Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

AirPlay

If you’d shown this new feature to the masses in 2005 or so, they’d have fallen down and worshiped it as a god. With one click, you can send whatever is on your Mac’s screen to your TV’s screen, in hi-def. No wires. In El Capitan, you can make the TV either a mirror of your Mac’s screen or an extension of it.

You can present photo slideshows on the TV from your laptop. Or play movies you’ve found online. Or give presentations from PowerPoint or Keynote. Or present software lessons to a class.

This trick requires both a fairly recent Mac model (mid-2011 or later) and an Apple TV. That’s a tiny, $90 black box that connects to a hi-def TV and lets you watch videos from services like YouTube, Netflix, MLB.TV, NBA, NHL, and Vimeo. It can also play videos, music, and photos from Macs or PCs on the network.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: AirPlay Audio

Before there was AirPlay video, there was AirPlay audio. Your Mac can easily send audio to your Apple TV (or your AirPort Express base station), and from there to what’s presumably a better sound system than your Mac’s puny built-in speakers.

The official way to do that: Open System Preferences→Sound→Output. Click the name of the Apple TV or AirPort Express in the list of speakers.

But there are two faster ways:

Press Option as you open the menulet. The items in this menu magically sprout previously invisible choices—like Apple TV and your other AirPlay ...