pad unless you fully uninstall them and here's a little ninja tip for you guys this is something i just personally like and it's something that's not on as default if you double click or right click on an empty bit on the dock you can go to dock preferences here you can switch on a feature that i really like and i don't know why they turned it off but this magnification tick that now when you go to your dock everything will be magnified as you run across it this is an awesome effect definitely recommend switching this one on and here's number five use stacks now stacks should be automatically on if you've got the latest software on your mac but this is how you can manually switch it on switch it off and customize it so on your desktop what you can do is either two finger tap or right click whatever you set up go to use stacks and you can see here there's a little tick next to it meaning that it is on now what stacks will do is take similar files and put them into stacks for example on my desktop you can see images if i click that you can see i've got two thumbnails here all stacked up if i take some other images let's take some out of this folder for example put them on the desktop now all of those images are in the stack when i click the stack it opens it up expands it so you can see everything when i hit the arrow it closes it back down this is just a really really good way of organizing your desktop on your mac and you can go a bit further with this as well and you could really use this to improve your workflow if you right click or two finger tap on the desktop go to group stacks by you can customize how these are organized so you can put them into groups of shared by date last open they added they've modified they created and tags trust me this tool is very useful i do recommend you play around with it i kind of like the kind set up so all my photos are in one place all my psds are in one place when they're on the desktop so the reason you probably bought a macbook and not an imac is because you want to take it around with you maybe on holiday to school to uni to do work on while you're on the go now one of the downsides to having such a big beautiful screen on a laptop is battery power so you need to use it efficiently so you're not draining the power all the time and this tool is going to help you do that so check this one out hit the apple logo top corner system preferences like before here we want to go to desktop and screen saver click on that and then here we want to go to screen saver and then on this page you can choose your screen saver of course i've gone with the drift one but this is what we want to look at hot corners this is important click on this what you can now do is when you slide your mouse into one of these corners it can perform an action i do recommend you stay away from the top left corner because as you've seen in this video quite often i go to that little apple logo in the top left corner take it from me you can definitely hit that top left corner by accident on many occasions so i always leave that one blank but check this out what you can now do is with the top right corner we can choose i've got start screen saver in the top right corner so whenever i go up here the screen saver automatically starts in the bottom right corner i've got put display to sleep so this is a great way to save power on the go when you're not using the screen you can put it to sleep so it's not using any power that trick right there is going to be very handy and then the bottom left corner i've got quick notes so whenever i go down here i can take a note very quickly just by dragging my mouse to the bottom left corner super useful definitely do this customize your hot corners here's number seven it's the three finger drag now this one is not something i use that much but it's been very popular amongst other people in the apple community so i'm going to show you how to do it and i'll show you why some people choose to do it as well so right now in order to drag things around on the desktop what you do is just grab it push down quite forcefully with your finger and then you can move the windows around i personally don't have a problem doing this but there is a way to do it with less resistance so check this out go back to the apple logo top left corner come back to system preferences here you want to go to accessibility in here you want to go to pointer control click on that and you can adjust the speed and everything of the pointer but what i want to show you is the trackpad options which are here and here where it says enable dragging if you click that what you can now do is set this to three finger drag and what this allows you to do is use three fingers to drag things around instead of pushing quite forcefully with one finger so check this out just click on the top of the window you're using and three fingers will move that around it kind of is a little bit easier let me know what you think about this one number eight embrace the darkness going back to what i said about using hot corners to save battery power by turning the screen off well this kind of is similar to that it's not going to save as much power but it will save power and it will be better for your eyes and that is turning on the dark mode this is how you do it go to that top left corner you probably see now why i told you not to set up the top left corner as a hot corner go to system preferences go to general here in general you will see at the top of the screen light mode dark mode and auto if you set it to auto in the daytime there's going to be a light mode at night it's going to be in dark mode that's quite nice it's a nice effect to have if you're stuck in a room all day and there's no sunlight it might give you an idea of what time it is so that could be useful but anyway i always have it on dark mode just because whenever there's black on the screen it's going to use less power than when there's bright areas of the screen and there's going to be way more bright areas of the screen when you're in light mode so switch on dark mode i recommend it but it's entirely up to you and the other thing i recommend you do this really is just a side note is to customize your wallpaper because loads of people buy an apple max you want to kind of make it your own and there's some cool features here on the wallpapers so all you do to open up the menu is do the two finger tap or the right click