Got a brand new Macbook Laptop for Christmas? Here is what you should do first:
If you found a brand new Macbook Pro or Macbook Air under the tree this year, the excitement is hard to contain! Since only one measly year ago, owning a Mac means so much more, not only in terms of better hardware and a better OS X experience, but also about cool new features that make our lives easier, like Continuity, Handoff and AirDrop.
We can now start working on an iPad, continue on an iPhone and finish on our Mac, where our document is ready to be printed or shared. We can even pick up calls from our iPhones, through FaceTime, and text our holiday cheer to our friends and family’s phones, from our iMac or Macbook Pro.
So here we are tearing up the shiny, colorful wrapper, hiding a sleek, white box with some very familiar lettering. It’s a cool new Macbook!
Question is: what to do first?
One good idea is to immediately get into the settings and make it behave just like we want it. OS X provides easy access to many of these sometimes overlooked features. While Macbooks are great out of the box, they are even better when set up properly, according to our very own individual needs.
Point and Click
Depending on your style and personality, there are different ways to configure your Macbook’s trackpad.
If you are the type of user who’d rather not use buttons to click, you may want to look into the Point and Click options and make sure to check “Tap to Click”, which allows you to click by tapping on the trackpad, “Secondary Click”, which lets you trigger secondary mouse button functions by tapping with two fingers, “Look Up”, or “three fingers tap, and “Drag With Three Fingers”, which is pretty self explanatory.
Spending a little time testing the tracking speed can also go a long way to ensure a more comfortable experience using gestures and other trackpad operations.
Quick Access to drives
This is one of those options that some users may not know about right away, but once they find it they wonder how they got around without it. In the General tab under Finder Preferences, it’s possible to set hard drives, external drives, optical readers and even shortcuts to connected FTP servers, on the desktop. This is especially handy when wanting to frequently access iCloud Drive and Airports devices.
Find My Mac
This one is becoming a must, especially for students who take their Macbooks to public places, like libraries, classrooms, labs and coffee shops. If there is one thing we have learned from smartphones, is that GPS tracking is a priceless feature, whether our new Mac is stolen, or simply dropped at a Lost and Found window.
Under Preferences / iCloud / Log In / Use Find My Mac, we simply use our Apple ID to activate the tracking signal which will allow to pinpoint the position of the Macbook, and even get driving direction to its location! Although in some cases we recommend letting the police do the driving...
Better battery indicator
Macbooks batteries are some of the longest lasting in their category. Left-clicking the battery icon, and selecting “Show Percentage”, gives us a much better indication of how much battery power is left.