macOS 12 Monterey - 100+ changes and features in-depth walkthrough

in my in-depth walkthrough of mac os monterey i discuss over a hundred changes and features along with in-depth commentary on what's new for the mac should you update to the public beta watch our hands-on video right now but first a word from our sponsor knightifymac is sponsored by cleanmymacs a name that's synonymous with keeping your mac in tip-top shape first and foremost clean my mac x is from macpaul diligent mac developers that we trust other mac cleaning apps exist but clean my mac ax is unlike the rest not only because it's trustworthy but because of its design and ease of use so what does it do it helps to tune up your mac to its maximum speed it includes dozens of tools to help you find and delete invisible computer junk freeing up storage and organizing disk space it fights mac specific malware and adware protecting your computer and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the next two weeks macpaul is offering viewers a five percent discount click the link in the description to get it today special thanks to matt paul for sponsoring nine to five mac alright so let's talk about the desktop in screen saver in mac os monterey of course there is a new monterey desktop wallpaper so let's go into system preferences and check out the wallpaper that you find under desktop and screensaver so there we go under lighting dark desktop you see the mac os graphic for mac os monterey and you see a little indicator showing that there is both a light and dark version so let's switch to the light and you can see the light version of that desktop wallpaper there i honestly am not a huge fan of the light monterey wallpaper but i do think the the dark wallpaper looks a lot better so let's go ahead and switch back to that what do you guys think about the new monterey wallpaper let me know down below in the comments and you have the new imac centric hello desktop picture that comes in seven different colors so you have the dark green you have the dark yellow dark orange dark pink dark purple dark blue and dark silver i guess dark silver and there's also light versions of that you have the light silver the light blue the light purple the light pink the light orange and the light yellow and the light green and just like the monterey wallpaper i'm more of a fan of the dark wallpaper when compared to the light wallpaper now to complement the desktop wallpaper you also have the hello screensaver that made its debut with the imac and really this celebrates the history of the mac it's available with the word hello in up to 34 different languages using custom design 3d fonts so this is of course inspired by the very first macintosh and you can see the various colors you have available you can choose between any of those or select all for it to randomly cycle through those various colors there's also the ability to show hello in all languages or to show it only in english and you can match the system appearance as well regarding light in dark modes so let's just briefly look at the hello screen saver and this is computer generated so it's going to look different every time with different angles and positions so it's going to feel new and fresh each time you see it appear on your screen so here it is in a different language like i said there are 34 different languages that this will cycle through using those custom designed 3d fonts be sure to watch our full video that goes in depth with the hello screensaver for more details now let's talk about window management so now it is possible to swap out apps in split view which is a super handy feature for prolific multitaskers so i have the finder in the app store if i hover over the green stoplight now i can see the new option to replace the tiled window just click on that and watch what happens it allows me to easily swap out the finder in split view with another application without having to re-invoke split view you simply swap it out it's super simple super easy let me do it again here so let's bring in the news app and we're going to do it one more time so let's swap in the the music app here so hover replace tiled window select our music app and it's that easy now you can also easily change the split view window to full screen let me show you how to do that right now so again hover over the green stoplight and along with the replace tiled window option you'll notice move window to desktop taking it out of the split view or make the window full screen so you have both options so let's go ahead and move window to desktop and watch what happens it's going to remove the music app from that split view put it back on the desktop but keep the mac app store application in the full screen so let's get our split view back in order here so we want to tile to the left select another app store there we go so now let's choose the option to make the window full screen and this is really cool watch what happens here i'm going to select make window full screen it's going to pop it out of the split view make it full screen and keep the other app that was in split view in full screen as well so basically you now have two full screen apps from a single split view and here's another cool new feature a full screen menu bar so watch what happens as i place the news app into full screen mode you see the menu bar is not displayed so if i want to display that of course i have to put my mouse at the top to reveal the menu bar and then when i move my mouse down the menu bar hides just like that normal full screen functionality right but watch what happens when we enable this new option which is available in system preferences so if we go to system preferences go to dock in menu bar you'll see automatically hide and show the menu bar on desktop and automatically hide and show the menu bar in full screen which is enabled by default so if i uncheck automatically hide and show the menu bar in full screen that will show the menu bar automatically even when in full screen so let's go ahead and create a new split view which basically is a full screen with two different apps running side