A common criticism of macOS is the frustrating lack of customization. This is, in some ways, intentional. The reason Macs for many years had mice with only a single-button click, for example, was simplicity. Fewer options mean a more streamlined, less confusing experience, at least in theory. These days, luckily, Macs are way more customizable than ever. Tons of settings you can change expand the otherwise narrow out-of-the-box experience, and if there isn’t a setting to fix it, there’s probably an app. In that spirit, we want to look at some MacBook system settings that have been under your nose all along.

These settings are (mostly) intended for modern MacBooks that support the latest macOS 26. Rather than the typical stuff — like choosing whether or not to hide the dock — we’re examining features that have flown under the radar in both Apple’s WWDC presentations and user reviews. You might want to change these five settings on your MacBook today.

MacBooks get impressive battery life, but they are not immune to the realities of the lithium-ion battery inside, particularly the potential degradation that may result when leaving your MacBook connected to its charger for long periods of time at 100% battery. macOS does support optimized battery charging by default, but in my personal experience, it’s only reliable with a rigid schedule. Luckily, macOS 26.4 introduced the same charge limiter setting as we’ve seen in iPhones and iPads.

Open Settings, go to Battery, look for the info icon beside “Charging” and click on it. Here you’ll see a slider that lets you drop the Charge Limit from 100% to as low as 80%. If your MacBook spends the vast majority of its life plugged in at a desktop, then we’d recommend keeping it at 80%. If ever you need the full 100%, all you have to do is click on the battery icon in the menu bar and hit “Charge to Full Now.” If your MacBook ventures out into the wild more often than that, a 90% charge limit could still be doable. 10% isn’t much to sacrifice, not when Macs are all-day devices.

For 99% of people, this setting is enough. For the other 1%, an app like AlDente is a great tool. It has more customizable battery settings if you are really gung-ho about making your MacBook last as long as possible, including goodies like heat protection and automatic battery calibration.

A lot of apps will add their own icon to the menu bar upon installation. Install just a couple dozen, and your menu bar can quickly become cluttered to the point that you might not even see all the icons there if your MacBook has a notch. There are free apps that make your menu bar into a double-decker, like Thaw, but what if you want to solve the problem without installing more software? macOS now allows you to control which apps get that top-screen real estate.

In Settings, look for Menu Bar. Now you can decide which apps appear in the Menu Bar — including several system apps — to streamline it to your purposes. You’ll notice here that some menu bar icons give you the option to only appear when they’re active, such as Now Playing. Scroll down further past all the system icons and you’ll see a section that says “Allow in the Menu Bar.” This is for third-party apps. It’s here where you can go to town on everything that added a menu bar icon without your permission. It’s arguably a lot easier than going into each individual app’s settings and hunting for the option to disable menu bar icons — which some apps may not even have.

When it comes to accessibility features, no one does it quite like Apple. Vehicle Motion Cues is, in my view, one of the greatest software features it has ever put out. FYI, this is an anti-motion sickness function that makes using your device in a car or bus doable without nausea. Originally, it was only available on iPhone and iPad. Now, macOS also has full support for Vehicle Motion Cues. One note here: you won’t be able to use this feature on the MacBook Air M1 or MacBook Pro M1 (and earlier), nor does it work on the new MacBook Neo. Bear in mind it’s optimized to work best if you’re sitting facing forward in a car.

You can enable it by heading to Settings > Accessibility > Motion, and hitting the toggle next to Vehicle Motion Cues. There’s a whole customization section that lets you choose the amount and size of the dots, the pattern they make, and the color. And there’s a much easier way to turn it on than having to go to Settings every time: add it to your Control Center.

Click on the Control Center, click Edit Controls, go to the Accessibility section, and then drag Vehicle Motion Cues wherever you like. Unlike the iPhone version, which can turn on when it detects you’re in a moving vehicle, the macOS version needs to be enabled manually. It’s a huge advantage to anyone who needs to use their Mac in a car and avoid damaging a $1,000+ device if they get sick. Even if you don’t plan on using Vehicle Motion Cues anytime soon, we’d recommend just putting it there, just in case.

One of the big upgrades to macOS Tahoe 26 was a significantly upgraded Spotlight. Finally, Spotlight no longer lags as far behind Alfred and Raycast, allowing you to do things like execute shortcuts and check your clipboard in a couple of keystrokes. Yet with great power comes … great annoyance. Spotlight may now show you too many results, some of which you have no desire to see, ever. You can decide what sorts of results Spotlight will show you to hone it down to what you want, and nothing else.

Go to Settings > Spotlight and you’ll get access to a fair bit of customization. You can prevent certain apps from showing their files and actions in Spotlight, and heavily limit system results; for example, you could turn “Files” and “Folders” off if you’d rather not be inundated with false positives when you never access files via Spotlight, anyway. You can go the opposite way, adjusting the Search Privacy to prevent Spotlight from touching certain areas. The result is a Spotlight that serves you better and may consume fewer system resources. Otherwise, consider a lightweight third-party Spotlight alternative like TinyStart.

You ought to deploy end-to-end encryption anywhere you can because it prevents anyone (company employees or bad guys) from touching your data. It comes stock with a lot of messengers these days, but surprisingly, it’s not the default (or sometimes even an option) for something equally as sensitive: your cloud storage. iCloud is one of the major providers that does. If you use iCloud to store anything sensitive, it’s advisable to enable Advanced Data Protection — Apple’s fancy way of saying end-to-end encryption.

Not everything is encrypted, but the most important stuff — iCloud Drive content, photos, notes, messages — is. You don’t have to buy an iCloud+ subscription to access it, either. Just make sure your account has two-factor authentication, your MacBook is passcode-secured, and your devices are up to date — macOS requires macOS 13.1 at the bare minimum.

Under your name in Settings, head to iCloud and look for Advanced Data Protection at the bottom. Turn it on, do what it requires, and you’re good to go. We want to stress one big caveat though before you try this: this could make account recovery impossible if you get locked out of your Apple account. For that reason, it is heavily, heavily recommended that you go to the Account Recovery section and give yourself options, such as a recovery contact and/or recovery key. We’d also recommend enabling data access so you can still use iCloud.com. There may also be some limitations with the functionality of sharing features. On the whole, though, the downsides of Advanced Data Protection are far outweighed by the advantages.