New Macbook? You Need These Accessories

The day has finally come. Ever since I was a little kid, I always wanted a MacBook. Watching people walk the hallways with that little Apple logo outside their laptop was a huge flex, and something I just never got to be a part of, until now. And man does this thing not disappoint. I went with the MacBook M3 Air with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. It's sleek as hell, was a breeze to set up, the connection to all of my previous Apple devices was flawless, and I feel like a little kid on Christmas using this thing. The problem is, I completely overlooked the accessories that I need to get my money's worth out of this thing. So without further ado, let's get this thing set up and get some accessories in here. If you're new here, welcome. My name is Ben, I make videos about tech that I find cool and interesting, and something I really find cool and interesting, the MacBook Air. Now I mentioned I went with the 512GB version, and yeah, that ain't gonna be enough. So first things first, I'm gonna need to upgrade some storage. This is the Samsung T7 Shield. As far as speed goes, it's 1000MB per second read write speed, which isn't slow by any means, it should be plenty fast for moving video files around. If you're looking for something super quick, the best option would probably be an M.2 in an external exclosure. The benefits this has over something like that for me is portability and reliability. Something like that has a little bit more moving parts, and just things that can go wrong. This is up to 3 meters drop proof, so if I knock it off the table I won't be super worried. IP65 water and dust resistant, so unless I completely drop it in the water or lose it in the sand at the beach, I should be pretty good there. And it's really small and light, especially compared to something like the lacy rugged hard drive that I have here. Now they offer a 1, 2, and 4TB option. Now Amazon's gonna tell you that this normally would cost $285, but if you look at the price history you can see it hasn't been that price for more than a day recently. In the past 3 months, it seems like it's generally been sitting around $180. But obviously, pick whatever you think you're gonna benefit from the most. But now that I've got the storage problem solved, I realized that I wanted to take this thing to the coffee shop today, and I had no way to get it there. I mean obviously I'm gonna take it in my backpack, but you know how that goes. You slide it in and out of your backpack a million times, maybe the zipper rubs against it, you throw your keys in there not realizing, and now that beautiful midnight black colorway gets all scratched up. So I picked up a sleeve, that'll be here tomorrow. Gonna get this hard drive set up in the meantime, and we'll talk more then. This is the, bear with me here, Ho-Yixi laptop sleeve. Now what makes this really cool compared to just a regular old sleeve is it actually has this foldable design on the top of it, which actually allows you to prop the MacBook up when you're using it. I've seen a lot of people using those metal stands before just to kind of elevate the screen a little bit and put the keyboard at an angle, and this does exactly that, killing two birds with one stone. It's super slim so I don't have to worry about it taking up any more space in my bag than the MacBook will itself. Has a little bit of extra padding on the corners, not really sure how much that's really gonna help if I were to drop this, but again, the point is really just to protect it from scratches, I'm not looking for like an OtterBox for MacBooks. And it's only $20, compared to some of the more popular name brand options out there, that's a pretty solid price. And probably my favorite feature overall, this little mouse pad that pops off the side, so you don't have to worry about getting your mouse feet dirty or damaging a table wherever you're working. Which brings me to my next thing, which I guess isn't necessarily a necessity, but I couldn't live without this thing, the Logitech MX Master 3S. Now I've talked about this bad boy a lot lately so I won't spend too much time on it, but there's a few features that I haven't got to talk about in the past because they're Mac specific. First of which being the gesture control, so just like how on a Mac trackpad you can swipe left or right to move between windows, you don't lose that functionality with this mouse. You can press and hold where the little thumb rest is, there's actually a button inside of there, and that kind of activates those gesture controls, so then you can swipe the mouse just as if you were swiping your fingers on the trackpad. Second feature that makes this mouse stand out to me compared to some other mice out there, is the ability to have all these customization options within the software for the mouse. If you're unaware, scrolling on a Mac versus a Window are backwards. And to me, as somebody who's been on Windows my whole life, that just feels more natural. However, I still want to keep the more natural scrolling on the trackpad for the Mac, so instead I went into Logi Options Plus and just switched the scroll direction for the mouse only. So now my mouse responds like it normally would on a Windows machine, but my trackpad still responds like an Apple product. Now one last thing I want to mention about these mice is they do sell a Mac specific version, which only works on Mac, but the standard regular edition will work on both Windows and Mac, so I don't see why there's any need to lock yourself out of any Windows operating systems in the future by going with the Mac edition. I would, however, only pick up black or gray because white is impossible to clean. So I took what I've got so far outside for a little spin, started editing this video, and everything worked pretty well. The sleeve definitely picked up dirt pretty easily, so I would stay away from putting this on any surfaces that are too dirty, otherwise you're just going to have to clean it off a lot. And the external hard drive performed perfect. I kept all my clips on there while I was actually editing this video. Moving files over was a breeze, but with it being early November, the sun starts to set pretty quick and it starts to get cold very fast, so it was time to move inside. And that's when I realized I have no way to connect this to my monitor. This is the Anker 555. It's a $50 USB-C hub, so kind of in that middle range of pricing. What made it stand out to me over some of the other options is you get 4k60hz via HDMI. A lot of the cheaper ones will be 4k30, and you can see here it's really choppy and just not ideal. It has a 10 gigabyte per second USB-C port, which again some of those cheaper options you'll usually only get 5 gigabyte per second, so a little bit of added speed here. Two 10 gigabyte per second USB-A ports, a couple SD card readers, and an ethernet port. But one thing I do want to talk about, because if you're new to this you should be aware of it, is scaling on Macs is a little bit different from what you'd get from a Windows PC. You can see under the display settings, the different sizes of scaling here, and the different resolutions underneath. From what I understand, those resolutions don't actually affect the image quality when you're watching like a YouTube video or looking at pictures on the screen. They just affect the resolution of the UI, making it smaller or bigger. So I have mine set to 3008 by 1692. That's just the size that feels right to me on this 42 inch TV. But the point of me showing you this, scaling is just super weird on Macs, so just be aware of that when you're shopping around for an external display. Now speaking of displays, I don't plan on using this open and using the screen as a second display on the MacBook. I just plan on keeping it closed using it in clamshell mode. But that means I'm going to need to find a way to store it while it's in use. I just grabbed a $13 mount from Amazon to mount it under my desk. I slapped a USB-C hub under there with some Velcro, so now when I come inside I can just slide it into the little mount, plug in the USB-C hub, the MagSafe charger, and we're good to go. But I think that pretty much covers all the essentials. We got everything we need for working on the go, everything we need for a nice setup at home. I guess the only things I might have left out is you would probably want to buy a portable charger, just in case wherever you're working doesn't have an outlet available. I use this one from a company called Volta. It's like 240 watts, has a really big battery, so I can charge my laptop like four times before that thing dies. And a solid USB-C Thunderbolt cable probably wouldn't be a bad idea either, just because you can charge via the Thunderbolt port. So like personally, when I take this thing off the dock and I head out for the day, I don't even bring my MagSafe charger with me. I just make sure I have a USB-C cable in my bag along with that portable charger, and I know that I'll be charged up throughout the rest of the day. Otherwise, huge thanks to you guys for stopping by. If you made it this far, I really appreciate it. Like I said, this is my first ever Mac. This is my first laptop in a very long time in general. So if I missed anything, or you have any really helpful tips of your own, drop them down in the comments below. Otherwise, appreciate you guys for stopping by, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.