I'm getting a new Macbook Pro. What's your favorite apps and tips?
Hi Tildes !
I was passively looking for an refresh of my current laptop (Thinkpad X1 carbon Gen 5; it's still working fine except some mysterious thermal profile1), and a friend of mine working in retail told me he could sell me a Macbook Pro (the mid-range 14in one with the M3 Pro chip2 at a heavy discount (more than half the price; it's a display model but he tells me it wasn't mistreated). It's a too good of a deal to pass on, so I accepted.
1 it's constantly at 70C; I already changed the thermal paste and the battery.
2 does that mean it's Macbook Pro Pro ?
3 and I guess the Thinkpad's going to be recycled as a home server. I half hope that running Linux on it will solve the thermal problem
My use case would be (in no particular order):
- photo/video processing: I know what I need and I already have a CaptureOne license. Davinci Resolve is enough (and plenty) for me
- programming (web dev, arduino; VScode's probably gonna be the second thing I'm going to install)(I'm kinda interested running a LLM locally, but have no experience with that)
- light CAD for 3d printing,
- gaming? My old gaming tower runs Elden Ring fine but struggle a bit with Baldur's Gate 3 (it's really the loading time, and loading textures), and it seems this MBP can run it fine.
- regular day-to-day browsing / office and adulting work
I would qualify myself as a power-user.
Background: I'm not entirely new to the Apple ecosystem. Back in uni I had the first unibody MBP sporting Leopard and then Snow Leopard. I then went with a X220t and then a my current X1.
Some questions:
- I see that BetterTouchTools is still a thing (back then I mapped three fingers swipe up to new tab, three finger swipe down to close tab, and twist to change tabs). I half remember one that was just a staging area living on a sidebar when moving file from one part of the finder to another (the name eludes me). Is there any other handy utilities I should be aware of ? That's also your prompt to plug in your favorite apps :)
- How's the dongle life (and what's the recommended one) ? While most of my stuff can be USB-C, I still have important stuff that requires USB-A (my photo printers, several portables hard-drive)
- Any interesting (gasp!) Android integration ? I'm not currently using any with my Windows machine (having Whatsapp/Telegram/Discord is sufficient), but I'm curious anyway.
Try spend some time to embrace the differences of macOS before using another utility to change its behaviour.
You might find you don't care or don't need to use many of the things people suggest. This goes for other "I've got a new x, what can I put on it" requests.
That said, I hate seeing the camera notch, and strongly prefer a black menu bar. So I use TopNotch to ensure that it is always black and hides the notch.
TopNotch in my experience is really buggy. I just use a wallpaper that’s already black at the top.
Since they added window snapping in the most recent update I’ve had no need for any of these tweak programs.
Hmm yeah. I should just edit the wallpaper I use for the screens I have.
That's a good advice, I'll try to keep this in mind. I see a lot of suggestion for a alternate window manager, but since I'm going to have sequoia hopefully I'll have 80% of what Window offer (I like snapping).
If you really want to do as the (ancient) romans do, try not using the window snapping tools... at all. And don't full screen things either. Just let windows float, and rely on your spatial memory to organize them.
That's how it was done on the OG macOS. It's an interesting read, if nothing else.
Letting windows just hang out wherever they end up and sizing windows to fit needs/content may seem counterintuitive to the goal of organization, but it’s what I’ve been doing on my Macs since I started using them 25+ years ago and it’s effective for me. I find myself spending considerably more time managing windows on Windows and in Linux DEs/WMs than I do in macOS.
All I do is snap left/right/top and three-finger swipe between workspaces.
One thing I'm looking forward to is a snappy Exposé (Windows-Tab in Win-10/11 has a noticeable lag). It's something I remember using extensively back in the Snow Leopard day.
Also, I'd recommend to try and learn as many keyboard shortcuts as you are comfortable with. I find it very distraction-free to not have to take my hands off of the keyboard when I am coding or writing stuff. Also don't use your pinkie for the command key please (i know some do :P ).
