Transcription
All right, you've just updated to Mac OS 26 and it's a big update. The brand new design is easy to spot, but unless you dig a little deeper, you miss many of the most powerful new features.
But first, starting with the obvious, because you can now personalize the way your Mac looks more than ever before. I mean, seeing Mac OS look like this, this, or this, yeah, feels almost illegal. You can join the party in the appearance settings where we now have themes. Before we could already pick the accent color, which basically shows up in any menus, as well as the text highlight color. Now, with Mac OS 26, if you do want to get a bit fancy, we can change the icon and widget style. There's dark mode, which you can also activate automatically, plus a new clear look, which makes everything appear translucent again in either light or dark mode. What's more, you can choose any color on the spectrum or even pick a color from your screen so you can match your wallpaper.
Now, this setting also tints your folders on the desktop and in the finder. Although, you can also customize individual folders one by one. And there's more to it than meets the eye. We can change the tint, but also add any icon or emoji, which can actually be useful customization for organizing things visually and making certain folders stand out from the blue hell we've had before.
Moving on. Not exactly life-changing, but in wallpaper settings, we can now personalize the appearance of the lock screen clock. So, change the font and wait. Oh, and just in case you're really not a fan of the new liquid glass, there's a quick way out. In the accessibility settings under display, you can switch on reduce transparency. Pretty much takes you back to the Mac OS 15 look.
But what if you couldn't care less about how your Mac looks? Well, there's plenty of practical customization, too. Like for control center, where we can now add and customize over 70 different toggles. These are the six. I'd start with a switch for activating low power mode, a one-click split screen tiling two apps, left and right, quick access to dark mode and night shift, a screen saver toggle, and screenshot and screen recording tools. Plus, if you've got any Apple home devices or Siri shortcut setup, you can throw those in, too, for quick control. Super useful.
Also, a small detail I don't see mentioned much. You can right-click any toggle, resize it, or even copy it to the menu bar so it's just one click away. On the same note, if an app keeps forcing its icon into the menu bar, but you don't want it to show up there, there's now a new system level toggle for each app here in the menu bar settings. You can simply block any app completely from showing up. Oh, and while we're here, if things get messy, this is also the place where you can reset your menu bar and control center back to their original setup.
All right, that's all fun to play with, but the one feature that genuinely impressed me the most is the new spotlight search. And if you want to squeeze the most out of it, there's a few things you need to know. Because let me tell you, once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts, so command one for apps, two for fights, three for Siri shortcuts and four for the new clipboard history, you're halfway there. But there's still some stuff to customize. For starters, for apps and fights, I switch the grid to list view just because I find it's easier to scan through.
Now, command three takes us to actions, and that's where it gets interesting. We have a bunch of baked-in actions, and you can set quick keys. So basically keyboard shortcuts for any of them. So just for instance, I've got SM mapped to send message. So I can either send what I've selected in an app or just type something in and fire it off to a contact without ever actually opening the messages app. But that's just scratching the surface because look what happens when you search for your own Siri Shortcuts from the shortcuts app. There's also a field for quick keys. So, for example, I could map PP to playing my work playlist. The point being, with this shortcuts integration, there's now basically an infinite number of things Spotlight search can do.
Now, we circle back to the Shortcuts app in just a sec because there's a new feature you want to see. But before, let's tweak three things in Spotlight settings. For privacy reasons, you can switch off help Apple improve search. On the same note, here's the place where you can delete your search history, which by the way, you can trigger any time by pressing the up arrow key, and you can scroll through your past searches one by one. It's also worth going through this list here and deselecting any apps and their content you don't really need showing up in Spotlight. Makes it both cleaner and faster.
All right, back to shortcuts because automations are now on the Mac. You might already know them from the iPhone, but there are also some Mac exclusive options like how you can automatically trigger a shortcut when you add files to a folder or when you connect an external drive. Though you can get way more creative like take this example I came across lately. Drop a file into a folder and on device Apple intelligence scans its content and sorts it into a fitting subfolder. I'm sure we'll see many more fancy automations like this one.
All right, you're still watching. Here's a bonus setting, which honestly I had no idea where to put in my script, but if you're reading a PDF in dark mode, previously this will blind you to death. Now there's a dark appearance toggle for PDFs, too. I mean, can't complain about that one. Just like the brand new Mac OS phone app, live activities in the menu bar, or these strange little dots, which can actually be quite useful. If you want to dive into that, this next video is where I'd go.
All right, catch you there. Thank you so much for watching and have an amazing day.