The Mac has a lot of built-in software, many of which you probably haven’t clicked on. There are actually some very useful tools in there. Today, I would like to share with you some of the most useful macOS built-in software.

The calculator

The Mac comes with a calculator software. The default display is simpler. But you can use the command-1, command-2, and command-3 shortcuts to switch to basic, Scientific, and Programmer state.

You can also use a calculator to convert units, for example, type 100 and select “kilometers to miles.” The calculator will display the 100 kilometers to miles result. There are 11 types of unit conversions.

In addition to using the calculator software, you can also use focused search to type directly in macOS to calculate results or convert units. It’s faster to do some simple calculations. By the way, the default shortcut for invoking the focused search box is command-space.

Image capture

It’s hard to imagine what this software is for, and it’s almost blank when you open it. But if you plug a device like your phone or camera into your Mac with a cable, you’ll see it under devices on the left. When you tap the device, all the photos and videos are displayed.

You can see the size of each photo and video, its location, shutter, shooting equipment, and more.

You can also select one or more or all of your photos and videos and export them to a folder on your Mac. Or a portable hard drive.

Activity monitor

If you’re a Windows user, you’ve probably opened Task Manager on Windows. Activity Monitor on macOS is a similar piece of software.

On the Activity Monitor screen, you can view the current CPU, memory, battery power consumption, disk read and write, and real-time network usage of the Mac.

For example, you can switch to the CPU and sort it by size to see which software or processes are taking up a lot of CPU on the Mac. You can also force some software programs to stop here to lighten the load on Mac hardware.

For example, energy consumption and here you can see which apps use the most energy over a 12-hour period. If you have a Mac laptop running on battery power, this is where you can see and stop some unused but energy-intensive software processes.

There’s also the “Disk” section, where you can see real-time read/write speeds when your Mac inserts an external disk and imports or exports files.

System information

Click the  icon in the upper left corner of the desktop and select about This Machine to see the Mac’s model number, year, CPU, memory size, serial number, storage space and more.

To view Mac information in more detail, click System Reports or open System Info. Here you can see Mac software, hardware, and network information.

For example, you can view memory type and number of slots, interface type and speed, battery health and number of cycles, version of Bluetooth specification, etc.

System Info and the Activity Monitor above give you a clearer picture of your Mac.

Digital color meter

This little tool is used to take color from the screen. It will capture the color and color value of the pixel where the mouse arrow is located in real time.

You can use shortcuts to lock the position or copy the currently captured color value.

notes

Ji ān, or ‘notes’,’ notes’ or ‘post-it notes’, allows you to display multiple notes on your Mac desktop.

Note color, size, placement, font size, and so on can be adjusted to suit your preferences.

You can also export the text of notes to a text file or directly export it to the “Memo” of the system.

Those who like to use notes on their desktop can skip downloading third-party tools.

The Mac also has a lot of built-in software, such as the versatile QuickTime Player, a great productivity boost called Autoaction, and a Migration Assistant that transfers data from other computers to the Mac. Those who are interested can explore it for themselves.