Do note that "spaces" come with a non-configurable, non-interruptible switching animation that takes approximately ten million years (seriously, it's something like 300-500ms, way too long for anything short of a complete context switch; and the animation has acceleration, so it's surprisingly difficult to identify exactly when it's over and you can interact with your computer again). If workspaces is a feature you like, you will probably find yourself wanting to seek out alternative implementations.
(I found Exposé to mostly not be useful to me, because I have too many windows which look similar—think terminal emulators—and/or aren't displaying the content I'm looking for at the moment of switching, like web browsers with background tabs. Also the animation/selection action, while way better than spaces, is dozens of times slower than just using a keyboard shortcut to go directly to what I want, so it's again into "only useful for a full context switch" territory.)
iirc the accessibility setting for reduce motion can be used to shorten/avoid such ui animations.
I used TopNotch and some others for a while, but ultimately just switched to a wallpaper with a natural true #000 black top section. Sleep and restart would mess with TopNotch juuuust enough to annoy me.
BetterTouchTool was only necessary for the touchbar era of macbooks. You don't really need it anymore. You can try rectangle if you're use to windows style windows management.
You don't really need dongles, so much as adapters in that case. Modern macbook pros have about as many ports as any other portable laptop. You can get A to C adapters for like $2/each on amazon.
There's not a lot of games that run on macOS, and fusion 360 still runs through rosetta, other than that shouldn't be any compatibility issues.
I'd recommend iTerm2, although the default terminal is very usable. In general, I'd reach for the default apple apps first, and only go out if they are lacking in some way. The first party apps are good and mac native.
HUGE disagree with your assessment there. I think a lot of people dismiss BTT because its name sells it way short. It’s so much more than window snapping, light gestures, and touch bar stuff. It’s a massively powerful engine for system automation. Since OP is a self-described power user, I highly recommend it. For me, it’s the one non-negotiable thing I install on any new Mac.
BTT is all about connecting trigger events to actions. Here are some of the triggers available:
And here are some of the actions you can connect:
I’m just scratching the surface. BTT is by far the most powerful and configurable util I’m aware of for the Mac and it’s still under constant active development. I paid for the lifetime license many years ago and it was a steal for how much I do with it every day. I keep finding surprising new uses for it too. Gonna digress with a story from just earlier this week:
I was connecting the 1Password standalone app to an already-authenticated 1Password extension for Firefox. The flow is that you initiate a request from the app to the extension… this prompts you to grant permission from within the extension, then a one-time 6-digit code appears in the extension for you to type in the app. The problem was, a stupid bug closed the extension view, killing the connection attempt, whenever Firefox lost focus, which had to happen in order to type the code in the app. It was impossible to proceed. I fired up BTT and added some custom key sequences I could trigger while the extension view remained open, that would send keypresses into the 1Password app without focusing it. Worked like a dream.
I’m doing all kinds of crazy stuff with it. I’ve got automations that control programs inside Windows VMs. I use it to make macOS’s handling of multiple displays bearable. You wouldn’t believe all the gestures I have set up. BTT is incredible.
Sure, but all of that is hardly necessary. On the touchbar macbooks, since they replaced an actually important part of the keyboard with the touchbar, BTT was necessary to recover some of that functionality you lost. Now, it's expanded its niche to some automation, sure, but that's something people who seek that can use, not something that everyone needs for their laptop's keyboard to function in a baseline manner.
I mean, BTT was around for many years before the touch bar was a thing. The dev jumped into supporting it because it was a useful add-on idea for his existing tool. It’s true that none of what it does is “necessary” but it is a really nice Swiss Army knife for power users to have if they’re looking to do more than they’re able to with the Mac out of the box.
I was using BTT to make three finger clicks open links in new tabs back in 2012, long before the TouchBar.
the menubar management is so great. I was using other apps like Bartender for the same thing, but double clicking the menubar to toggle icons is even better.
For @PetitPrince, I also use Yabai as a twm instead of the snapping that BTT has. The BTT method is great, though. I always have a split window (35/65) and the 35 is divided into thirds vertically; top third for a terminal, discord in the middle, and the bottom third split in half with a notepad and imessage.
