New To Mac? Here Are the Apps Apple Gives You For Free.

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. If you're new to the Mac you may be surprised to learn about all the apps that already come pre-installed. 

When you buy a new Mac a number of apps come pre-installed. Some of those are built-in apps that are part of macOS. Others are apps that you normally get from The App Store but they'll come already installed on your Mac. In some cases if you bought a used or refurbished Mac or one that has been reset, at some point you may find that some of these apps aren't there. If that is the case you can just get them from The App Store for free. I've broken these apps into seven different categories. Let's take a look at them. 

The first category would be Internet apps. So here we've got Safari Web Browser. It is a great web browser that is filled with features and is also really good for MacBook battery life. If you're used to using another web browser, like Edge or Chrome, you may not want to jump to installing those immediately. But instead use Safari. There is no reason why you can't have multiple web browsers installed on your Mac using Safari for most things and maybe Edge and Chrome for special uses. 

You've also got Mail which is a mail app that connects not just with Apple's iCloud email system but also it connects with just about any other standard system including Microsoft, Goggle, Yahoo, and any standard email account like from a business or school. 

You've got the Messages App which allows you to communicate using Apple's iMessage System. But if you happen to have an iPhone your iPhone will forward standard text messages to your Mac so you can communicate with just about anybody seamlessly using the Messages App. 

FaceTime is Apple's own video conferencing system. It's mostly used for people to talk one-on-one with another person. It works primarily with other Apple devices but you can also set this up for group conversations. So you can have meetings in FaceTime, for instance.

There's also The App Store which is where you can go to get other apps besides the ones that come installed on your Mac. We're going to circle back to The App Store at the end. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

The next set I call Productivity. This includes apps that you use, not just in business but also for personal things. Like for instance the Contacts app is where you would store contact information like people you know, their email addresses, their phone numbers, their physical addresses, things like that. Then those contacts are used in other places. For instance, in sending an email message you can easily just type the person's name and it will get their email address from your Contacts. 

You've also got other productivity apps like a Calendar App where you can enter events, appointments. You can do everything here from business meetings to classes to travel plans. Things like that. 

You've got the Reminders App which is basically a To Do List app. You can enter in multiple lists of things that you need to accomplish. You can have times set for them for deadlines or not. You can just have lists of things and sublists and kind of arrange things. I like to keep track of ideas as lists in the Reminders App. 

But if you want to go beyond just simple lists the Notes App allows you to basically create these little text documents. But you can also Format things, Add images and Links and other things like that. This could be used for personal note taking, note taking at meetings, or in classes, or anywhere you want to just record lots of information. 

You've also got a Voice Memos app. This allows you to just record from the microphone to make quick voice memos and it will transcribe them for you. 

No doubt with apps like Voice Memos, Notes, Reminders, Contacts, and Calendar these all sync across to other Apple devices like an iPhone using iCloud. So if I use the Voice Memos on my iPhone to record a voice memo I would see it appear here on my Mac as well. Note that with some apps, like for instance the Calendar App, you can use other Cloud systems like say Goggle instead of Apple System to sync between all your devices. 

Finally, in the Productivity section we've got one called FreeForm. This allows you to go even further than notes in creating documents that basically just have lots of images and elements over a board that you can just move around. So you can create all sorts of charts and idea boards and all sorts of things in FreeForm. 

Now if you want to go beyond just making lists or note taking Apple gives you a Suite of Office Apps. The primary three are Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Pages is a word processing app. But in addition to using it for word processing you can use it as a Page Layout App as well to create things like newsletters, and flyers. 

Numbers, as you may have guessed, is a spreadsheet app and you can use it to create spreadsheets, charts, and do all sorts of different calculations. It's like Excel in Microsoft Office but it uses a table metaphor here where you can have multiple tables on a single sheet. 

Keynote is presentation software. You can use this to build presentations for work or school. You can even export presentations as videos to create information videos for YouTube, for instance, 

There are two other apps that I will put under Office. One is Preview. Preview is an app that allows you to view two different things. PDF files and Images. For each of them it allows you to not only to view them but to mark them up or, in the case of some PDF's, fill out forms. So you don't need to get Adobe Reader, for instance, for most PDF's. You can just use Preview that you already have built-in and for viewing and doing some simple editing of images files you can use Preview as well. 

Now the next set of apps are internet related but I put them in a different group called Information. The primary one here is the News app. This is basically a news reader that draws on multiple internet sources. It's not what some people think a newspaper, edited and published by Apple. You pick the sources, you pick the topics, and you get to define what you really see here. So you can make it an app where you just see tech news, or entertainment news, or just news from a few local sources instead of all over the internet. It's also how you would access Apple's News Plus which is a subscription services which allows you to view articles from various places, like magazines, that normally would cost you a subscription fee to see each one individually. You can pay one fee to Apple and get hundreds of these magazines all included.  

Related to the News App is the Stocks app which is very much like the News App except you can put in your portfolio of stocks here and then the news articles you see will be business articles tailored to the stock that you have entered in for tracking. You can also search for other stocks and information, get charts and all sorts of things. So it is all related to the Stock Market. 

There's also a Weather App that will give you detailed weather information, not just for your location here, but you can also search for other locations and add them to the list here to quickly jump around to different places in the world where you want to often check the current weather. 

