How many apps should go on a new MacBook in the first week?

Fewer than the install list suggests. The useful limit is not a count of apps but a count of resident ones, because those are what consume menu bar width, login time, and permissions. Install job critical apps immediately and spread utilities out so each one can be judged on its own.

Does installing a menu bar manager before other utilities help?

It works better afterwards. The value of a menu bar organizer comes from choosing which icons stay visible, and that choice needs an actual set of icons to work with. Installing it once the strip is populated turns a guess into a decision.

Are the free menu bar tools good enough?

For hiding and revealing icons, Hidden Bar and Ice both do the job at no cost, under the MIT and GPL-3.0 licences respectively. The gap in the free tools tends to be what happens after hiding, such as whether a hidden icon can be operated without expanding the whole strip first. That is worth testing against how often icons get clicked rather than just looked at.

Should two menu bar tools be installed at once to compare them?

No. Two tools managing the same item positions interfere with each other, and neither behaves predictably while both are running. Test one, remove it, then test the next.

What is the fastest way to tell which apps open at login?

System Settings, then General, then Login Items and Extensions. The upper list shows what opens on login and the lower section shows which apps are permitted to run in the background even when closed. Both are worth reviewing after any round of installing or removing.

Which App to Install on a New Mac Book First: A Starting Order

A new MacBook is empty on purpose. The Applications folder holds what Apple ships, the menu bar holds the clock and a few system icons, and nothing is competing for attention. That state lasts about a day. A browser arrives, then the apps the job requires, then the small utilities that each looked harmless on their own. By the end of the first week the top right corner of the screen is a row of shapes nobody picked deliberately.

Most app roundups answer a different question than the one a fresh machine poses. They answer which apps are good. The harder question is what order to install them in, because several of the things an app consumes are genuinely finite. Installing the same ten apps in a different order produces a noticeably different machine.

Migration decides the starting point

Before the first install comes a choice that sets everything after it. Migration Assistant can copy applications, user accounts, files, and settings from an older Mac or a Time Machine backup, and Apple documents it as the supported route for moving to a new machine.

Use Migration Assistant to transfer your data to a new Mac from an old Mac, a Time Machine backup, or a startup disk. Source: support.apple.com, read September 25, 2026

Migration is the right answer when the old machine was in good order, and it arrives with a fully populated menu bar on day one. That is not a problem, but it does change the job from choosing what to install into deciding what to keep, which is a different exercise and usually a longer one.

Starting clean costs a weekend and buys a visible baseline. Every icon that appears afterwards is traceable to something that was installed on purpose. On a machine that had accumulated years of utilities, that trade is often worth it. On a machine being replaced after eighteen months, migration wins on time.

Either way, one step is worth doing before anything else: note what is currently in the menu bar on the old machine. Not to reproduce it, but because that list is the only honest record of which utilities actually earned their place.

Every install spends three things

The first is menu bar width. Apple has told developers for two decades that the strip is not guaranteed space.

Because there is limited space in which to display status items, status items are not guaranteed to be available at all times. For this reason, do not rely on them being available and always provide a user preference for hiding your application's status items to free up space in the menu bar. Source: developer.apple.com, read September 25, 2026

On a laptop the notch sits in the middle of that strip and takes width from both directions, so the budget on a 14 inch MacBook Pro is smaller than the same count of icons would suggest on an external display.

The second is the login sequence. Anything that adds itself to Login Items runs before the first document opens. The list lives in System Settings, under General, then Login Items and Extensions, and it carries a second section that is easy to miss: Allow apps to run in the background governs work an app does when it is not open at all, such as checking for updates or syncing.

The third is permissions. Utilities that touch other apps ask for Accessibility, Screen Recording, or Input Monitoring, and each grant is a decision that deserves a moment rather than a reflex. Granting five of them in one sitting because five installers asked in a row is how a machine ends up with permissions its owner cannot account for.

None of this argues for installing less. It argues for installing in an order where each addition is visible against a known baseline.

Check what macOS already covers

The fastest way to shorten an install list is to strike the items the system now handles. Window tiling, full text search across files and the web, PDF markup, screenshots with annotation, password and passkey storage, and scheduled backups are all built in and documented in the Mac User Guide for the current release. A utility bought to do one of those jobs has to beat the built in version, not merely exist.

Two menu bar settings belong in the same category. Under System Settings, then Menu Bar, sits Automatically hide and show the menu bar, with four states rather than a checkbox.

Choose when to hide and show the menu bar: Always: Always hide and show the menu bar. On Desktop Only: Hide and show the menu bar when not using an app in full screen. In Full Screen Only: Hide and show the menu bar when using an app in full screen. Never: Never hide the menu bar. Source: support.apple.com, read September 25, 2026

The same pane lists every system item that can appear in the strip, including Clock, Spotlight, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery on laptops, Focus, Screen Mirroring, Display, Sound, Now Playing, Time Machine, VPN, and Weather. Several of those offer Show When Active alongside Always Show, which is worth setting on day one while the list is still short.