I love the idea of BTT or keyboard maestro, but I’m reluctant to allow a third party such critical permissions, especially a small developer. How do other people deal (even if just psychologically) with this?
I’m with you, it is risky to give any app the keys to the kingdom like that. I haven’t used Keyboard Maestro but BTT specifically has earned my trust over many years. Andreas Hegenberg is a responsive and helpful developer I’ve interacted with personally. He’s always helping users on the community forum in a way that demonstrates good faith. If he ever sold the app to someone else I’d be really worried, but as long as it’s under his control it’s got my full confidence.
Since Sequoia got some basic window rearranging functionality, I have stopped using Rectangle. Works pretty well for me. Maybe not if you require extensive, automated tiling, however.
If you do wanna game, GPTK with Whisky and Parallels are options that run many Windows games with more limited performance. The first one is what Proton is to Linux but it doesn't work as well due to also having to compensate for ARM chips. But it's improving and already very usable.
Last time I checked GPTK needed you to be on beta versions of MacOS. Is that still the case?
It might be that it works only from
SequoiaSonoma onwards, I haven't checked on older versions.edit: GPTK is fairly mature to the point Apple feels confident advertising the latest OS with it.
Here are some of my favorites and what they do (in no particular order):
Free Apps
Paid Apps
So much more too. I wouldn't be able to do my job without the Oryx Configurator for example. Pretty much everything Sindresorhus has ever made. If you're interested in my setup I can find more time to share details.
Only app I can’t agree with is Resilio Sync. I highly recommend using syncthing instead. I will admit I haven’t looked at resilio for many years, but last time I did, syncthing was better and had more features, and syncthing is open source.
Many other apps you mention I can also recommend.
I’ve tried Syncthing, it’s not terrible. But I believe in what ain’t broken, doesn’t need to be fixed.
I’ve been using BitTorrent sync since it first came out, and I already have Resilio (BS successor) on all of my machines. It’s never failed me and it’s been over a decade I think.
I'll add a couple to your list:
I use all of these too :)
All of my stuff is auto installed on every laptop I get via a script named
brew.shevery two years via https://getupgraded.com/I use rectangle and iterm2 and can't recommend them more.
My biggest gripe going from Windows to Mac was the lack of intuitive windows management. Rectangle isn't perfect but it gets the experience like 95% there.
Great list.
I was going to duplicate your mentions of Raycast, Rectangle, Shottr and VSCodium, as those are the tools I used to or still use the most and like the best.
Also, definitely use Homebrew to install your apps like @tonyswu said.
Furthermore:
Finally @PetitPrince OP, a meta-question: Apart from the bit about potentially running LLMs locally, how certain are you that you’ll need the full heft of a MacBook Pro?
I got the M2 Macbook Air (after diligently waiting to upgrade to a new form factor and not getting the M1 Macbook Air to replace my early 2015 MBP…) in 2022, and the chip is insane. And that’s with the processors from back then, I hear they’re at what, M4 now?
I consistently and constantly have too much opened and going on simultaneously, and it’s handled it perfectly. Hell, I have tried and can play modded Minecraft on a fan-less machine!
I expect the computer to last me for at least another 5-7 years computationally (if working memory suffices for applications until then, and if the SSD doesn’t die of a freak failure, and the battery keeps up). The only thing you must upgrade is RAM. Minimum 16, better 24/32/whatever you can afford and is available GB, though. (This would also apply to the potential MacBook Pro.)
Other potential Air killers include (Apple did play this rather smart):
Hope this helps!
I probably don't need that much, and I don't even have an imperative need to upgrade my laptop (while it's 7 years old and runs a bit hotter than originally, it's still going fine) but my friend could get me this MBP for less money than a brand new Macbook Air, so it was a deal to good to skip (a combination of a retail branch going down plus employee benefits).
Otherwise my upgrade plan was to either sidegrade by putting some flavor of Linux on the Thinkpad (I'll probably do that anyway so get a proper home server) or wait until some adventurous person put a track point on a Framework laptop.
