Setting Up My Mac Mini M1 (Apps, Settings & Tips)

hey friend and welcome back to the channel so i recently got a new mac mini that is now powering my entire productivity desk setup so in this video i'm going to show you all the settings the tips and the apps that i installed on my new mac mini so if you bought a new mac mini or a macbook congratulations welcome to the club or maybe if you're trying to power up your mac experience even further this is the right video for you i haven't set up a new mac in a long time i got my macbook in 2016 and ever since i haven't changed and so this video will also be useful for future then when he gets a new macbook and he's trying to set it up all right let's go into the screen let's get started alright so the very first thing that i change on a new mac is set up the mouse and the trackpad speed and the reason for this is because it drives me a little bit insane on how slow this mouse is and because i'm going to use the keyboard and the mouse for everything else that i'm going to do it helps to set that up first because it makes everything else run a lot smoother so let's do that now let's bring up spotlight go into system preferences if you don't know where spotlight is you can do that with command spacebar or by just clicking the little magnifying glass on the menu bar so go into system preferences and if you don't know where to find something all you need to do is type here for example mouse and it's highlight where it is so i'll go the tracking speed the fastest scrolling speed the fastest double click speed the fastest primary mouse button it's the left that is correct so that's all i did and now it goes with blazing speed and you'll see that it also has this zoom on the mouse we'll fix that in a bit then i go into trackpad and i'm gonna do tap to click tap with one finger and that means i can do this and that will open like all the commands that you have on the left side if you're on a macbook because you don't have a mouse it's something that i always love to have then i'm gonna do the tracking speed also fast and then the click which is how you click on this thing you can either do firm medium or light i prefer to have it white and i also could do silent clicking like that and then i can go into scroll and zoom more gestures now if this is the first mac that you have i highly recommend that you spend a few minutes learning all the commands here all the hand gestures are immensely helpful when you're navigating on your mac so spend the next couple of minutes just trying it out so for example closing the four fingers to go into the launchpad or swiping up to see all the desktops that you have might be confusing at first but it's immensely helpful to learn all of these another thing that i like to do is enable the three finger track now before this was in trackpad i believe but now it's a little bit buried in accessibility so first command f search accessibility and you'll see that it's here then i'll go all the way down here until pointed control then i'll go into trackpad options and click enable dragging three finger drag what that means is that now i can hold three fingers and just drag the window wherever i want if this is without drag lock click three fingers nothing happens i can't move it so that's something that i use a lot so three finger track also scrolling speed fast then finally the last thing is going into the keyboard settings so i'll go back and you'll see the keyboard is next to the trackpad let's close that keyboard so here keep repeat i'll go to fast delay until repeat also go to short and then use f1 keys as standard function keys that allows me to control for example the volume here whereas before i couldn't so now all i have to do is click fn the key then plus and that will automatically put the volume higher so then i go into shortcuts and what you want to click is this use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls press the tab key to move focus forward and shift tab to move focus backwards so let me demonstrate what this does if i want to go in between controls you see that i'm using the shift here and it's just moving in between the left thing here the right one and then the search bar but for example if i want to go to the second one increase display brightness i can't do that with the shift but if i click this i can now do so shift shift and then you'll see that it's navigating between all the things in the screen now this is one of those things that you only notice when you're missing it so i always make sure that i take that box to use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls right so that's mouse trackpad and keyboard all set up all the settings that i want at this point what i want to do is check for updates even if you buy a new mac you might need to update for a new os so you click the apple there about this mac software update now we'll check for updates and it will let you know if you have any update is needed i did and i already did this before this video but if not all you have to do is click there and update and so if your mac needs a software update that might take a couple of minutes sit back relax drink a cup of coffee drink a cup of tea come back to the mac completely updated with the new latest software right let's now talk about on all the settings that i want to change on my new mac mini so first the number one thing that i do is to turn off document sharing with the icloud now this is a little bit annoying because it comes by default but i don't use icloud at all i use google drive so let's turn that off and what we need to do is go into system preferences then you'll see your apple id here and then you'll see at the top apps on this mac using icloud and if you click icloud drive options here you'll see desktop and document folders and actually i don't want to save any of those because what happens is you want to add the files on a computer that live on the cloud and like i said i use google drive instead so i'm gonna set those all down and also you get start getting these annoying pop-ups by apple you've run out of high cloud space which is a little bit annoying and then i'll also remove the mail because i don't use that app the reminders safari and then also stocks home in siri because i don't use those on my mac right the next thing that i do is go look into siri so i don't want to use siri on my macbook or my mac mini if you click enable ask siri that will show siri in your computer and don't want that actually now when i set this up it asks you by default when you're setting up the computer so that's really cool and if this is check show siri in menu bar you'll see the siri here don't want that so uncheck that as well now let's talk a little bit about security settings the first thing that you want to do is turn on