Finally, there's the Maps App which gives you detailed mapping information. You've got satellite view, you've got Exploring & Driving views, you've got a 3D view as well. You can get pretty detailed in a lot of urban areas particularly. Of course get directions and information about different locations. 

The next group I call Media. It, for the most part, allows you to handle media that you have stored on your Mac. For instance, the Music App, which is kind of the successor to what used to be called iTunes, allows you to store your own music. You can rip from CD's or download from other websites and you can play your music here and create Playlists. You can also subscribe to Apple's Apple Music Service which is like Spotify where you can get all of the music available, streaming, for a monthly fee. But you don't have to use that. You can use music with just your own files. 

Likewise the Podcast App allows you to subscribe and listen to podcasts, most of which are free. 

The TV App allows you to view your own video files but also rent movies, buy movies, and TV Shows and access Apple's Apple TV+ streaming service. 

The Books app, which allows you to read your own ebooks, including audio books, or buy them from Apple's Bookstore. If the only bookstore you're used to is the Kindle Bookstore one significant difference with Apple's Bookstore is there are free books, lots of them. Amazon doesn't really provide that except for some specials. But Apple Books is filled with lots of free, public domain books, or books just made free by the author that you can download. 

Finally there's QuickTime Player here which is a video player that allows you to play most kinds of video files on your Mac. So if you just have a video file and you just want to play it you can. But you should note that it goes beyond that. It also allows you to do some editing, like some trimming of the videos and you can record videos using your Mac's camera or webcam attached or record audio files as well. So it is a recorder as well as a player. 

Which takes us to the Creative Apps. The first one here is Photos which is photo management software but allows you to do adjustments and cropping and organize into albums, searches, all sorts of different things with your photos and syncs across to your different Apple devices using iCloud Photos as well. 

Then there is also iMovie which is video editing software. You've got a timeline down here. You've got your media. You've got your Preview area. You could build simple movies from your different clips that you've taken on your iPhone or downloaded online. It's definitely not pro-level video editing software but it's good enough for what most people want to do on their Macs. 

There's GarageBand which is a surprisingly complex  music production app. You can use it with different tracks. You can record with a microphone. You can record with many instruments attached to your Mac. You can create songs or just use it to edit an audio file, trim it out, apply effects, and things like that. It may not be quite as sophisticated as professional music software but it certainly comes close in a lot of ways. 

The final group I have here are Utility Apps. So you've got apps like a Clock App which allows you to set timers, have a stopwatch, or just see times around the world. 

You've got the Passwords app which is a Password Manager that stores all your passwords and works with Safari, effortlessly, so you may already be using this even if you don't go into the app itself. 

You've got the Shortcuts App which allows you to create simple programs. Automations that let you control your Mac. 

You've got the Calculator App which seems pretty simply at first but you actually have scientific and programmer modes and can do conversions and all sorts of other things with it. 

You've got a Dictionary App which is not just a dictionary but also a Thesaurus and you can use it to access Wikipedia. 

In Settings you can add all sorts of other dictionaries using different Languages and Translation Dictionaries. 

You've got Find My which works to locate things like your iPhone and iPad or maybe your MacBook to give you their location. 

You've got the Home App which works with internet enabled devices like lights and things like that around your house. 

You've got Image Capture which is an app that allows you to import photos directly from cameras without the Photos App or do things like use a scanner that is attached to your Mac. 

Disk utility is something you should know about because it is how you would format drives. Like if you get a USB thumb drive or an external drive you can erase it and reformat it using disk utility.

PhotoBooth lets you use the camera on your MacBook or iMac as a regular camera or to record short videos.

The Terminal App is the way for you to interact with your Mac using Shell Commands, like if you were using a Unex or Linux machine. 

System Settings, of course, is a way for you to customize your Mac. All of the systemwide settings are here. There are tons of things in different categories. As you learn to use your Mac you're going to go to System Settings often to change things or set things up. For instance here under Keyboard you can set Keyboard Shortcuts and redefine keyboard shortcuts for various apps and other functions on your Mac. 

There is one app that is missing from all of that because it is not something you ever need to launch. It's always running. It's called Finder. You can see I'm in it right here and it is the left most icon here in the Dock. The Finder is the app that allows you to work with your files. You can manage your files, you can view and create folders, you can move things around. It is how you would find files. You double click something to open it up in the app. It is the equivalent to Windows Explorer. 

Now let's circle back here to The App Store app. The App Store app is the app that you would use to get more apps. So if you need to get another app to do something else you would go to The App Store and search for it here or you can browse through the various apps that are available. All of the apps here go through Apple. The developer has to register with Apple so there is a level of safety when you get apps from The App Store. It is also easy to get them here. It is easy to pay for them. You don't have to pay individual developers but you can pay through The App Store although a lot of these apps are simply free. But sometimes there are apps that are not available in The App Store. You would just download those from the developer's official website. Make sure you're there and make sure you trust that developer and that site before you install an app. This is also where you may find some of the apps I've shown you before if for some reason they were not already on your Mac. For instance, you can see here Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. 

So as you can see your Mac comes packed with software. For a lot of people everything they need to do on their Mac can be done using these apps. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.