First Time Setup

• Best Settings For System Preferences On Mac Computers
• Best Settings For System Preferences On Mac Computer

The first thing you should do is update your system. To do that go:Apple menu () > About This Mac > Software Update.

Turn on/off Night Shift from System Preferences. Launch the System Preferences app on your Mac. Alternately, click on the Apple menu at the top left corner of the screen and choose System Preferences. Now, click on Displays. Next, make sure the Night Shift tab is selected. After that, check the box right next to Manual to turn on Night.

Also upgrade your OS to the latest version to have a more secure OS. macOSupgrades are usually free so you might as well keep your machine up to date.

If this is a new computer there are a couple tweaks you could make to theSystem Preferences. These settings are all optional, consider themsuggestions. Always choose the setting that makes the most sense to you.

Users & Groups

Best Settings For System Preferences On Mac Computers

• In System Preferences, you can customize the settings to prevent others from altering the crucial settings on your Mac. If options in a preference pane that you wish to change are dimmed or grayed out, click the padlock icon in the bottom of the window and type your administrator password.
• Going into System Preferences is fine, but macOS Big Sur does a good job of providing quick access to a number of settings by bringing the iOS Control Center to Mac.

• Login Options -> Change fast user switching menu as Icon
• Set up Password, Apple ID, Picture, etc.

Trackpad

• Point & Click
  • Enable Tap to click with one finger
  • Change Secondary click to Right corner
  • Uncheck Three Finger Drag
• Scroll & Zoom
  • Uncheck all apart from Zoom in and out

Dock

• Visual Settings
  • Change position to Left and make the size of icons Small
• Other settings
  • Remove workspace auto-switching by running the following command:

Finder

• General
  • Change New finder window show to open in your Home Directory
• Sidebar
  • Add Home and your Code Directory
  • Uncheck all Shared boxes

Menubar

• Remove the Display and Bluetooth icons
• Change battery to Show percentage symbols

Best Settings For System Preferences On Mac Computer

Spotlight

• Uncheck fonts, images, files etc.
• Uncheck the keyboard shortcuts as we'll be replacing them withAlfred

Accounts

• Add an iCloud account and sync Calendar, Find my Mac, Contacts etc.

User Defaults

• Enable repeating keys by pressing and holding down keys: defaults writeNSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false (and restart any appthat you need to repeat keys in)
• Change the default folder for screenshots
  • Open the terminal and create the folder where you would like to storeyour screenshots: mkdir -p /path/to/screenshots/
  • Then run the following command: defaults write com.apple.screencapturelocation /path/to/screenshots/ && killall SystemUIServer