How to Screen Record on a MacBook

Every MacBook Air and MacBook Pro can record its own screen with nothing installed — the same shortcut works across all of them. The part that's different on a laptop isn't the recording; it's making a capture from a 13-inch screen readable, and not burning your battery and disk while you do it. Here's the short version, then the laptop-specific tips.

The 30-second answer

1. Press Shift + Cmd + 5.
2. Choose Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion.
3. Under Options, pick your microphone if you're narrating.
4. Click Record; stop with the ■ in the menu bar or Cmd + Ctrl + Esc.

That's identical on every MacBook running macOS Mojave or later. For the full tour of the built-in tools (and QuickTime), see how to screen record on a Mac — the rest of this page is about what's different when the Mac is a laptop.

Tip 1 — Keep a small screen readable

A MacBook display crams a full desktop into a frame your viewer will probably watch in a small player — full-screen captures of a 13-inch screen turn menu labels into mush. Two fixes:

• Record a region, not the desktop. Frame just the app window so it fills the video. See how to record part of your screen.
• Zoom in on the action afterwards. An eased zoom at each click keeps text legible without recording at 4K.

Tip 2 — Battery and disk space

Screen recording encodes video in real time — noticeable on battery during long takes — and Retina-resolution footage eats disk quickly. On a laptop it pays to:

• Plug in for anything longer than a few minutes.
• Capture only the region you need — fewer pixels, smaller files, less encoding work.
• Trim the dead air before sharing instead of uploading a 200 MB take of you finding the right menu.

Tip 3 — Edit before you share

The built-in shortcut hands you a raw .mov on the Desktop. If the recording is going to a teammate, a customer or a tutorial, run it through an editor first. ScreenTailor is a native macOS recorder-plus-editor: capture a pixel-exact region, then trim, zoom, add captions and effects in one window and export a share-ready MP4. Every editing tool is free — the free plan caps each recording at 5 minutes with a small watermark on export, and a 14-day Pro trial or a Lifetime license ($39) removes both.

Frequently asked questions