firewall so you can do that by going again into the system preferences and then security and privacy and again you can search so security and you'll see that it's this little house vault i guess then you click the walk to make changes i'm going to input my password here turn on firewall and that is done and now that we're here in security and privacy let's also talk about privacy the first thing you want to do is go through all the apps that you see here and over time as well and enable or disable location services so for example obs which is the only app that i've installed so far because i need to record the screen is allowed access to my microphone that's fine but you'll see here all the other apps as you build them along that they're getting access to your location and other things so come back once you've installed a couple of apps to your privacy and check that you're not sharing things that you don't need to one thing that i like to do is go into analytics and improvement and not share any analytics with apple now i'm pretty sure they have a lot of data they can figure out how to make their products a lot better without needing my data and i'm sure they'll go back in the other day from me so you're going to share mega analytics just take that off and also apple advertising i will uncheck personalized ads so they will still show ads but not personalized tyler to me i kind of want that in place so that's the first sweep that i'll do in security and privacy and then like i said i'll come back once i have a couple of apps to see if i'm not sharing things that i really don't need to share finally the last thing i'll do is go into hot corners so to do that we're going to system preferences you can search here like i said before going to desktop and screensaver and then you want to click here where it says hot corners and this will allow you to do things on the corners of the screen so for example on the left here let's say that i want to open the launch pad on the left down i like to go to the desktop so if i'm here or if i have a lot of documents here happening i can go here and i'll be on the desktop on the top right i like to use mission control so do that and do the multiple displays if i want and then on the bottom right here i like to use put display to sleep so not powering down the computer just putting the display to sleep you can actually put it to sleep with alfred later on this video i'm gonna talk all about alfred and click okay and that's it right let's not talk about the dock situation here and this is biggie because by default it shows you a big big dock i like small minimal because it's taking all these real estate on my screen and my screen is quite big at this point but imagine wasting all this space in such a small macbook why would you do this so the first thing that i'll do is remove all the apps that i don't want all you have to do is left click options and then remove from dock or what you can do instead is just hold on to the item click mail and then you'll see this little thing called remove and then it's gone so let's do that for all the apps right so i'll have the calendar the notes and the system preferences for now now what i like to do is resize this and you can do so in here all you need to do drag it up and down so i'm just going to do it real small and then you do left click here and you go into dock preferences and here you can see docker menu bar preferences so first what i like to do the size you can also resize here if you want so i'm just going to leave it what it is you can do magnification if you want to do it up i don't use this a lot so i'm going to check that off and then because screens today are horizontal in a way that you see things i like to position the dock bar on the left side of the screen so that i'm not wasting all these real estate space and again my monitor is quite big but imagine this on a 13 inch so position left and you'll see that it appears here on the left then what i like to do is automatically hide and show the dock and that will mean that when i check this it will hide the dock here on the left and if i want to show it i can just go on the left there and we'll show another big one is minimize windows into application icon and what this means is that if i open a new tab for example let's open safari here and i say hello world and i close it's going to minimize it directly into safari now the problem is if i close safari it will still show it here on the site because it's a recent application and is trying to learn from what i need the most but i don't need that prompt so i can click show recent applications in doc let me just click automatically show and then if i click it you'll see that those have disappeared so that's what i do when docs are concerned let's now talk about the menu bar and the first thing that i like to do is automatically hide and show the menu bar for the very same reason of the dock being on the left it's just taking a little bit of real estate don't wanted that because it's horizontal so if i click it it will disappear and if i hover over it it will show again now for the sake of this let's just keep it open and you'll see that it's spotlight here but i use keyboard actually i use offered something i'm going to talk about later in this video so i don't need to see that in the menu bar so i can go into spotlight showing menu bar untick that it will remove i'll also remove the now playing showing menu bar when active if i'm watching a video show like now playing this video and sound when active i'm gonna put as always because i want to see at all times that i can about the sound also i don't need the splice so i'm gonna disable that and i want to be able to see bluetooth so i'm going to click show on menu bar and this allows me to see everything that's connected so for example the keyboard the trackpad the mouse and also the headphones that i have the airpods and the bose headphones and then finally wi-fi um also selected so go back automatically hide and show the menu bar and now it's just a very nice screen nothing on it beautiful very minimalistic setup of the mac so the last thing that you want to do is also show the battery on the menu bar now obviously this is a mac mini so it doesn't have battery but on a macbook you're going to have battery and you want to do show in menu bar and also show the percentage so that it shows like this one here it has 100 so that it shows how much battery you have left in your macbook right let's talk about the desktop and the finder so when you first open finder it's a little bit weird and i customized this over the years in my macbook so i'm going to do the same setup in the finder here so the first thing that you want to do is click into view and then you want to show path bar and that underneath here will show you