8 Things You Must Do After Buying a New Mac

If you're the proud owner of a new Mac, here are all the steps you must take to achieve the ultimate performance and productivity gains.

If you’ve bought a Mac for the first time, you need to know that Apple designs its products with great attention to detail—from the physical feel to how the operating system works. To fully experience the Apple brand and the power of your Mac, you need to properly set up the device.

Though we all go through the initial setup, you'll get performance and productivity gains by optimizing the system to your needs. In this article, we will talk about eight things you should do after you’ve bought a new Mac.

1. Set Up Your Apple ID

When you set up your Mac, you’re required to sign in to your Apple account. If you skipped it earlier, now is the time to do it via the Apple menu > System Preferences > Sign In.

You can’t use the App Store, download updates, or use iCloud without logging into an Apple ID, so you definitely should.

2. Activate Service and Support Coverage

A key thing to do is activate your Mac's Service and Support Coverage. If you don’t do this and your Mac suffers a problem, you won’t be able to claim Apple’s help.

To activate your device’s warranty, head to checkcoverage.apple.com and enter your Mac’s serial number. Then, click Continue, and a page will show you whether your Mac’s warranty has been registered or not.

If it's a new device, you can activate it from this page. If you've bought a used Mac, you can see when it was registered and when the coverage expired (or will expire).

3. Check for Updates

It’s possible that your new Mac’s OS isn’t up-to-date. Updating your Mac to the latest available macOS helps you unlock the latest usability and performance improvement features.

To do this:

1. Click the About This Mac from the Apple menu in the top-left corner.
2. Then, click the Software Update button on the pop-up window. Your Mac will then check for updates.
3. If your Mac is up-to-date, the pop-up will say so. Otherwise, you'll be able to see the available update. Click Upgrade Now and the process will begin.

Related: A Complete Guide to Updating Your Mac's Software

4. Schedule System Backups

System backup helps you restore data that you may lose if your Mac suffers a software or hardware accident. To avoid this, set up Mac’s Time Machine with an external drive.

Time Machine is a built-in macOS tool that creates system backups periodically (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly). This way, you can easily restore data in the unfortunate circumstance that you lose it.

Related: How to Back Up Your Mac

5. Customize the Menu Bar, Dock, and Desktop

Organizing how your Menu Bar, Dock, and Desktop look will help keep your system tidy, especially when you amass more files.

Menu Bar

The Menu Bar displays most of your quick information like time, battery percentage, running apps, and audio control. Customizing the menu bar is an important part of making your new Mac feel like your own. See our full guide to customizing the menu bar in macOS for help.

The Dock is the taskbar at the bottom of your screen. To optimize it, remove all the apps you don’t use at least once a week. Removing unwanted apps will make you more efficient while using your Mac.

If your Dock is too big, you can resize it; simply hover the dividing line on the right. Once the cursor changes to a double-sided arrow, hold and drag up or down to increase or decrease the Dock size, respectively.

Alternatively, you can turn on the auto-hide option; right-click and check Turn Hiding On. This way, you will only see the Dock when you need to.

Desktop

A feature that you might like is Stacks. It collects all the similar files randomly spread on your desktop together. Click any Stack of files and all the icons will spread.

To activate Stacks, on the Menu Bar, go to View > Use Stacks.

This feature helps keep the desktop clean and is an alternative to using folders to arrange desktop files.

6. Set Up Hot Corners

A lesser-known usability feature that can make your life easier is Hot Corners. It lets you assign each corner of your screen a function that triggers when you hover on it.

To set up Hot Corners, head to Settings > Desktop & Screen Savers > Screen Saver Tab > Hot Corners. Here, you can set different functions for all corners, like locking the screen, opening Launchpad, showing Desktop, and much more.

7. Enable or Disable Tap to Click

Usually, Mac users love Apple's excellent trackpad haptics and they turn off Tap to Click. This is a feature that requires you to press the trackpad with more pressure to register a click.

If you want to see what feeling you like best, head to Settings > Trackpad > Point & Click Tab and check the Tap to Click box (check the animation on the right of the box to see how it works).

If you keep it off, you can register clicks with single touches.

From these settings, you can change other trackpad preferences as well. Play around and see what suits you best!

8. Invest in Protective Gear

Though Macs have sturdy chassis, they can fall and get damaged. Using rubber, plastic, or leather casings for your MacBook and protective cases for iMacs helps against physical damage to a good extent.

Most users avoid protective gear on their MacBook as it prevents them from enjoying the Apple product’s premium feel. However, using protective gear increases the product's life, so it's worth the trade.

Related: The Best MacBook Pro Cases

You’re All Set to Use Your New Mac!

With this, your Mac is now fully optimized to give you the premium Apple experience; all these features exist to make the Mac more usable and secure for you. Plus, you can always go back and tweak these settings whenever you like.

But this isn’t it. macOS evolves with new features all the time. For example, if you’re using macOS Monterey, you can adjust your widgets and play with Quick Notes. In short, Macs are the gift that keep on giving!

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