In that case, go for it if you want to. It’s obviously an outstanding computer, especially for a discounted price! Was just concerned about potential cost-to-performance/your money going wasted… I totally overlooked just how much you’d get it on sale for in my first read of the original post :)
Minor FYI: The M3 Air actually supports 2x external monitors, if the lid of the laptop is closed.
Thanks, wasn’t aware!
Not as big of an issue nowadays anymore, but I like to use the builtin webcam for video conferences. So that’s not always a “true” option. And let’s be real here: The chip absolutely could’ve handled more monitors at once had they prepared it to support that from the start…, it’s just Apple artificially separating their product categories at play here.
On the subject of heat, the 14” models have seemed to have slightly underspecced thermal management ever since the debut of the M series. The main thing I’d recommend to keep that under control is to pay attention to what’s unnecessarily keeping CPU cores spun up in Activity Monitor. Electron apps and web apps running in Chrome are notorious offenders and probably good candidates for monitoring and replacement with more lightweight native alternatives.
More generally, I’d recommend not “fighting” the OS. A lot of switchers stack up a huge number of utilities trying to replicate a Windows-like setup with middling results. In my opinion, it’s better to embrace the differences and just get used to them.
A few random tips:
OMG, how did I not know this?
I am totally pulling this out on my next zoom call to see whose mind I can blow.
Coconut Battery and Daisy Disk are very, very useful apps. One is free and the other is a one-time purchase that pays off.
For gaming, you want to grab Whisky. It sets up Apple's GPTK, which is a lot like Valve's Proton if you've heard of that. You can have the full Windows version of Steam and all that entails.
For dongles, these are good, well-built and cheap: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Basics-Converter-High-Speed-Certified/dp/B01GGKYXVE/
Android integration is pretty poor unfortunately-- one nasty surprise is that macOS does not support the Media Transfer Protocol commonly used to get data on and off Android devices (and the Nintendo Switch for some reason.) You're going to have to find a third party solution, one that comes up is "MacDroid."
I had no idea that Whisky allowed Steam and all that entails. I really hadn't looked at Whisky at all except when I had to install for some reason I can't even think of now. I'll have to take another crack at it...
Edit: Okay, I see now that the Whisky homepage makes it extremely clear that games are pretty much the focus. I had installed it solely for fotosketcher and basically just hit the download and left.
I second Daisy Disk. Being able to visually assess what is eating up ridiculous amounts of storage has saved me on multiple occasions. Both IntelliJ software and Microsoft Outlook were major offenders of temp file overruns in the past.
Another nice to have if you have to work with multiple OSes and external storage is NTFS for Mac.
I find Alfred very useful for loading specific searches and apps
The snippets in Alfred are good if you use the terminal a lot.
Here are some of my favorite apps!
Utilities
-Alfred - A really nice application launcher and productivity app. There is some overlap with Keyboard maestro, but I think they complement each other really well. Alfred also has my favorite clipboard history manager, and a great ecosystem of community-made workflows: https://alfred.app/
Dev
--vm-type=vzCreative
My volume is not important enough to justify a dedicated culler, but that's nice to know especially since Photo Mechanics went for a subscription business model. You don't happen to have a comparison between the two, don't you?
No, I’m afraid Fast Raw Viewer is the only one I’ve tried. I also don’t use it as much these days since most of my shooting is done tethered now
I was using Bartender to hide icons in my taskbar but the software changed owners and there were some privacy concerns. I recommend Vanilla (free) as a replacement: https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/
Thanks for this recommendation! I have been without this feature since that bartender issue. I just tried vanilla and it is perfect! It’s way more simple to setup and use than bartender. I never really needed all the fancy features of bartender anyway.
For other people reading this thinking the bartender issue might not be a real problem, it definitely is. I know sometimes when a company changes ownership everyone freaks out and starts jumping ship when it isn’t really warranted. In this case it is definitely warranted.
