Just got my MPB 16 Max and now I am sort of lost what to do...

[SuperCachetes]

I like Al Dente to limit the max battery charge to 80%. Mine spends a lot of time plugged in.

Home - AppHouseKitchen

It needs AlDente.

apphousekitchen.com

I'm not against third-party apps (I have actually used CoconutBattery and iStat for years), but my M2 MBA on 14.2 also stays plugged in nearly 100% of the time, and the MacOS battery optimization is doing precisely the kind of charge limiting you are talking about, right out of the box.

I am sure Al Dente and other software can give you more granular control over the battery, but I just wanted to point out that the built-in tool does exist and might be just fine for someone brand new to Macs.

 

[Siliconguy]

One word: LibreOffice.

The charting in LibreOffice could be better, but otherwise it does all I need, actually more than I need.

Until Numbers and Pages support ODF they are not useful to me especially given the speed at which Apple obsoletes old versions.

 

[BanjoDudeAhoy]

(Yes, I even loved Windows 8 lol)

Me too. Maybe not love, eaxactly, but I liked it. And dare I say, I liked it way better than the mess Windows 11 is becoming.

First thing I download on a Mac is LinearMouse because I don’t like macOS’s mouse pointer acceleration when using an external mouse. On a trackpad it’s fine.

Then Al Dente and all my photo editing software, BetterSnapTool, Office…

 

[MauiPa]

Yeah i'll probably continue using MS Suite since i am so intune with them. I dont really use Onedrive or Onenote but i definitely use Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

I do hear apple's counterparts are good though.

I used to use MS Suite stuff cause I had to for work. Finally got tired of the out dated paradigm (one honking table per sheet? come on what year is this, Ribbon bar - yecch). Also, I used to download lots of data into tables to analyze (way better to use a DBMS for that) and excel kept crashing on Windows computers no less- had a memory leak problem.)

I switched to Numbers when I would have had to buy an Excel license, and have been totally happy with it. I'll admit for those familiar with Excel it is a transition, and most people don't like change. But Numbers is a great product with a much better (in my opinion) UI, does everything I need it to do and has never crashed.

That being said, there is stuff in Excel, that if you use it, then you should stick with Excel, but most people don't use it. always remember that the VBA in the MS Suite is a hackers delight (A shame really, I use to build embedded applications using it, so here is to MS fixing the security holes LOL)

So here is your decision tree. If you use some of the more nuanced stuff in Excel, stick with it. If you love familiarity, stick with it. If you use VBA, stick with it. If your work requires it, stick with it. If you read XML files in Excel, stick with it (I really haven't found a good alternative in Numbers, but it is not a problem for me because I don't use them often). If you share Excel files with others, best to stick with it. While Numbers can and read and write excel. the big honking single table Excel approach, versus the multiple specialized tables in Numbers makes for some quirky conversions - but you can share data, it is just cumbersome.

Now, if you want to start a fresh approach and don't mind a new learning curve, you will be happy switching.

 

[TechnoMonk]

I like Al Dente to limit the max battery charge to 80%. Mine spends a lot of time plugged in.

Home - AppHouseKitchen

It needs AlDente.

apphousekitchen.com

I also like iStat Menus. Can put a lot of useful info in the top menu bar.

iStat Menus

The ultimate system monitor for your menu bar, with CPU, GPU, memory, network, disk usage, disk activity, temperatures, fans, battery info and more.

bjango.com

Another app I like a lot is BBEdit for text editing. It's sort of the Mac equivalent of NotePad++

Bare Bones Software | BBEdit 14

Apparently, people like Sublime Text for text editing as well. I've never tried it but here's a comparison / list.

5 Best Text Editors for Mac

A good text editor is worth its weight in gold. We take a look at some candidates for the best text editor for Mac in this guide.

www.groovypost.com

Baby sitting battery is redundant now. I have my MBP connected all the time except when I am traveling. Mac OS handles charging pretty well. I never had problem with battery life.

 

[MauiPa]

The charting in LibreOffice could be better, but otherwise it does all I need, actually more than I need.

Until Numbers and Pages support ODF they are not useful to me especially given the speed at which Apple obsoletes old versions.

XML support would be nice as well. that being said, I upgraded to apple in 2011 and have never looked back and have never had an "obsoleted" problem, so I don't understand what your concern is.

 

[IG88]

I'm not against third-party apps (I have actually used CoconutBattery and iStat for years), but my M2 MBA on 14.2 also stays plugged in nearly 100% of the time, and the MacOS battery optimization is doing precisely the kind of charge limiting you are talking about, right out of the box.

Mac OS doesn't allow the user to set a charge limit. I've already recovered some battery health by keeping the battery at or below 80%.

If you don't need it / want it, that's fine. But the OP asked for suggestions, and I like Al Dente.

 

[IG88]

Baby sitting battery is redundant now. I have my MBP connected all the time except when I am traveling. Mac OS handles charging pretty well. I never had problem with battery life.

I don't recall telling you that you need to use Al Dente?

