“New Mac users are often given bad advice that leads to mistakes when they first switch to the Mac,” Gary Rosenzweig writes for MacMost.
“Don’t listen to others when they advise you to immediately installer add-ons, or give you tips to customize your Mac,” Rosenzweig writes. “Learn to use macOS in its default configuration first, which is best for most users.”
“Also avoid the habit of shutting your Mac down and instead let it sleep,” Rosenzweig writes. “And absolutely avoid installing maintenance or anti-virus apps. Most are useless and many are actually harmful.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good advice, as usual, from Gary. Follow it, new Mac users, and welcome to the world’s most advanced operating system!
Great advice. Now can we get MacNN to stop advocating the clearing of caches to “improve performance”?
Unless MacNN made a comeback, it retired a while back,
When I switched I discovered the Mac just had a different set of problems… Sure, many things just worked, made more sense, or were refined, but some things were just infuriatingly (and needlessly) troublesome. Good advice for new users to not monkey around with customizations. However, while the author recommends no additional malware protection, and while I am aware of the problems these products have brought over the years, you really ought to have malware protection installed. Buy from a large, reputable company from a country that you can distrust the least.
Get little Snitch, Malware software don’t waste your time.
Spot on, a very effective and enlightening piece of software expecially as far as Google is concerned.
Excellent advice here… Also some third party add-ons are not compatible with all MacOS apps and cause them to crash. Adobe Creative Cloud software is especially prone to crashing from 3rd party add-ons. Cleaning apps such as Clean-My-Mac removes foreign language files from apps which can cripple them from updating to newer versions in the future.
only if you tell it to
My advice to new Mac users is to let it be a Mac and don’t try to make it work in the ways that PCs do.
If something seems difficult to do, then either you might not be doing it the best way to do it on a Mac, or otherwise you might be trying to do something which is unnecessary on a Mac.
The 2 mistakes I see new Mac users make more than any other are ones that effects their Mac’s performance:
Closing open windows by clicking the red dot in the top-left corner of a window, instead of quitting out of the application. I routinely see Macs with a dozen or more applications running, but no windows open.
Web browsers with open tab(s) left running for days. This causes performance issues by using RAM, and is particularly problematic when the tab(s) are left open to site(s) with dynamically loading content (news sites, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, etc.).