Mac apps are signed by Apple from a specific developer account. One day, bartender users had an update pushed to them that was signed by a different developer account than the original. It appeared to be unrelated to the original developer. Users had to give it the accessibility permissions it needed again. Most users, myself included, did that without thinking. The smarter users looked into the issue and found out about the different developer signing account. At this point there was no official statement from the dev about selling. It appeared like a full scale supply chain attack, for a program that often has screen recording permissions.
Finally the dev posted that he had sold. But the company he sold to didn’t appear to match the new developer account signing the builds. At some point in this people started downgrading to the older version of bartender signed by the original developer account. And then the old version downloads were replaced with versions signed by the new developer account.
After all this shook out, there was a third developer account that started signing builds. At least that one appeared to be associated with the company it was sold to.
I am sure I got some details wrong, but the point is that bartender is not a program you want anywhere near your computer. Even if you are on an old version, I would recommend finding an alternative ASAP.
I can confirm that DaVinci Resolve rendering takes a major leap forward when going from an Intel Mac to an M3 Max one, especially when using Fusion compositions.
I also play Final Fantasy XIV, which does officially support MacOS. However, using the third party "XIV on Mac" launcher will deliver far greater performance. I went from an unstable 38-50fps with reduced graphics settings to a solid 60fps (far higher if I didn't cap it) at maximum settings. They basically swap out the official WINE wrapper for a custom one that takes advantage of newer technologies (such as DXVK/MoltenVK), much like in the Proton world on Linux.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet: get Homebrew. It's the de facto standard package manager, and you'll be able to install typical CLI utilities through there.
I no longer use a mac device. But, I used to have a macbook until a year ago for work. For me, the biggest annoyance is macOS window management. Although since I last used it some things seem to have improved, apparantly a tool like rectangle (Windows inspired window management) might no longer be needed or less useful. I am still mentioning it since I am not sure how complete the Apple implementation is.
Some other utilities I really liked are:
I just tried SoundSource and it made audio from YouTube very choppy over Bluetooth. Also sometimes after a restart no audio works (through the speakers) until I quit and reopen the app. So it doesn't seem very stable
I never had issues with it and it was quite stable for me. That might have changed in the past year. For me it was a great extra utility.
I had this issue with specifically the AirPods 4 and not the AirPods Pro 2 until a recent point release fixed it. This might point to SoundSource stability being dependent on certain bluetooth headsets?
Maybe. But I experienced it on both a pair of Samsung earbuds and Microsoft headphones. If they need to patch on a per-device basis that's a losing game IMO
Thanks for all you inputs everyone !
This may or may not be helpful, but my laptop was recently giving me issues with overheating too, and it started giving fan errors. Long story short, see if your computer has any diagnostic tools you can run on startup. I was able to test my fans and ended up replacing them to fix my issue.
Hot.app is a great tool to monitor temperatures on macOS. You were probably mentioning it for the Thinkpad, but it is good to monitor on any system.
I won't presume to give Mac advice - it's been a long time since I've used anything but Hackintosh VMs, and I'm not much of a gamer.
As far as the Lenovo ThinkPad thermal issue is concerned, one of the issues I've had (and others have reported) is that out-of-warranty Lenovo devices don't get manufacturer updates to match the most up-to-date OS kernels. If you haven't already, apply the latest Lenovo BIOS and get current chipset/thermal management drivers directly from the motherboard manufacturer (e.g. Intel or AMD).
Uh, I should have thought of checking for new drivers directly from Intel. Thanks for the tip!
Lots of great suggestions already, a decent number of which I use! Just adding two that I haven't seen mentioned yet:
https://asahilinux.org/
Lots of great comments and suggestions here. Here's mine: Itsycal. I've always found opening the calendar app and managing a calendar window annoying in macOS. This puts my calendar, an easy chart of upcoming dates, the current day of the week, the day, and the month in my menu bar. One click and you have access to your whole calendar. And it updates very quickly when events change. Highly recommended over the stock calendar.
The one app I can recommend that I haven't noticed in other comments is amphetamine. If you ever need to keep your Mac awake for a certain period or while something runs, it's phenomenally well-designed and works perfectly.
If you’re interested in LLM’s, maybe install the llm command, which provides a nice interface for using either local or remote llm’s along with other Unix commands. (For example, using pipes.)
