How should i configure my macbook pro

If it's going to be awhile, you don't have to babysit it. It's perfectly fine to leave your computer and go watch a show, let it process overnight, or even run some errands. One thing to keep in mind, and Migration Assistant will remind you if you run into this, is that your new Mac needs to be on the same OS update as your old Mac or vice versa. So you may have to finish the setup process without using Migration Assistant, then update your OS directions covering how to do that are below , and then run Migration Assistant.

If you're switching from a PC to a Mac, you can use Apple's Migration Assistant, but the process is a little bit more involved and technical just at the beginning. Apple walks you through the process in this support article. Once you've completed the Setup Assistant and find yourself looking at your Mac's desktop, it's a good idea to check for any pending software updates. Once your Mac's software is up to date, you'll also want to check and make sure all of the preinstalled apps are updated in the App Store.

Find the App Store icon in the app dock along the bottom of your screen. Click on it to open the App Store and then select Updates and then update any apps with pending updates. Now that you have your Mac all set up, it's a good idea to be prepared for any hiccups you may run into. Here are system tweaks you may want to make right away. If this is the first time you've used MacOS Big Sur , we have plenty of tips to help you get started.

When your Mac inevitably slows down, learn how to speed it back up again. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy , which we encourage you to read. To find out more, see Access your iCloud content on your Mac. Screen Time: Monitor and get reports on the use of your computer. For options and details, see Screen Time on Mac. To add a fingerprint, click and follow the onscreen instructions. You can add up to three fingerprints per user account, and a total of five fingerprints for all your MacBook Pro user accounts.

Follow the onscreen prompts to add and verify your card. If you already use a card for media purchases, you might be prompted to verify this card first. You can also make it disappear from view when you aren't using it by checking the box for Automatically hide and show the Dock. Safari now combats two of the bigger internet annoyances: autoplay videos and ad trackers. Ad tracking is stopped by default, but there is a global setting for stopping autoplay videos that you'll want to enable.

Open Safari's Preferences and click on the Websites tab. Choose Auto-Play from the left panel and for When visiting other websites at the bottom of the window, select Never Auto-Play or Stop Media with Sound if you are okay with muted videos playing and sit back and rejoice in the silence.

Favicons are those tiny icons that show up on your tabs and bookmarks bar that make the browser more visually interesting and, more importantly, they're a great aid in keeping track of which tabs are which.

Chrome has had them for some time, and now Safari does, too. To enable favicons for Safari, open Preferences and click the Tabs tab at the top. Next, check the box for Show website icons in tabs. Staring at a blue screen before bed can shift your body's natural clock and make it difficult to get a good night's sleep. With Apple's Night Shift feature, the colors of your display are shifted to the warmer end of the spectrum during the evening hours.

You can set Night Shift to come on from sunset to sunrise, or you can select a custom time period. Use the slider to adjust the color temperature of the effect between less warm and more.

Once you start using Night Shift, you'll wonder how you ever sat in front of a cold, blue screen in the evening hours.

With MacOS Mojave , Apple introduced a dynamic wallpaper that slowly changes its lighting throughout the day, going from a bright, sunny desert scene during the day and transitioning to a cool, dark screen at night. There are two dynamic wallpapers: Mojave and Solar Gradients. In any app that supports tabs, choose Window from the bar at the top of the page. Then click Merge All Windows to bring several windows together in a series of tabs.

Open a new window, head to the View menu at the top of the page, and choose Show View Options. The next dialog box lets you set icon size, grid spacing, text label size and positioning, and more. Once you decide on these new settings, macOS will apply them to any Finder windows you open in future. In Finder, select the files you want to permanently delete. The item will skips the Trash entirely and disappear. When someone emails you about a party, macOS can automatically add that event to your calendar.

To enable this feature, open the Mail app and click Mail in the bar on the top of the screen. Choose Preferences , and under the General tab, turn on the Add invitations to Calendar automatically option. Now, emails with times and dates in them will receive a Calendar banner across the top, which asks if you want to add the event to your schedule.

Every time macOS starts up, it can automatically launch certain programs. Under the Login Items heading, you can remove apps with the minus button or add new apps with the plus button.

As cloud-storage app iCloud matures, Apple has given it new abilities—like syncing desktop folders to the web if you have the space to spare.

Open System Preferences and go to iCloud. From this menu, look next to iCloud Drive to find Options , where you can pick which folders and apps you want to sync automatically to your cloud storage account. Autoplaying ads and videos can make the internet a noisy place. Here, click on Auto-Play and, on the bottom, open the drop-down menu to stop audio and videos from playing automatically in the future, or block videos that have sound attached.

However, this brings the brightness up or down in discrete steps.