New Mac Setup Mistakes Worth Avoiding

Most new-Mac advice is a list of things to do. This is the shorter, more useful list of things not to. Several are holdovers from Intel Macs or from macOS versions that no longer exist, and a couple actively cause the problems they claim to prevent.

Configuring before migrating

The most common and the most annoying. Migration Assistant copies preference files from your old Mac, so an hour spent perfecting Finder and the Dock beforehand is an hour that gets overwritten. Migrate first, configure second. Covered properly in migrating to a new Mac.

Installing a cleaner app on day one

A new Mac has nothing to clean. Cleaner utilities exist for machines with years of accumulated caches and duplicates, and running one on a fresh install is at best a no-op. Revisit the idea if disk space genuinely becomes a problem in a year.

Turning off Spotlight indexing because it is “slowing things down”

Spotlight indexes hard for the first few hours after setup or migration, and people watching Activity Monitor conclude something is wrong. It finishes on its own. Disabling it trades a temporary cost for a permanent loss of search, which is one of the better things about macOS.

Calibrating the battery

A genuine practice for older lithium batteries with different controllers, and obsolete on any modern Mac. Optimised Battery Charging does more for longevity than any manual discharge routine, and it is already on. See battery settings.

Disabling SIP because a guide said to

System Integrity Protection is a meaningful part of what keeps macOS difficult to compromise. Some legitimate tools require it off, and if you need one of those, fine — but do it knowingly and for a specific tool, not as a general setup step because an article recommended it.

Granting permissions in bulk

Install thirty apps in an afternoon and you will face thirty permission prompts, each out of context, and you will start clicking Allow to make them stop. Set your privacy baseline while the Mac is empty, then install gradually. Privacy settings covers what each permission actually grants.

Changing things you cannot undo

The general principle behind all of the above. Every setting worth changing has a documented way back, and the habit that makes tuning safe is reading a value before writing it:

# Always know what you are changing from
defaults read com.apple.finder ShowPathbar

If that returns does not exist, the setting is untouched and defaults delete restores it. If it returns a value, that value is your undo. Anything you cannot reverse deserves more thought than a five-minute setup session gives it.