whatever you set up go to change desktop background this will open up your options for backgrounds and these ones at the top the dynamic ones these are the cool ones the ones with the clouds i haven't downloaded yet but these ones here what they would do is you can set them to dynamic so what that means is as time is ticking over throughout the day the background is going to change the sunlight is going to pass across it until it becomes nighttime again like i said before if you're stuck in a library or in the middle of a building somewhere where there's no sunlight this wallpaper will give you some kind of indication as to what it's like outside so i do think it's a good thing so definitely do that so number nine is one of the reasons i jumped over for windows in the first place it's the security side of things i just got tired of having to have third-party anti-virus and all this kind of stuff going on pop-ups and all this nightmare one of the greatest things about mac computers is you get very little of that but anyway check this out your brand new macbook has got a fingerprint reader built in no face id yet but a fingerprint reader is here and what i recommend you do is set up more fingerprints because you'll only set up one when you set it up the first time let's say you're holding a pen like this you could use maybe this finger here to unlock it or one of your other fingers or maybe even your left hand so this is how you set up more fingerprints i do recommend you probably do all of your right hand seeing as how the fingerprint reader is on the right side of the keyboard so check this out top left corner again system preferences and here where it says touch id click on that and here you can go to add fingerprint once you click that it'll ask you for your password put your password in scan your other finger now you can use multiple fingers to unlock your mech and check this out here's another really cool feature if you have an apple watch which i don't so i can't really show you in practice but i can show you how to set it up come back to system preferences here go to security and privacy now once you're in this folder if you have an apple watch you'll have a tick box here that says unlock mac with apple watch so literally when your watch is close to your mac you can use it to unlock it instead of using the fingerprint or typing in your password that could be very useful for you i do recommend you set that up if you have an apple watch but make sure it's connected to the same apple id as a computer otherwise it won't work you probably bought your macbook so you could be more productive on the go and trust me one thing that's going to stifle your productivity is notifications from hundreds of different sources trust me i know how distracting these things can be here's how you switch them off so hit the apple logo top left corner system preferences this must be becoming very familiar to you now but here where it says notifications and focus click on that and then down the left side here are all the things that are going to send you notifications go through them one by one and decide what things you want to get notifications from and what things you absolutely don't want to get notifications from so think wisely before you switch things off but definitely go through these the other thing i recommend you set up here is focus so let's say you know you're going to be at uni or college at school from a certain time of the day what you can do is set up times of the day where no notifications will come through at all use this wisely you don't want to miss some important emails and stuff that you've been waiting for so be mindful about your choices here so i want to take this opportunity to thank you for getting all the way to number 10. here's a bonus ninja tip for you just for making it this far this is something that's a bit harder to find and not many people know about so so up here where the apple logo is when you hit finder you have all of these settings file edit view go window help help is very useful definitely use that if you're stuck but check this out this is how you access the sequence settings and hidden menus within your mac so when you're hovering over one of these for example file if you hold down options you'll see it expands a little bit and it gives you some other options so if we go to edit hold that down you can see i can do things that weren't there before hold options you can see group stacks or sort stacks but here on go if we hit options you can see we can bring up the library this is something that's kind of hidden away within the computer this is where a lot of files are kept that you don't really have easy access to so this could be useful if you're an advanced user and one of the shortcuts here which i find personally very useful it's not as advanced as some of the other stuff you can do with it but when you go to file and hit options you'll notice you have this close all so if you have loads of files and folders open like loads of windows and adobe premiere and photoshop and safari and deezer and your vpn you've got all of these things running in the background normally what you do to close them all down is i've just shut the computer down entirely or close them down one by one using this option you can shut them all down just by holding options and then going to close all and then of course you've got the shortcuts as well so if you learn this shortcut which is command option and w you can do it without even going into that secret settings and menus and i was going to show you guys all the different gestures and stuff for the trackpad but i think there's thousands of videos out there that already do that so there's no point in me doing i really do appreciate you guys for watching this far into the video if you just subscribed you're now one of the finest subscribers known to man really appreciate your support and i will see you in the next one don't be late

Channel: WhatGear

Views: 32,298

Keywords: new macbook pro 2021, first things to do on new macbook pro, first things to do on new macbook air, first things to do on new macbook, first 7 things to do on new m1 macbook air, macbook pro 2021 tips and tricks, apple macbook pro 2021 tips and tricks, macbook pro shortcuts and tips 2021, macbook pro m1 2021 tips and tricks, linus tech tips macbook pro 2021

Id: kIH9IkMF5hc

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021