The first things I do for new Mac people.

[tuqqer]

Over 20 years of helping newbies get set up, here are the first things I do on their Mac. There are many more, but these are the crucial ones I've found important to avoid hair pulling and eventual antidepressant meds.

- Turn off Spring Loaded Folders. Oh my F god. No single feature ever caused more tears than this beauty. And so intuitively easy to locate. Just Sys Pref: Accessibility: Mouse & Trackpad: unclick Spring-loading delay. Of course it's there.

- Turn off *everything* in Mission Control.
Second place for tears goes to full-screen mode and Spaces. Let people see that each window has edges to it! like pieces of paper on top of a desk. Work with the metaphors that they're used to.

- Show Scroll Bars ALWAYS (Sys Pref: General)

- Teach them Command-H to *hide* a program. Stop closing windows, stop quitting applications and for the love of god stop moving windows around, grampa. When you need to get into another application, Command-Hide any app on top. To go back to some app again, click on its Dock icon.

- Put Dock on the left side if they're on a laptop and make it smaller. Otherwise they'll constantly accidentally launch stuff.

- Set Finder windows (Show View Options or Command-J) to "Always open in List View", Arrange by None, Sort by Name, then click: Use as Default. 
Every human understands hierarchical alphabetized lists. The other 3 views will drive them batty. While you're in there, increase Text Size if they wear glasses. Bonus tip, Apple: consider offering fonts size bigger than 16. On large 4k monitors, "16" is now 5, and has been for a decade.

- Teach them Command-Spacebar to open Spotlight, for launching applications and finding their files.

- Do NOT install antivirus software on your Mac. Ever. I mean never. If you do, we're done.

- Teach them how to know WHERE their file is. Command-click in any open file icon, and see the dropdown hierarchical list of where it is. Click on any of those folders to get to that folder. See attached image below for this.

- Do not use your Desktop for file storage. This is a larger topic, but if I have time and they're long-term friends, I teach them how to create folders, how to rename their PDFs/images/files to appropriate names, and how to stay organized.


I'm sure there are dozens more you MacResourcers have found...

[jdc]

Your "command + click" on the icon dosent work in all apps.

[tuqqer]

jdc wrote:
Your "command + click" on the icon dosent work in all apps.

good point.

[Ken Sp.]

If they are brand new to the Mac, I put the dock on the left side. On most screens you run out of vertical height, and while there still plenty of width.

In Mouse and Trackpad, disable most things except secondary click

Adjust security settings, sleep/password to best fit the user.

In Apple mail, general settings, make sure search for the junk folder.

While in Apple mail, I also turn off “increase quote level"

[pRICE cUBE]

I tell them:

DO NOT DOWNLOAD MACKEEPER!

[testcase]

Thanks for those hints tugger!

[August West]

I try to get neophyte to use cmd tab.

[GGD]

I was expecting this to be just one thing rather than a list, and the one thing I was expecting hasn't even been mentioned.

"Create a separate account with Admin privileges and turn off Admin privileges on their normal account."

[MikeF]

I charge them $20 for a pack of gum and tell them to get used to paying more for everything Mac related.

[Article Accelerator]

Pretty good advice, tuqqer.