But I mostly just run basic stuff. Web browser (Chrome), VS Code, git, deno since that’s what I use for TypeScript.
I have a Mac Mini M2 Pro. It plays BG3, and any other game I've played, at max settings without stuttering. That said, as always Mac doesn't have the same games available. And BG3 is theoretically Cross-play enabled, but my experience playing with my Windows buddies is that Mac is always several patches behind, and the game doesn't allow you to do cross-play across versions. It became a problem. Admittedly, the last time I tried it was probably half a year ago. Maybe the release schedule for patches has slowed down a bit from release and they are able to get it to parity.
I recommend looking at Raycast as an all-in-one app manager/toolbar/search box etc. It's excellent. Very convenient and fast for searching for files, opening and managing apps, and many community made extensions. I wrote a script for myself, as well, so that I could modify text in my clipboard so that it adds 4 spaces to the start of each line....which then allows me to paste it into a Reddit comment to format it as a code block (since old.reddit doesn't allow for normal backtick code fences). It's a two button command from my keyboard.
For connectivity, I got a mac mini stand from Satechi.net that I'm very satisfied with. They have docks and dongles for lots of mac stuff. No complaints about the product/company/shipping. My Mac Mini stand fits perfectly with the actual computer in terms of size, design, and appearance.
Back when i had a 2014 MBP a couple years ago I signed up for Shadow.tech, which is a subscription pc vm host-- Kind of like Nvidia Geforce Now, or Google Stadia or similar services, except you get access to a whole PC computer. It's more expensive at $30/mth. But for that, I have a top-notch windows PC that I use for gaming with friends (going back to the BG3 issue) and for doing Windows-based development, or just with programs that have no Mac option. I have told friends that are considering new monster gaming machines to just check out Shadow so they can avoid the upfront cost of a computer (if you build a $1000 machine, that's nearly 3 years of a shadow subscription), the cost of upgrading that computer after 3 years, and you don't need to have a big monster box on/under your desk. I started this subscription back with the 2014 MBP so then it was more about getting better performance....now, with the M2 Pro, the performance aspect is less important. Oh, and I might not recommend it if you don't have fiber internet (I have 500mbps and it works flawlessly).
I have an app called "Background Music" that sits in the menubar and allows me to set the volume of every app and quickly switch inputs/outputs.
And I'll say that after awhile we caved and signed up for Apple One, which is the bundled services (TV+, storage, Games, News, etc). Generally a good buy, in my experience, but I think it's likely very much a person-to-person thing and likely not worth it if you aren't in the "ecosystem" (you mentioned android...).
Anyway, good luck with the new 'puter.
Mac won't run Elden ring. I'm pretty sure a macbook pro has plenty of power to play it, but it just isn't available. If you are interested in other specific games I would check to see if there is a mac version on steam.
The most taxing game I've played on a macbook pro is Balatro. Also if you want to play games you may want to run them from an external drive since macbooks have pretty low storage unless you pay a lot extra.
I don't have the game, but I've definitely seen people play Elden Ring on Apple Silicon Macs using Whisky/GPTK. It's obviously not supported, but it's basically the same idea as Proton on Linux.
There are lots of great apps suggested here, so I'll give a tip instead.
I have a dbrand skin on my laptop and I definitely suggest getting something like it. While I am very careful, it does provide enough protection to have prevented damage on a couple of occasions. They are not particularly expensive, and there make it easy to identify your laptop as well; I haven't seen any other orange MacBooks around.
You can buy cords that will connect to the photo printer/ hard drive using USB-A and will connect to the macbook with USB-C.
I use mostly safari/chrome/firefox (depending on my needs), and the following:
For work, I also use RingCentral, Slack, Adobe Reader/acrobat, HP Smart Print (ugh), 1password, Zoom, and the stickies app for sticky notes on my computer.
Oh, I totally forgot a really nice one:
brew install bluesnooze. This fixes a major issue with MacOS where your bluetooth devices will try to connect to the laptop even if it's shut and asleep.