 

[winxmac]

Well that was easy

a friend of mine mentioned something called Coconut battery is a must have. Is it necessary?

official website of coconut battery

I have never used an Apple Silicon Mac... I only have a 2015 15" MacBook Pro

You can use it to monitor the manufacturer, manufacturing month and year of the battery, battery cycles, and whether 100% displayed by macOS is the same as what Coconut Battery was able to read... It can also check the battery status of iPad and iPhone that you connect via USB cable to your Mac...

coconut battery free vs paid

 

[msackey]

I had already planned to buy myself a Mac for Christmas an "I deserve it for nearly completing Grad school" (I grduate in may but christmas was a good excuse to spend the money for it) but my dad actually surprised me today with my very own Macbook Pro. I sort of expected it but i was not expecting him to buy a model that costs nearly $4,000 either. It's probably weird ro be annoyed by that but kind of am lol.

nothing to add here other than to say congratulations on finishing grad school!! It's definitely no small challenge

 

[msackey]

But to preserve the life of the battery Al Dente is very good freeware and I find necessary.

I'm not so sure it's that necessary. The latest versions of macOS have better battery management and it will not charge to 100% if it recognizes you keep the laptop plugged in most of the time. I agree that in previous years, mostly prior to 2021, this feature was not available natively. In fact, with the onset of the pandemic, I kept my laptop plugged in most of the time and ended up with a swollen battery.

 

[msackey]

Could not disagree more with this

Pages and numbers are junk

Excel and word are the only things where Microsoft can’t be beat

I would say that some people actually find Pages and Numbers great.

I don't have much experience with them as I use Word and Excel, but many people do prefer Pages and Numbers. So, instead of going straight to Microsoft, unless you already have or subscribe to the Mac version, I say try out Pages and Numbers which are free.

 

[smirking]

a friend of mine mentioned something called Coconut battery is a must have. Is it necessary?

As said already, not necessary, but it is interesting and it's a very user friendly battery health tracking tool. Install it if you want to geek out, but don't get too obsessive about what it says. It's just an estimate and bounces around.

I used to use it more often when I had an Intel Mac and was trying to gauge if my attempts to stretch battery lifespan were doing any good. I am not kind to batteries at all. 2 years was the average length of time before I had to get battery replacements.

I'm at 2 years now with my M1 Pro MBP and Coconut battery still reports about 95% health left. Now I open it once in a while and gloat to myself about how amazing the power efficiency is on my MBP.

Welcome to the Mac! Enjoy!

 

[Amazon Rainforest]

I like Al Dente to limit the max battery charge to 80%. Mine spends a lot of time plugged in.

Home - AppHouseKitchen

It needs AlDente.

apphousekitchen.com

I also like iStat Menus. Can put a lot of useful info in the top menu bar.

iStat Menus

The ultimate system monitor for your menu bar, with CPU, GPU, memory, network, disk usage, disk activity, temperatures, fans, battery info and more.

bjango.com

Another app I like a lot is BBEdit for text editing. It's sort of the Mac equivalent of NotePad++

Bare Bones Software | BBEdit 14

Apparently, people like Sublime Text for text editing as well. I've never tried it but here's a comparison / list.

5 Best Text Editors for Mac

A good text editor is worth its weight in gold. We take a look at some candidates for the best text editor for Mac in this guide.

www.groovypost.com

I can wholeheartedly recommend Al Dente and iStat Menus. I have been using iStat since it's been around. And it has alerted me, over the years, to some funny goings on which I had to address. I am often referring to it in my MenuBar.

Al Dente is a fabulous piece of software. I suggest you buy the Pro version to get all the features. Plus, it helps the developer to stay in business. I have been using it over a year, the last eleven months on my M2 MBP Max. It stays plugged in 90% of the time. I set the battery level to 80% and I Calibrate every two weeks. My battery health is 100% from a battery with a manufacture date of 12/26/2022. The number of Cycles is currently 35 and the Current Capacity is 8600 mAh which is slightly below the Design Capacity of 8694 mAh.

I can recommend Bartender. I have over two dozen icons which I am hiding. This leaves a lot of room for the iStat icons.

I also use Little Snitch and a VPN for protection. Speaking of protection, I recommend that you do NOT install any anti-virus software. The macOS really doesn't need it.

 

[smirking]

I'm not so sure it's that necessary. The latest versions of macOS have better battery management and it will not charge to 100% if it recognizes you keep the laptop plugged in most of the time. I agree that in previous years, mostly prior to 2021, this feature was not available natively. In fact, with the onset of the pandemic, I kept my laptop plugged in most of the time and ended up with a swollen battery.

The battery health charging on MacOS like it is on iOS is somewhat erratic. You can set it to 80% and it'll still charge to 100% sometimes.

 

[Timpetus]

I'm not against third-party apps (I have actually used CoconutBattery and iStat for years), but my M2 MBA on 14.2 also stays plugged in nearly 100% of the time, and the MacOS battery optimization is doing precisely the kind of charge limiting you are talking about, right out of the box.

I am sure Al Dente and other software can give you more granular control over the battery, but I just wanted to point out that the built-in tool does exist and might be just fine for someone brand new to Macs.

