5 MacBook Features Students Will Use Every Day

As laptops become more and more affordable, they have also become as essential to the student experience as backpacks and laptops. The demands of being a student haven’t necessarily changed much, however, writing papers, conducting research, taking notes in class, and adjusting to new schedules remain among the main challenges of each semester. Apple’s MacBook line is a favorite tool to help meet the challenges of students of all ages, with macOS offering features that put more capabilities in their hands with each passing year.

Since there’s a MacBook for every budget, the line is almost as accessible to students as devices like Chromebooks. Apple includes the MacBook Air among its most affordable laptop options, and the more recently released MacBook Neo specifically targets students and budget buyers who want to use the many features of Apple’s software ecosystem without completely breaking the bank. Features aimed at fun, like sharing songs on Apple Music and screenshotting memes to share on social media, will of course always be popular draws among students.

But there are many other ways for students to use a MacBook. Although many may not have explored macOS beyond its superficial features, the operating system is full of tools and software that students can use on a daily basis. Brainstorming, collaborating, memorizing, focusing, and organizing can all be made simpler, easier, and more convenient with a MacBook. So let’s explore some of the features that students can use to maximize the learning experience.

Keeping track of everything that is communicated at a conference can be a challenge. It’s almost impossible to keep up when taking notes by hand, and typing into a word processor while simultaneously trying to absorb the content just doesn’t work for students who aren’t natural multitaskers. It can be easy to miss a point in the moment, and just as easy to take notes illegibly or in a way that makes it difficult to remember when referring to them.

The Voice Memos app built into macOS can handle a long conference without any of these issues. Students can set it to run in the background while taking notes or simply listening to the professor, knowing that a recorded version of the lecture will exist for future reference. This can certainly help students who learn more naturally by listening, but having a recording of each lecture is something that almost all students might find useful at some point during the semester.

QuickTime Player is another built-in app that students can use to record lectures, although Voice Memos can take voice recordings even further. It doesn’t have the ability to annotate or timestamp while recording, but Voice Memos on a MacBook is capable of transcribing audio and presenting it as text. Students can then copy and paste the transcript into a word processor, where they can search, highlight, annotate, and even summarize the text with various AI programs.

There’s no shortage of windows, apps, and browser tabs that can fill a student’s MacBook screen. Essays, documents, search tabs, and Apple Music are likely to be open simultaneously, not to mention the digital space that productivity apps like Calendar, Notion, Pages, and Reminders can take up. Just like a physical desktop computer, a student’s MacBook screen may never seem big enough.

An external monitor is always an option, but it defeats the portability of a laptop. However, a feature called Spaces is available with macOS, which allows students to set up virtual desktops that they can easily switch between. Apps can be organized into spaces by category, but students may also find it convenient to set up different workspaces for each course they take. Software like Pages and Notes could each have their own space, while software dedicated to schedules and to-do lists could live in a separate space.

Students can set up spaces through Mission Control, with macOS allowing up to 16 different spaces. This feature can be somewhat frustrating when used to create Spaces for related apps, as each app can only be open in one Space at a time. In other words, students cannot open Pages in a designated writing space or a separate note-taking space. But this feature can also be used to organize all open windows at once, giving students the ability to simply create temporary spaces as they open and close files throughout the day.

Although a MacBook may be the centerpiece of a student’s digital world, iPhones and iPads are common secondary devices. For students with multiple Apple devices, a feature called Handoff is available. It allows students to move what they do on one device to another. Some common uses include moving a web page open in Safari from a phone to a MacBook to view it on a larger screen and working on an essay in Pages before moving it to an iPad for more comfortable writing on a couch or recliner.

Handoff has been so popular among Apple users that a similar feature will also be available on Android. But another way for students to distribute their work across multiple Apple devices is to use the Universal Clipboard feature. This allows students to copy text, images, and videos on one Apple device and paste them onto another. It’s a very handy tool for moving links, snippets, media, documents, and even hard-to-remember passwords from one device to another.

The main requirement for these features to work is that devices must be signed in to the same Apple ID and connected to the same Wi-Fi network. These can make these features difficult to use on the go, even though most students connect their multiple devices to the same campus Wi-Fi network anyway. AirDrop is a fallback option because it allows users to transfer files between Apple devices without the need for a Wi-Fi connection.

Between apps like iMessage, FaceTime, and Calendar, as well as endless use of browser tabs and social media sites, a MacBook can quickly become as much of a distraction as a tool. Apple built a feature called Focus into macOS specifically to help users like students keep tabs on what’s most important while using their laptop. Through the computer’s system settings, students can configure different concentration modes depending on what they are doing at any given time. A Focus mode could eliminate text notifications while writing, for example, while another could block all notifications while studying for an exam.

One thing to watch out for when using Focus Modes is that, by default, the feature applies to all devices that share an Apple ID. This means that by hiding notifications on a MacBook, a student is also hiding them on their iPhone or iPad. However, it’s quite simple to ensure that these only apply to one MacBook by enabling the Share Across Devices button in the Focus sidebar of the MacBook’s system settings. Distractions can be avoided more generally by using Screen Time, which allows students to set daily time limits for certain apps and websites.

It is unclear what each semester may contain in terms of the amount of materials, research, and media collected for assignments. Files and folders can quickly pile up on a MacBook’s desktop or in its Documents folder, making specific files difficult to find when a user needs them. But macOS includes a markup feature that can be used to color-code and organize files. Students can mark anything from an English class in red, a science class in blue, and a group project in green, for example. This makes any tagged file searchable and filterable specifically by its assigned tag.

Students can use the tag feature to organize files however they want, as each tag color can be renamed to fit any organizational structure. The color-coding system can even be used to match calendars and reminders in their respective macOS apps. But while this organizational structure can be a game-changer in avoiding chaos, tracking and grading will only be effective to the extent that the student is committed to maintaining them. Tags may need to be renamed as new courses arrive each semester, for example, and older files may need to be untagged or filed in a permanent archive tag to separate them from the current semester’s files and folders.