Some of them have existed for many years, many are not that cheap because they are the main source of income for their developers, who pour in amounts of dedication and love for the platform that you won't find from even Apple itself, let alone app creators on Windows. EDIT: There are some extremely high-quality apps out there for Mac users. I personally use iStat Menus, Bartender, a good (plain) text editor (BBEdit, Sublime Text or Visual Studio Code are probably the most popular ones), Fantastical and some others.

Again, try without them first so you have a good base. That said, there are some neat apps for power users. And maybe VLC or another media player if you need to play videos that QuickTime Player doesn't support.īut I'd say honestly there aren't any real 'must-have' third-party apps outside of special interests like content creation etc. Obviously if you use any music streaming service like Spotify, or a messenger, get their app. (EDIT: Keychain is a built-in password manager that syncs with your iPhone, Safari is a decent browser, and there are many integrated system services like the emoji/character picker, or text replacements found in keyboard preferences) The built-in print feature of macOS lets you save any print job as a (searchable, vector-based) PDF. The built-in Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Notes, Reminders apps are quite competent, and Preview can display and convert basically all (non-pro) image files, even edit/markup PDFs. For someone switching from Windows, this can be surprisingly far. If you used Disk Utility from macOS Recovery, you can now restart your Mac: choose Apple menu  > Restart.Outside the apps you need for work/school, I would say: try and see how far you get with the built-in apps. The order of repair in this example was Macintosh HD - Data, then Macintosh HD, then Container disk4, then APPLE SSD.

Keep moving up the list, running First Aid for each volume on the disk, then each container on the disk, then finally the disk itself. If you're asked for a password to unlock the disk, enter your administrator password.Īfter Disk Utility is done checking the volume, select the next item above it in the sidebar, then run First Aid again.If the button is dimmed and you can't click it, skip this step for the disk, container, or volume you selected.If there is no Run button, click the Repair Disk button instead.In this example, the last volume on the disk is Macintosh HD - Data.Ĭlick Run to begin checking the selected volume for errors. For each disk that you're repairing, start by selecting the last volume on that disk, then click the First Aid button or tab.

Vanilla mac utility