On macOS, it’s best to start with the default – Six Colors

A question from reader Jack B. has led me on a journey of reflection about the result of Apple iterating on macOS for a couple of decades. “I’m hoping for a new MacBook Pro for the holidays,” he wrote. “Do you have any good pieces on Six Colors highlighting the best apps/utilities?”

The short answer is that we don’t, though we have written stories about our favorite apps of the year for most of the last decade. But I thought Jack’s suggestion was interesting, so I opened a file and started writing down my notes about what utilities I simply must install when I start using a new, default Mac.

The thing is, my personal list has been built up over time. It’s a bricolage of utilities that I’ve integrated over the years in order to offset some of the deficiencies of macOS. Sure, we all have specialized tools that we use to do our jobs, and I could list those somewhere, but what Jack was asking was far more general: What are good apps and utilities to augment macOS?

This is when I realized that, over the two decades I’ve been using what was once Mac OS X, Apple has filled in so many of the limitations of macOS that there’s precious little that I would consider a must-have utility today. The early days of OS X were rough. It was a new operating system with a lot of gaps in functionality, and third-party apps rushed in to fill the cracks. But over time, Apple did what it does—adding feature updates here and there that won’t satisfy every need of the power user but will satisfy everyone else.

I got the religion about launcher utilities when my old boss Rick LePage recommended LaunchBar to me (a couple of decades ago!). I was able to turbocharge the speed at which I controlled my Mac by using my fast typing skills, coupled with an intelligent launcher utility. Quicksilver was a similar popular utility back then, and then Alfred came along, and recently Raycast joined the party.

But all the while, since its introduction in 2005, Spotlight has kept getting better, faster, and more versatile. Can it do everything I use LaunchBar to do? Well, no, but it can come pretty close. So close, in fact, that I would hesitate to recommend any of these launcher utilities to someone starting out from scratch. Spotlight’s pretty great. It may be all you need. Start with that, and then, if you want to up your productivity game, bring on LaunchBar, Alfred, or Raycast.

Similarly, while I’m backing up my data eight ways to Sunday, the first step in backing up your Mac is plugging in a big enough hard drive and configuring Time Machine. It’s a great place to start. Yes, you probably want to do an offline backup because if your backup drive is located in the same place as your computer, they can both be destroyed in a fire, flood, or other natural disaster. So your next step might be something like Backblaze. And yes, you might want to go further and use a cloning utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. But Time Machine is, once again, a good start.

I’ve used Dropbox for years and paid for it for most of those years. There are still some Dropbox features that I use that iCloud hasn’t replicated, but that number has shrunk quite a lot in the last few years. iCloud has improved in reliability and added features like shared folders, which means it has more than enough features for most people who are living entirely in Apple’s ecosystem.

My first three installations on a new Mac are usually LaunchBar, Dropbox, and 1Password. But even when it comes to password management, Apple has built up functionality that’s so strong that it’s hard for me to recommend something else. Sure, if you’re sharing passwords with people on other platforms or if you yourself use other platforms, you’ll need more than what Apple offers. But if you’re just trying to generate and store strong passwords, one-time codes, or passkeys, Apple has you covered.

The more I think of it, the more I realize that Apple has identified the most common holes in macOS functionality and has systematically eliminated those holes for the broadest section of its Mac customers. Tools that once filled gaps are now just nice-to-have upgrades from the base Apple functionality.

The biggest gap I can think of that still exists is clipboard history. Many apps can act as clipboard managers—I’ve been using the one in LaunchBar for years, and Pastebot is a popular favorite—and once you use a clipboard manager, it’s hard to go back to Apple’s concept, unchanged in nearly 40 years, that there’s a single clipboard and once you copy something new, the old clipboard is gone forever. I now reflexively copy multiple items in one app and then paste those items into a different app rather than doing the old back-and-forth. I rely on the clipboard history to dig out an item from half an hour ago without having to look it up again.

Not to give Apple new ideas about how to make more utilities sort of obsolete, but imagine if macOS and iOS gave you the ability to access your clipboard history, synced across devices! Wow, that would be amazing—and given how locked down iOS is, it’s a feature that only Apple can provide.

Another area of interest is file management and automation. I recently wrote about how Folder Actions is somehow still a thing in macOS. Think about offering users the ability to select a folder in Finder or Files and build actions that would occur when those folders changed. Folder Actions enabled some of that, and utilities like Hazel have taken it to the extreme. Sure, power users can run wild with features like this, but I think regular users might appreciate being able to say, “When a file in this folder is older than 60 days, file it away somewhere else,” or “Delete all the disk image files in my downloads folder older than 60 days.” There’s something there.

I’m hesitant to suggest that Apple invest even more time in macOS window management given the existence of Spaces and Stage Manager, but Apple hasn’t upgraded the ability of users to move and resize windows within a space. Microsoft has invested a lot in this over on Windows, and there are several popular Mac windowing utilities such as Moom out there. It might be worth it for Apple to make it easier for users to quickly tile windows in order to tidy up their screens.

This is why I struggle with Jack’s question. For basic use, macOS is pretty solid and comes with a bunch of useful apps right out of the box, too. Sure, there are lots of great nerdy utilities you can use to spiff things up—I love SwiftBar, for example. And I still need a load of stuff specifically to do my job, like BBEdit and Logic Pro and Audio Hijack, and the list goes on.

But the truth is, unless you’re a longtime Mac user who has integrated your personal collection of utilities into the way you use your Mac, you might not need all that much. So that’s my advice for people getting new Macs who don’t carry that legacy with them: Start with what’s there and then explore when you find where the built-in tools can’t meet your needs.

Except a clipboard manager. You should totally use one of those. It’ll change your life.

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