Before The 100
Twelve things to set up once, while the Mac is still new and empty. They are not skills to learn, which is why they sit here rather than in The 100. They are switches to set, and once they are set you can stop thinking about them.
Then you can spend the next three hours rearranging your Dock, guilt-free.
Before you start
These are suggestions, not instructions, and they are your settings to change. Most are reversible in seconds. Two are not, and those say so where they appear. Read those bits before you act on them. When something here could lock you out or lose you a file, we say so rather than burying it.
Run the updates that are waiting
System Settings, General, Software Update. Let it finish before you do anything else. A surprising number of “my Mac is broken” stories are a Mac that has never been updated.
On a brand-new Mac, install what is offered. Later on, treat the two kinds differently: security updates are worth installing promptly, while a brand-new annual macOS version is worth waiting a week or two on if you depend on particular audio, printing or work software.
Sign in to an Apple Account you control
System Settings, right at the top of the sidebar.
Use an account that is yours, not an employer’s and not a family member’s. It is what enables Find My, iCloud, the App Store, password syncing, and several recovery paths. Plenty on this page works without it, but those do not.
Secure that account
Two-factor authentication on, recovery phone number correct, and a look at which devices are signed in.
Worth doing in the same sitting as signing in, because this account is the key to most of the recovery options further down this page. If you skip one thing here, do not skip this one.
Turn on Find My
System Settings, your name, then Find My.
It can help you locate, lock or erase a missing Mac, and Activation Lock makes it much harder for anyone else to reuse. It is not the only thing that helps, since keeping your serial number and having a backup matter too, but it takes two minutes.
Set up Touch ID
System Settings, Touch ID & Password.
Add the fingers you use. Most people end up wanting more than one, because the hand that is free changes depending on what you are doing.
Ask for the password after sleep
System Settings, Lock Screen. Set it to require your password shortly after the screen goes off.
This is the setting that matters if you ever work in a café, a shared house, an office, or anywhere with other people in it.
Set up a backup, and let the first one finish
Plug in an external drive, open Time Machine in System Settings, choose it, and leave it running until the first backup completes.
Use a drive kept for backups and nothing else, ideally a good deal larger than your Mac’s own storage, and plug it in regularly. If the drive came from a Windows PC, or is in a format Time Machine cannot use, macOS will ask to erase it first. That wipes whatever is on it, so read that dialog rather than clicking through it. A drive that is already empty avoids the question entirely. Do this before any big cleanup or file reorganisation, not after. It is the only thing on this page that protects you from deleting something by accident.
Get your passwords working
macOS has a Passwords app built in, and it fills things in for you across Safari and elsewhere. Whatever you use, get it set up now.
If you import from somewhere else and the export produced a file on your desktop, delete that file afterwards. It is a plain list of every password you own. And pick one place to be the real one, rather than half your passwords in a browser and half somewhere else.
Choose your browser and bring things across
Whatever you use. Get bookmarks and passwords over before you build new habits in the wrong place.
Sign into one browser as your main one rather than all of them. Safari is the simplest if the rest of your things are Apple; the others make more sense if you want the same setup on a Windows machine or a phone that is not an iPhone.
Install apps from places you can trust
The App Store, or the software maker’s own website. Those two cover almost everything.
Be wary of download portals, pop-ups telling you something is out of date, and anything advertising itself as a Mac cleaner or Mac antivirus. That last category causes more problems than it solves. When macOS interrupts you to ask whether you really want to open something, that pause is the point. Read it rather than clicking through.
Tame the notifications, gently
System Settings, Notifications and Focus.
Start light: quieten the apps that are obviously noise and leave the rest alone for a fortnight. Turn everything off on day one and you will miss a call or a message that mattered and not understand why.
Make it feel like yours
Tap to Click, in Trackpad. Show indicators for open applications, in Desktop & Dock. That little dot under an icon explains half of macOS. And press ⌘⇧5, then Options, to send screenshots somewhere other than the desktop.
None of these are important. They are the small annoyances that would otherwise nag at you for a year, and they are all reversible in ten seconds.
Not on the list. A decision, not a chore.
FileVault encrypts everything on your Mac, so the files are unreadable to anyone who ends up with it. It is a real security improvement and plenty of people should have it on.
It is separate from the twelve because it is the one thing here that can go badly wrong. Encryption makes files unreadable without the right credentials, and that includes unreadable to you. If you lose your login password and your recovery method at the same time, the files are gone. No support desk can get them back, ours or Apple’s.
So we are not going to tell you to turn it on. If you decide to, do it knowing three things: you have a current backup, you can sign in to your Apple Account, and any recovery key macOS shows you is written down somewhere that is not this Mac and not a photo on the phone beside it. Apple’s own page on it is worth ten minutes first.
One thing we are not
We teach people how to use a Mac. We are not Mac support, and we cannot help with a machine that will not start, a repair, or an account you have lost access to. For any of that, Apple Support is the right place, and it is free to ask.
That is the admin done.
Now the actually interesting part: learning to use the thing.
Start The 100 →
Mac for Newbies