Best Review Guide / Articles / Software / Mac Utilities / Essential apps every Mac user should install

Essential apps every Mac user should install

Hailey Avatar By: Hailey | Last updated April 14, 2020

blond girl monitor computer mac utilities


If you’ve just got yourself a new Mac and you’re starting to configure and personalize it, or if you’ve just switched from Windows to Mac OS, you might not be up to speed with all the available apps. And there’s a whole bunch of them out there! Whether you need some utilities and troubleshooting apps, something for Internet and communication, productivity, entertainment and so on, there’s a plethora of options to choose from.

Here are some common and essential apps every Mac user should consider installing:

  • VLC is one of the most popular and versatile free media players and it works on both Mac and Windows. It can also be used for streaming and media conversion and it doesn’t require you to download any additional codecs
  • It is a very useful and complex system monitor which can show you everything from your CPU performance, to the battery level of your wireless keyboard or Magic Trackpad and system temperatures
  • Google Chrome. If you’re not that pleased with Safari as far as web browsers go, you can try Google Chrome instead. It is free, fast and has a myriad of useful extensions. Another noteworthy option is Firefox Quantum
  • Alfred is an app launcher and more. It can help you perform web searches and find files, use keywords and hotkeys to be more efficient and save time, control your Mac and much more
  • It is a great image editing software, not as complex and hard to grasp as Photoshop, but very easy to work with and full of useful tools and features. It is also affordable (around $30)
  • It is a must-have utility app which identifies files and folders that can be saved in a damaged directory. Once it finds them, it builds a new directory with them, this time one without errors
  • This one is a useful organizer that helps you choose which apps appear in the menu tab and in what order. You can customize it based on which apps you use more often
  • Keyboard Maestro 8. It is a complex automation app which helps you become more efficient. It includes a lot of useful tools such as machine learning (it learns the functions and actions you want to trigger or select by name, so that you can access them faster), editor AppleScript support, front browser actions, send messages and iMessages, dictionaries and many more
  • It lets you customize several input devices on your Mac. It supports: Macbook Trackpad, Magic Trackpad 1 & 2, Magic Mouse 1 &2, Siri/Apple remote, normal mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts and others. It allows you to create your own gestures and more
  • 1Password for Mac. It is a great security app that creates strong passwords for all your websites so you don’t have to remember so many of them. You can instead log in with a simple tap
  • Dropbox. Unless you’ve never owned a computer with Internet connection, you’ve most likely heard about this one. Dropbox it is still a great app for Macs (and not only) and it is free. It helps you easily access your files from anywhere, regardless of the device you are using and to share them with anyone you want.

SUBSCRIBE