It's great and all but I have both CoconutBattery and AlDente installed, and I've noticed that Apple's estimate of battery health is more optimistic, meaning it will actually let the battery charge past the true 80% level as measured by CoconutBattery.

 

[saudor]

One word: LibreOffice.

People often mention that and linux etc but Any kind of business/collboration and it just falls flat (aside from servers). For basic average joe stuff, pages/numbers or even google docs is enough. The linux community is just so fragmented and no one can agree on anything, hence the need for 2,393,203 distros.

 

[msackey]

The linux community is just so fragmented and no one can agree on anything, hence the need for 2,393,203 distros.

This made me LOL. Good one!

There are good and bad things about de-centralization.

 

[smirking]

It's great and all but I have both CoconutBattery and AlDente installed, and I've noticed that Apple's estimate of battery health is more optimistic, meaning it will actually let the battery charge past the true 80% level as measured by CoconutBattery.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Coconut Battery is actually getting its readings from the same system info that would be passed to the internal battery health monitor. The numbers you see in each may simply reflect the numbers were sampled a minute or two apart. I’ve noticed different readings in Coconut battery than in system info before and if I wait a bit, they line up.

That said, I totally support using AlDente. It’s a simple app that does its one job well.

 

[Siliconguy]

XML support would be nice as well. that being said, I upgraded to apple in 2011 and have never looked back and have never had an "obsoleted" problem, so I don't understand what your concern is.

I am referring to the ability to open a decade old document and the current version of the software can still read it. Previous experience with Apple software has not been encouraging in that regard. Maybe they are better at that now, maybe not, I don't know.

 

[darkpaw]

Well, if they work in an environment where they share or collaborate with Windows users, then Excel is still king. I do like Numbers and Pages but if you are sending files back and forth with others, then you should use Office applications. Yes, they are "compatible" but if y'all do any kind of formatting beyond the basics, you're going to end up being "that guy" that either messes up the formatting or insists that everyone else is messing up the formatting.

Or, if it's an option, let Google Docs handle the collaboration and sharing part.

The OP said they're about to finish grad school, so I doubt they work in an environment where they need to share a lot of documents.

Apple's office applications are perfectly acceptable for someone new to the Mac, which is what I was suggesting. If they're going to just use all the apps they've been using on Windows, what's the point in getting a Mac?

 

[kc9hzn]

I used to use MS Suite stuff cause I had to for work. Finally got tired of the out dated paradigm (one honking table per sheet? come on what year is this, Ribbon bar - yecch). Also, I used to download lots of data into tables to analyze (way better to use a DBMS for that) and excel kept crashing on Windows computers no less- had a memory leak problem.)

I switched to Numbers when I would have had to buy an Excel license, and have been totally happy with it. I'll admit for those familiar with Excel it is a transition, and most people don't like change. But Numbers is a great product with a much better (in my opinion) UI, does everything I need it to do and has never crashed.

That being said, there is stuff in Excel, that if you use it, then you should stick with Excel, but most people don't use it. always remember that the VBA in the MS Suite is a hackers delight (A shame really, I use to build embedded applications using it, so here is to MS fixing the security holes LOL)

So here is your decision tree. If you use some of the more nuanced stuff in Excel, stick with it. If you love familiarity, stick with it. If you use VBA, stick with it. If your work requires it, stick with it. If you read XML files in Excel, stick with it (I really haven't found a good alternative in Numbers, but it is not a problem for me because I don't use them often). If you share Excel files with others, best to stick with it. While Numbers can and read and write excel. the big honking single table Excel approach, versus the multiple specialized tables in Numbers makes for some quirky conversions - but you can share data, it is just cumbersome.

Now, if you want to start a fresh approach and don't mind a new learning curve, you will be happy switching.

Excel is definitely better for data processing and analytics, but Numbers is so much better at presentation than Excel is, to the point where you might go as far to say that they have completely different use cases.

 

[IG88]

I can recommend Bartender. I have over two dozen icons which I am hiding. This leaves a lot of room for the iStat icons.

Yeah I forgot to mention Bartender. I mainly wanted it to get the old spacing back, instead of what looks like is designed for a touch based OS.

 

[sleeptodream]

Dislaperture is cool if you want to round the bottom corners of the screen to match the top

xAct is great for converting audio files.

Hot is a nice light menu bar temp monitor

OpenEmu if you like emulators

OnyX let’s you change hidden system settings, manually run maintenance tasks, etc, a lot of things you would normally have to do in Terminal

Cider if you use Apple music and want it to integrate with Discord

Also I’d recommend giving Safari a fair try before going straight to Chrome or whatever, I’ve tried a lot of browsers but I always come back to Safari

 

[kc9hzn]

As for software that I really appreciate as a Mac user that might be great for new Mac users are keyboard app launchers (you’ve got your pick, I’m still partial to Quicksilver, but Alfred, LaunchBar, Butler, any of them would work. (They usually have power user features beyond Spotlight, but the reason for getting into them back in the day was how slow Spotlight was.) Text shortcut engines like TextExpander are another tool I couldn’t live without.

A good task manager is also crucial for me, but Reminders is getting to be better and better and may be more than adequate for most users.