The four categories worth a real decision

Across almost every Mac setup, four kinds of utility get installed for the same reasons. Everything else is job specific.

Category	What it changes	Examples with a price on the vendor's own page
Window placement	Keyboard driven halves, thirds, and corners	Rectangle is free and open source, and supports macOS 10.15 or later
Clipboard history	Recovers whatever was copied three copies ago	Maccy is open source and free
System readout	Shows CPU, network, or disk in the bar	Stats is open source under the MIT licence and supports macOS 12 or later
Menu bar control	Decides which icons are visible at all	Hidden Bar is free under the MIT licence, Ice is free under GPL-3.0

Three of those four add an icon to the menu bar. The fourth exists because the first three do. That relationship is the reason ordering matters more than selection, and it is why the menu bar question is better answered late than early.

Paid options exist in the same category and are not hidden from view. A survey of menu bar tools published on this site and checked against each vendor's own page on September 3, 2026 lists Bartender 6 at 3,494 yen as a one time purchase, with a yearly and a lifetime option also offered, and Barbee at 12.99 US dollars as a one time in app purchase on the App Store. Free and paid both work. The distinction that matters on a new machine is whether the tool can reach a hidden icon without undoing the tidying, and that is a feature question rather than a price question. The features list for a given tool is where to check it.

An order that holds up

The sequence below puts the reversible steps first and the ones that depend on knowing the machine last.

Browser and sign ins. Everything else is easier once passwords and bookmarks are present. Nothing here touches the menu bar.
File sync and storage. Cloud clients are usually the first resident icons to appear, and they are the ones most likely to be left on out of habit rather than need.
The apps the work actually requires. Editor, design tool, terminal, whatever pays for the machine. Install these before any utility, because they determine which utilities are worth having.
Utilities, one at a time, with a day between. A window manager on Monday and a clipboard manager on Wednesday makes it obvious which one caused a change in behaviour. Four on the same afternoon does not.
A menu bar organizer, last. By this point the strip contains a known set of icons and the question is answerable: which of these need to be visible at a glance, which need to be reachable, and which are there because an installer put them there.

Step five arrives late for a reason. Organizing a menu bar with three icons on it is guesswork. Organizing one with eleven is a decision with evidence behind it.

Removing is part of installing

Two weeks after setup, a new machine has a handful of apps that were installed to try and never opened again. Removing them is not just housekeeping, because a resident app that is still in Login Items keeps costing width and startup time whether or not it gets used.

Apple documents two cases. An app that shipped with its own uninstaller has one inside its folder in Applications, and that is the route to use.

If an app is in a folder: Open the app's folder to check for an Uninstaller. If Uninstall [App] or [App] Uninstaller is shown, double-click it, then follow the onscreen instructions. If an app isn't in a folder or doesn't have an Uninstaller: Drag the app from the Applications folder to the Trash. Source: support.apple.com, read September 25, 2026

After removing anything resident, it is worth reopening Login Items and Extensions. Entries sometimes outlive the app they pointed at, and a background permission granted to a deleted app has no reason to remain.

Judging a utility after a week, not an hour

The install decision that goes wrong most often is the one made during the first ten minutes, when a new tool feels productive simply because it is new. A week is long enough for the opposite signal to appear: the tool that never got opened, the keyboard shortcut that never became automatic, the icon that has been ignored since the day it arrived.

Three questions separate the keepers from the rest. Did it get used without being thought about? Would removing it cause a noticeable loss? Does it need a permission broader than the job it does? A window manager usually passes the first two. A system monitor often fails the first, because glanceable numbers feel useful and rarely change a decision. That is not an argument against it, but it is a reason to move it behind a divider rather than keep it in the visible strip.

Trials are the mechanism for asking these questions honestly. A fourteen day trial that requires no card, which is what several menu bar tools including the one described on this site's pricing page offer, is long enough to see whether a habit forms and short enough that a forgotten trial does not turn into a charge.

One more filter is worth applying at the end of the week: how the app behaves when a display is connected or disconnected. Menu bar width changes with the display, and a layout arranged for a 14 inch laptop screen is not the layout that suits the same Mac docked to a monitor. Tools differ on whether they remember a separate arrangement per display setup or simply reflow, and that difference only shows up once a second screen enters the picture. A comparison of how the available tools handle it is on the compare page.

What to change first

Open System Settings, then Menu Bar, and read the list of system items before installing anything else. That five minute pass decides how much width is left for everything that comes after, and it is the one step that never has to be undone. Once the strip has a known set of icons on it, Koffret is what decides which of them stay visible.