Appearance Settings Worth Setting on a New Mac

Appearance settings look like pure preference, and mostly they are — but two or three of them affect how readable your screen is for the eight hours a day you sit in front of it, which makes them worth a deliberate decision rather than leaving whatever the setup assistant picked.

Light, dark, or automatic

System Settings → Appearance. The third option, Auto, switches with sunrise and sunset at your location, which suits most people better than either fixed choice: light when the room is bright, dark when it is not.

One caveat worth knowing before you commit to dark mode all day: for long-form reading and writing, dark text on a light background is easier for most people in a well-lit room. Dark mode wins in dim rooms and at night. Auto exists precisely because the right answer changes. See dark mode on Mac.

Accent and highlight colour

Two separate settings that people usually assume are one. Accent colour changes buttons and controls; highlight colour changes selected text. Setting the highlight to something with more contrast than the default makes selections far easier to see when you are editing text heavily. Detail in changing the accent colour.

Display warmth

Two features overlap here and it helps to know which does what:

• True Tone adjusts colour to match the ambient light in your room, continuously. Leave it on unless you do colour-critical work, where you want a fixed reference — True Tone.
• Night Shift warms the display on a schedule to reduce blue light in the evening. Separate from True Tone and stackable with it — Night Shift.

Wallpaper behaviour

macOS ships with rotating dynamic wallpapers, and on a new Mac they cycle by default. Two reasons you might not want that: a changing background is distracting in peripheral vision while you work, and screen recordings or shared screens look inconsistent. Set a static image if either applies. One related setting catches people out — clicking the wallpaper can shove all your windows aside to reveal the Desktop, which is covered in click wallpaper to show desktop.

Scrollbars

By default macOS hides scrollbars until you scroll, which looks clean and hides useful information — namely how long a document is and where you are in it. Appearance → Show scroll bars → Always brings them back permanently. Small change, and one of the ones people keep. See always showing scrollbars.

Text size and readability

If the interface feels small on a high-resolution display, the answer is usually display scaling rather than appearance settings — System Settings → Displays, and the scaled options there. That affects the whole interface proportionally rather than just text, which is generally what people actually want. Sidebar icon size under Appearance is a smaller, more targeted fix for Finder specifically.

The rest of the visual setup is in menu bar setup and Dock setup.