My first ever Mac

[chadsworld81]

Hi all. I bought my very first mac (MacBook air 13in 2015). I am a long time pc user. Any tips or advice do you have for a mac newbie? I do have ios products such as iphone and an Ipad. Thanks in advance

 

[Meister]

What will you use it for?

 

[chadsworld81]

very general computing browsing managing music and photos occasional word document writing etc

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Enjoy it

My advice would be to enjoy it and play around with it, it's fairly intuitive not too different from windows and fun to use.

There are endless tutorials online for specific uses so make use of them.

Downlaod VLC for movie playback.

Skim for reading PDF's

Transmission for torrents

Avoid chrome web browser it doesn't play nice with macs.

Other than that play with it until you get it set up as you like there are as many ways to use it as there are owners....

 

[gmintz09]

Hi all. I bought my very first mac (MacBook air 13in 2015). I am a long time pc user. Any tips or advice do you have for a mac newbie? I do have ios products such as iphone and an Ipad. Thanks in advance

I was in the same boat as you in 2013 and I haven't looked back since! I absolutely love my Air and it still runs just as well as the day I bought it. It's wonderful. Honestly, I was pretty surprised at how similar a lot of things were on my new Mac compared to my old PC laptops in the past. There are a few things that are confusing to try and figure out how to do on a Mac vs. a PC, but if you just Google it or look up a tutorial on Youtube, you can get it pretty quickly. Obviously you have to install a Flash plug-in for Safari if you want that to work (and many, many sites have Flash content), but I found the Safari plug-in "ClicktoFlash" to be useful in page loading time so that I could activate the Flash content if I wanted to or ignore it if I was not interested. You'll be happy to find that a good number of iOS apps have Mac equivalents (or at least, many of the more well-known apps), so they sync very nicely between iOS and OS X. The whole process is really just trial and error, but I feel like I caught on pretty quickly once I got used to the gestures on the wonderful trackpad. Having an iPad helped to remember some of those because some of those gestures are the same on the Mac trackpad.

Oh, and be sure to activate the phone call and text message forwarding in the settings so you can take care of those things on your Mac if you desire to do so rather than on your phone/tablet.

A couple key shortcuts I have found useful over the past year and a half are Command+Space for Spotlight (wonderful tool to search your system and online) and Command+Alt/Option+Esc for the Force Quit screen to see which apps are running and finally Command+Q for quitting apps. Also remember that "X-ing" out of screens on a Mac doesn't quit the app, you have to either use that aforementioned key shortcut or go up to the bar at the top and click the name of the app and click "Quit" from the pull down menu. That was probably the thing I had to get used to the most on a Mac.

 

[chadsworld81]

Thank you all for your tips I look forward to playing around with my new mac

 

[ZBoater]

I got Parallels since after so many years of Windows use, there are still a couple of apps I need that won't run on Mac. Parallels is very useful and reliable way of running Windows in a virtual machine on your Air for those times you may need it.

 

[iLondoner]

My only regret is not making the move many years earlier!

However, one thing I find sub-par on the Mac is the Finder app compared to Windows Explorer. You can download the free XtraFinder app to extend Finder.

 

[mubeenshahid]

Same here bought MBA core i7 8gb ram after using windows for 10years.I am loving every bit of it so fast quiet and beautiful

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My only regret is not making the move many years earlier!

However, one thing I find sub-par on the Mac is the Finder app compared to Windows Explorer. You can download the free XtraFinder app to extend Finder.

Yes finder is crapy compared to explorer in windows.also better touch tool app enhances multitasking capabilites

 

[Agent-P]

Congrats on the purchase! gmintz09 actually covered what I consider the two most important keyboard shortcuts for new Mac users:

• command + space bar = you can search for nearly anything (whether that's files, web searches, using as a calculator, etc.)
• command + option + escape = force quitting something that isn't responding

But in addition to this I'll also say Macs have the ability to run Windows via Bootcamp (which is built in) or using a virtual machine like Parallels (as ZBoater mentioned). Each method has its own pros/cons (which you can find with a quick search), but if you find you absolutely need Windows for something you have options!