The Mac settings worth changing in the first ten minutes
· 5 min read
There is a genre of Mac advice that lists sixty settings to change. Most of them do not matter, and working through the list is how a new machine eats an afternoon.
These are the ones that change how the Mac feels every day. Ten minutes, and then stop.
Keyboard: two sliders that matter more than anything else
System Settings, Keyboard.
Key Repeat: fastest. Delay Until Repeat: shortest.
The defaults are conservative, designed so that nobody accidentally repeats a character. If you type for a living, these two sliders are the single most noticeable change available on a Mac. Holding an arrow key to move through text goes from sluggish to instant.
Do this first. You will notice it within a minute.
Trackpad: speed and tap
System Settings, Trackpad.
Tracking speed: higher than the default. Most people settle two or three notches above where it starts. The default makes a fast machine feel slow.
Tap to click: on. Pressing the trackpad down all day is unnecessary effort.
Decide about natural scrolling now. It is reversed relative to Windows. Either commit for a week or switch it off, but do not keep changing it.
Finder: three things it hides by default
Open a Finder window, then the View menu.
Show Path Bar. Puts the full location at the bottom of every window. Removes a whole category of “where am I” confusion.
Show Status Bar. Item counts and free space.
Then Finder, Settings, Advanced: Show all filename extensions. Knowing whether a file is a .pages or a .pdf without opening it is worth the slight untidiness.
While you are there, Finder, Settings, General: set New Finder windows show to whatever you actually open most, usually your home folder rather than Recents.
Finally, drag your working folders into the sidebar. It starts nearly empty and it is the fastest navigation the Mac has.
Dock: remove what you will not use
The default Dock is a showcase, not a working set.
Right-click anything you do not use, then Options, Remove from Dock. A Dock of six applications you actually open is faster than one of twenty.
Worth considering: Automatically hide and show the Dock, which gives back screen height on a laptop. And turn off Show recent applications in Dock, which otherwise keeps changing where things are.
Hot Corners: at least one
System Settings, Desktop & Dock, then Hot Corners at the bottom.
Set the bottom-right to Lock Screen or Screen Saver. Flicking the pointer into a corner to lock the machine when you stand up becomes automatic within days.
Avoid setting all four at first. Corners you did not mean to trigger are more annoying than corners you do not have. Hot Corners covers which ones people keep.
Screenshots: change where they land
By default every screenshot goes to the Desktop, which fills up quickly.
Press Command-Shift-5, choose Options, and set Save to a folder of its own. Make one called Screenshots in your home folder.
Same panel, turn off Show Floating Thumbnail if the preview that hovers after each screenshot annoys you. The screenshot tool covers the rest of what that panel does.
Battery and display, on a laptop
System Settings, Displays: turn on True Tone if it is not already, and set Night Shift to a schedule if you work in the evening.
System Settings, Battery: Low Power Mode on battery only is a reasonable default for a machine you carry.
Leave the rest. Battery settings are one of the areas where fiddling produces confidence rather than results.
The two that are not settings
Name the Mac. System Settings, General, About. It appears in AirDrop, Find My, backups and every device list you will ever see. Naming a Mac covers picking one that stays useful.
Turn on the backup. Before you put anything on the machine, while the first pass takes minutes. This is the setting people defer and regret. A backup plan that survives one thing going wrong covers what is reasonable.
Then stop
Everything else can wait until you have used the machine for a fortnight and know what actually annoys you. Preferences changed before you have a complaint are guesses.
Questions
Should I turn off Spotlight indexing to speed things up? No. Indexing is intensive for the first day and then costs nothing, and Spotlight is one of the better parts of macOS. Spotlight covers using it properly.
Is it worth turning off transparency? On an older machine, sometimes. System Settings, Accessibility, Display, Reduce Transparency genuinely helps when the graphics are struggling. On a current Mac it makes no difference.
What about Siri? Personal preference and nothing depends on it. If you will not use it, turning it off removes a menu bar icon and a keyboard shortcut you might trigger by accident.
Do I need to change security settings? The defaults are sensible. Confirm FileVault is on and leave the rest until you have a reason. Keeping a Mac secure without making it unusable covers where the real trade-offs are.