the path of the folder that you are that is immensely helpful because then i can click on it and navigate to for example here my macintosh hd or if i go for example into desktop and i want to navigate to my main folder now the second thing that you want to go is going to view then show status bar this will tell you the amount of items within a folder and also the amount of storage that it's taking so if you have for example here on the downloads folder you see that it's only obs one item and you have this much available then let's talk about the finder settings so all you have to do is go click finder and then preferences put here on the side so show these items on desktops i don't want to show anything on desktop because again i like that clean minimal look and then you'll find the window is going to show the recent so for example if i open a new finder window here it's going to show the reasons which is not really helpful to me what i spend most of the time retreating files is from downloads so i can actually choose other and then i go into downloads and then i'm going to choose that so now if i open a new finder it's going to go into downloads pretty useful right then i'm going to tags and i'm select i don't really use tags i don't need them sidebar you'll see that the items here you can customize and so i have my macbook here so i have desktop is the first one now i do have applications i don't have recents i have desktop documents downloads i don't have movies music pictures i probably want my home folder here i don't need icloud drive again i don't use it and then locations i'm just going to choose this computer and text again i don't use it now let's go into the advanced settings i'll just choose remove items from bin after 30 days even though i clean my bin every week and then when performing a search this is the last one you want to search within this mac or search within a folder i want to use search within the current folder and what that means is if i'm searching something so command f there and i'm searching for for example obs is searching the entire mac but i just want to search within downloads because i know it's in this folder so what happens the most is i'll search within a folder for something and the exception to that rule is searched within the mac so it makes sense that search the current folder will be my default so now if i go back and i try to search again and i search obs it's now only finding within downloads and that's what i want and then i also spent some time rearranging the icons on the favorites here on the left so we have desktop then i have applications then i have downloads documents i have airdrop and creative cloud which i don't have here so actually i might have forgotten airdrop right so air drop there so downloads documents airdrop daniel and i also have a folder here for youtube but because i don't have that folder yet i can do it but all you need to do is drag that into the site so for example archive here i'll drag it here and if you want to remove you can just say remove from sidebar and that will remove that folder a pretty neat thing is also hitting command and dragging it will also take the file to the top and that's easy navigation so for example if i'm on downloads i click there it goes into the top of the archive and then remove it click command and it disappears now let's talk about the views in your finder by default it's showing you as a list i like to show as columns but so to assume this as default go into view customize and then always open in column view browse in comb view close that and it will always open like this now another thing is by default it doesn't have the scroll bars only when it starts scrolling will start showing and that's a little bit annoying so i'm going to do default always shows scrolling so to do that you go to system preferences and then general which is here and then show scroll bars always and then you always see the scroll bars here let me show you so for example if i go to the applications i can show you automatically based on mouse and trackpad if i go down it will show that when scrolling it will start showing when i scroll and always it will always show that scrolling so i kind of like that now let's talk about the launchpad so four fingers to the center and you'll see all these apps now i don't use launchpad that much because i use offer again i'm going to talk about this in a minute but it's a little bit confusing if i need to go there so what i like to do is just move everything into the folder it's going to give it a name in this case productivity i don't care but basically it's a miscellaneous folder right so all you need to do is just drag all these apps into there don't use google maps quickly do that to all the apps right now your launchpad looks a lot nicer final last setting that i change on a new macbook is to disable the floating thumbnail when i'm taking a new screenshot so if i do shift command 3 i take a screenshot you'll see that here on the right it shows for a few minutes before going into the desktop a floating thumbnail of that screenshot and now it's send it over here now if you take a lot of screenshots as i do this is a little bit annoying you don't want that floating thumbnail you just want the screenshot to appear automatically so what you can do instead is shift command 5 it will go into this window to select things and then you can go into options and remove the tick on show floating thumbnail so click that cancel and now shift command 3 again and the screenshot automatically appears no floating thumbnail to annoy the wifi view right finally let's talk apps now everyone has their own set of apps that they use for the type of work i'm not gonna go into detail in a lot of these apps because they are specific to my work and they're gonna be different maybe for your work but i will talk about the apps that i would install on any new macbook or mac mini or anything that i'm setting the first one the absolute number one app that i'll install is alfred now i've talked about alfred before in this channel offroad is like spotlight on steroids it does a lot more it has a paid version for about 49 pounds i believe best investment that you're gonna make so let's install that right now right what i like to do as well is set up offer that it works on the same command that it works with spotlight which is command space so to do that you need to first change your spotlight preferences right so let's open spotlight here and then click keyboard shortcuts and then when you see show spotlight search command space and tick that so when you go into here you can select command space and now command space opens alfred launch offered at login yes and then i'll also go into features here and then choose folders documents text files archives and