5 macOS Features That Can Improve Your Productivity

macOS provides an awesome web-browsing experience – Windows users who have tried it will have a hard time going back to their previous OS – but even that can become a nightmare if the web browser becomes a memory hog.

Think about Chrome and even Safari in their earlier versions: these programs utilized a big chunk of the Mac’s physical resources, making the machine sluggish and forcing the user to free up RAM either with the help of Activity Monitor or a third party Mac optimization app such as CleanMyMac.

With macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Apple addressed this major issue. Better memory management is especially important for users with Macs that don’t have a lot of RAM. This will also result in a less sluggish computer.

Universal clipboard

This feature is part of Apple’s Continuity initiative, which makes it possible to copy text, photos, and videos from one Mac and paste them onto an iOS device or another Mac. This could be a quick alternative to AirDrop, a neat feature of macOS, as it enables speedy and easy file transfers between machines. The only catch is that to do so you will need to sign into iCloud on all the devices you want to use Universal Clipboard with and make sure that both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are turned on.

The Apple File System – now default with macOS 10.13 on Macs with SSD – replaces a decades-old file system. APFS was developed with flash and SSD storage in mind and is therefore optimized for this particular type of storage.

It features strong encryption, allows for the cloning of files and directories, snapshots, and much more. Cloning makes a nearly instant copy of a file or directory without occupying any additional disk space, while macOS High Sierra uses these snapshots to make backups work more efficiently and enables users to easily revert to a certain point in time.

The friendly robot designed to take the burden of manually completing repetitive tasks off you, Automator can become a powerful utility if the workflow’s recipe is good enough.

Automator workflows can be used to improve your own productivity and optimize the Mac’s performance, since the software comes with hundreds of pre-set actions that need only to be chained together to form a workflow that solves any given ‘problem’.