Setting up a new Mac: the order that saves you a week later
· 7 min read
A new Mac takes about twenty minutes to become usable and about a fortnight to become yours. The gap is filled with small annoyances that are cheap to prevent and tedious to fix afterwards: a machine named after a shop, an account with the wrong short name, a backup that was never set up, apps installed from the first search result rather than the right source.
The order below front-loads the decisions that are awkward to change and defers the ones you can adjust any time.
Before you switch it on
Two decisions, both irreversible in practice.
Decide whether you are migrating. Bringing everything across from an old Mac is convenient and carries the old machine’s accumulated clutter with it. Starting clean is more work now and gives you a machine with nothing on it you did not choose. There is no universally right answer, and it is much harder to change your mind after the first login. Should you migrate or start clean covers the trade properly.
If you are migrating, have the old Mac charged, on the same network, and ideally connected by cable. Do not start the process on a laptop at nine percent.
Decide the account name. The first account you create sets your home folder name, and changing it later is genuinely fiddly. Use something short and lowercase without spaces. Your display name can be anything and is trivially changed; the short name is the one that sticks.
The first ten minutes
Work through Setup Assistant without hurrying, and note three things.
Apple Account. Sign in with the account you actually use for purchases. If you have two accounts, one for purchases and one for iCloud, this is the moment to think about which is which, because untangling them later is unpleasant. Signing in to a Mac covers what each one controls.
FileVault. Turn it on. Setup Assistant offers it and the default is usually correct. On a modern Mac the performance cost is not noticeable, and without it the contents of the drive are readable by anyone who takes it. What FileVault protects you from is worth reading if you want to know the limits.
Location and analytics. Neither matters much. Say no to analytics if you would rather not send diagnostics; nothing depends on it.
Skip Apple Pay, Siri and Screen Time for now. All three are easy to set up later and all three slow you down here.
Name the machine, immediately
System Settings, General, About, and set the name. Then check Sharing, where the local network name is derived from it.
This takes thirty seconds and pays back constantly. The name appears in AirDrop, in Find My, in Time Machine backups, on your network, and in every list of devices you will ever look at. A machine called “MacBook Pro” among four other machines called “MacBook Pro” is a small, permanent tax. Naming a Mac covers picking one that stays useful.
Set up the backup before you put anything on it
This is the step people defer, and deferring it is how a fortnight of work is lost.
Connect a drive and turn on Time Machine now, while there is almost nothing to back up and the first pass takes minutes rather than hours. A backup you set up on day one runs quietly forever; one you plan to set up “once things settle” competes with everything else you are doing.
If you have no drive yet, at minimum confirm what is syncing to iCloud, and understand that syncing is not backing up: a file deleted on one device disappears everywhere. iCloud is not a backup covers the distinction, and a backup plan that survives one thing going wrong covers what a reasonable arrangement looks like.
Then the settings that affect everything else
A short list worth doing before you install anything, because each one changes how the rest of the setup feels.
Trackpad. Turn on Tap to Click if you like it, and set the tracking speed higher than the default, which is conservative.
Keyboard. Set key repeat to fast and delay until repeat to short. If you type, this is the single most noticeable change available.
Finder. Set new windows to open somewhere useful, show the path bar and status bar from the View menu, and add your working folders to the sidebar.
Dock. Remove what you will not use. A Dock full of applications you never open is harder to use than a short one.
Hot Corners. Set at least one, usually bottom-right for the screen saver or lock. Hot Corners covers the ones people actually keep.
The remainder can wait. There is a long tail of preferences that feel urgent and are not, and doing them now means doing them before you know how you use this machine.
Installing applications
Two rules that prevent most trouble.
Get software from the developer or the App Store, not from a search result. Search results for popular Mac applications are a well-known target for imitation sites, and the download will run and look right. Type the developer’s address directly, or use the App Store.
Install in waves. Put on the five applications you cannot work without, use the machine for a few days, then add what you actually miss. Installing forty applications on day one guarantees you keep some you would not have chosen.
Expect Gatekeeper to stop something at least once. That is normal for software from outside the App Store, and it is not a sign that anything is wrong. Gatekeeper explained covers what the warnings mean and which ones deserve attention.
The week after
Three things worth doing once the machine is in use.
Check what is starting at login, in System Settings, General, Login Items. Installers add things there, and the list grows without anyone deciding it should.
Confirm the backup has actually run. Set up is not the same as working, and Time Machine’s menu bar item will tell you when it last completed.
Go through Privacy & Security and read what has been granted. Applications ask for permissions during their first run, when you are busy, and it is worth reviewing what you agreed to when you were not paying full attention.
Questions
How long should a migration take? Over a cable, roughly an hour for a modest amount of data, considerably longer over Wi-Fi. Start it when you do not need the machine.
Can I change my account short name later? It is possible and it is fiddly, involving renaming the home folder and repointing the account. Far easier to get right at the start.
Should I install macOS updates immediately on a new Mac? Yes, at the start. A new machine often ships with an older version, and updating before you install anything is the least disruptive moment to do it.
Do I need to set up Find My? It is on by default when you sign in with an Apple Account, and it is worth confirming rather than assuming. Find My on a Mac covers what it does and does not make possible.