From the course: macOS Sequoia Essential Training

First-time setup for a new Mac - macOS Tutorial

From the course: macOS Sequoia Essential Training

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First-time setup for a new Mac

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- [Instructor] If you buy a new computer with Mac OS or if you do a fresh installation of Mac OS, there will be an initial setup process the first time you start up, which will prompt you to answer several questions. Some of these questions are really obvious, like this one where it's asking me to choose my location. I'm located in the United States, so I'll choose that from the list. Then click continue, and you can see how that works. Let's get forward past some of these more obvious questions. Many of the things you do on your Mac and in this training course will require an internet connection. So one of the first things you might see is a screen prompting you to sign into a Wi-Fi network, which I do not see, because my computer's connected to the internet with a cable. If you use Wi-Fi, you will see a step in this process prompting you to choose your network. Select your Wi-Fi network from that list, put in the password for that network if it's locked, and then you'll have internet for the rest of this setup. Now, if this still is not clear to you, you can skip that step and check out the video later in this course on connecting to the internet. Then at some point you'll see this information here about privacy and security. You can feel free to take some time to click this link to learn more and read all of this important information, but for now, I'll click continue. Now it's offering to let me transfer data from another computer. If you are migrating your documents and applications from another Mac, you can choose that option. If you're transferring from a Windows computer, there's an option for that as well. And then after that you can just follow the prompts, but of course, it's completely fine to set this up as a new computer and not transfer anything, and that's what I want to do. So I'll click not now. Next, it's prompting me to either sign into my Apple account or create a new account. I explained what the Apple account is earlier in this course, and we even saw a preview of this screen. I want you to know that you do not have to use an Apple account. It may look like you do at first, but if you don't want to sign in, you can just click where it says set up later down here at the bottom. There's also an option to create a new account if you don't have one, and if you happen to have two separate accounts for iCloud and the iTunes or App Store, you can click this option to sign into those accounts separately. So if you have an account, go ahead and sign in and there may be a step where it needs you to put in a verification code for two factor authentication. If you have any trouble with that, it is explained in my course "iCloud Essential Training." For now, I'll just choose setup later to skip this. And confirm. Next is the user agreement, and you can scroll through and read the full legal agreement. I'll just click agree and confirm. Next, you'll need to set up your user account. Basically your name and password for the computer itself. Every time you turn on the computer, you'll need to type in your password to unlock the computer, and this keeps your computer secure. If you signed into your Apple account, it will already set up your username based on that. You can change that or if you did not sign into an Apple account, you can just type in your name in this first field. Then when you click on the account name field, it will fill in a short version of your name. Then you'll need to put in the password that you want to use. When you sign into this computer, you will need to type it in twice to verify, and if you want, you can set a password hint that the computer can show you if you ever forget your password. So I'm going to skip that and click continue. If you did sign in with an Apple account, it may ask some questions to configure the iCloud services connected to that account. Those questions and steps are clarified in the "iCloud Essential Training" course. And then there will be a few more other options. If you're using an Apple account that was also used on another Mac, it may automatically set some options based on what you chose on that other computer, or it may prompt you to set those manually. And from here, most of these questions will be clear if you read the text on the screen and answer with your preferences, I'll just skip past them. And when you're finally finished with all of that, you'll be signed into your computer and you can start working with your new system.

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