images then i like to go into clipboard history keep playing text for a month and that allows you to something that you type today 30 days from now still retrieve it using alpha and that's absolutely amazing and then you can customize the appearance i like the orange avenir it's a little bit easier on the eyes with that font so a lot better then also go into calculator and input and say use decimal point as decimal separator so before if i do 1.5 plus 1 it won't do 2.5 but if i use decimal point i can do that and it will give me 2.5 and then obviously you can search offred for example new coffee beans and you can search within amazon wikipedia or something like all the things that offer normally does much better than spotlight in my opinion the number one app that i always install the second thing that i always install obviously is google chrome so now let's go here into safari be a little bit of trader and install google chrome and because this is running on the new m1 silicon apple chip it's going to ask me if you want the intel chap or the apple chip so i'm going to choose the apple one hello thanks for downloading so now it's here on my downloads google chrome now i do realize that google chrome is a little bit slow and a little bit of a hog in the computer but there are a couple of things that it just does a lot better than safari for example browsing youtube is one of them and also because i use the extensions a lot it really helps to have google chrome i'm just used to it don't judge me please so i'm gonna set as a default browser and again remove the sharing things so use chrome and now you're able to log in and at this point i log in also as well to lastpass because that's going to make signing up on everything else a lot easier and all the extensions and all the websites as well then i'm going to install a windows resizer because if you open something here let's open safari and chrome moving things around is a little bit weird here and i want to be able to do this with my keyboard so the app that i like is called spectacle you can show here and it gives you all this commands to move and resize windows with ease and it's a little bit sad that apple doesn't do this very well windows does this very well maybe that's why it's called windows and so when you install spectacle you need to give it accessibility features so let's do that right now so then we can open spectacle here and it will give you all these commands that you can use so for example option command c is going to center that screen and you'll see here on the menu bar you'll see it so the upper left and you'll do all of this what i use the most is this one to go to the left and then choose in thirds so i'll do one on the left here and then writing something on the right but because this is a big monitor sometimes i like to have three and i'll open like a new chrome bar or safari bar or something like that and i'll put it center here and i'll put this one on the right and then on the third so now i have three screens that i can use at all times a little bit of a flex there but you get to point that you can use spectacle and you have all these commands thirds lower left upper left all these things when i have just the macbook and no external display i would use thirds a lot upper left lower left up the right because i could open like four things at the same time so spectacle is free very cool just make sure you click here launch spectacle at login to make sure that whenever you power up your mac mini or macbook um spectacle is already running for you when you start finally the last app is display perturb this pipetter is very i would say useless app but very pleasing experience what it does is allows you to have round corners on your screen and i realize this is a very first world thing to talk about but i kind of like it so you can open it here and you'll see that the corners here so radius is this is the normal one and then you can do all the white to 540 pts i kind of like to set it at 12. default is 10. kind of like it a little bit more and you'll see that the corners are a little bit round and that's all it does so yeah i realize this is very much a first world app i guess but it's just a nice pleasing experience to have a little bit of round corners on your monitor either in your macbook or if using an external monitor with a macbook or a mac mini like i am so that's it that's all the settings the tips the tricks the apps that i install on my new mac mini if you follow this along you'll be changing the settings and all the apps in your macbook that's an awesome thing what i recommend that you do at this time and i wish i did this five years ago is that you create a checklist as you're doing these things so that the next time that you're doing a setup of a new mac you already have everything in sort of a checklist so if i open my notes here you'll see i have a new mac setup checklist and i have all the things that i talked about in this video here and then if or when i buy a new macbook or a new computer from apple really i just go mouse and trackpad speed up the mouse and i can just do that and then i can just go through this what is called a do checklist to do all the settings very quickly and then the probably 30 minutes i can get all of this done and then you can have that in your phone and just follow along as you're setting up your new mac so let me know in the comments if i missed anything are there settings that you use that i should be using or apps that you really recommend that i install on my new mac mini or other things just drop a comment feel free to start a conversation and if you really like this video please consider subscribing it's completely free and you can change your mind at any point in the future and then if you want to know more about my setup on the mac i have two videos for you the first one is about all the apps that i use in my macbook so in this video i cover the essential apps i install on any new mac but these are all the apps that i use in my macbook and then here on this side you can see how to work faster in your macbook how to move at the speed of light so thank you so much for watching have a great day and i'll see you on the next video bye

Channel: Dan Silvestre

Views: 19,619

Keywords: how i setup a new mac 2021, how i setup a new mac, setup new m1 mac, how i setup a new m1 mac 2021, mac setup guide, mac mini m1 setup step by step, setting up a mac mini, mac tips, macos, how to customize macbook, macos big sur customiztion, new mac user tips, macos tips, new mac tips, macos install tips, new mac mini user tips, how to setup macos, new macos setup, mac tips 2021, mac tips for new users, mac tips and tricks 2021, mac tips for beginners, mac newbie, new mac

Id: GlLesU-THGY

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021