by side and you can see the menu bar is displayed there even while in split view without my cursor having to be at the top so it's just automatically shown there which is a really cool new feature for those that use full screen apps in the mac os finder get some new capabilities in mac os monterey first and foremost you can now use shortcuts you can add them to your menu bar you can add them as quick actions just like this so now when i go up to the menu bar you're going to find a new shortcuts menu bar icon i can click that and then invoke a shortcut directly from the menu bar right there at any time that's super cool now it's also available in the quick actions so you can go in here and enable those shortcuts right there super nice new feature super powerful as well and that's really kind of just the tip of the iceberg shortcuts is going to be awesome in mac os monterey you can also access them from the services menu now another new feature you'll find in monterey is a new icloud collaboration folder that's where you're going to be able to find shared items that you can quickly access right there from the finder and you'll notice special metadata that applies to shared files and folders as well so of course you don't have to keep the the icloud collaboration folder available on your finder sidebar if you don't want to you can easily go in and customize that if we go into finder preferences and click sidebar you'll see under icloud the new shared option or shared folder so you can just simply uncheck that if you want to hide it and you can see it no longer appears under icloud but i think this is actually going to be a very useful feature especially if you work with teams or you collaborate with individuals on a regular basis now this is one of my favorite new features go to folder enhancement so if you go up to the go menu in the finder select go to folder you're going to notice some several enhancements that stick out like a sort of thumb right you now have a new look and an improved auto completion engine to help you get to the files and folders you're looking for more quickly so now you can just simply type out something like this like desktop and it automatically points you to the right path and points that or spells that path out for you and if you're an advanced mac os user then this is probably something you use quite often and it's nice to see apple give a little attention and work on enhancing the go to folder functionality in finder and you also find automatic window resizing when switching between two different resolution displays so if you have my pro display xdr of course and the built-in retina display on the imac and i switch between them when i have it maximized you're going to notice that it automatically will fit or conform to its destination display which is really nice all right so let's talk about the mac experience now in macos monterey finally you will be able to erase all contents and settings without having to completely reinstall mac os that is such a nice feature and you'll find for macbook users that is a new low power mode option which will optimize performance to reduce energy consumption increase battery life and to operate more quietly so you can see if i go to the menu bar select battery low power mode enabled again a handy feature from ios devices is now available on the mac so this is something i've been wanting forever airplay finally comes to the mac meaning you can airplay content from your apple device directly to your mac sort of like your max had apple tvs connected to it so you can see my imac and my macbook pro so i can output directly to my macbook pro mirror my screen directly to the macbook pro just like that and of course when i move about everything is perfectly in sync here i am in safari i can go into landscape browse like that super nice feature to have mirroring directly to my mac but of course it doesn't stop there that's just really the start when it comes to airplay on the mac so let's talk about mirroring or extending the display now certain apps support the ability to extend the display to an airplay destination sort of like here with the photos app where i have the slideshow on my mac but i have the controls still available on my iphone but again it doesn't stop there you can also use your mac as an airplay to speak your destination so you can see my imac my macbook pro showing up obviously in this case i want to use my imac it has much better speakers than the macbook pro so i can airplay just strictly music from my iphone to my mac such a nice feature to finally have courtesy of mac os monterey but again it doesn't stop there so let's talk about sending wired or wirelessly now i already showed you how to air play wirelessly but if you don't have a wi-fi connection or your wi-fi connection isn't very good guess what you can use a wired connection for airplay look at that so jeff's imac appears because i'm connected directly to the imac and i can now airplay to this device even without a wi-fi connection just like that so along with not having access to wi-fi this is also very handy when you want to make sure there's no latency with your presentation or with your video playback whatever the case may be you can enjoy all of your airplay functionality in wired mode what do you guys think about this let me know down below in the comments your thoughts on the new airplay functionality in mac os monterey arguably the most exciting new feature to come to mac os monterey is universal control and what this allows you to do is to control multiple devices including ipads and macs with a single keyboard and mouse and the cool thing is that there is no setup required at all you just simply put your devices next to each other and move your cursor between them and you can have multiple device combinations like an ipad and a macbook and an imac you see the little cursor there how you just move it over like that and now you have universal control enabled as long as your devices are close to each other like this then you can independently control these two machines with a single keyboard and mouse but more importantly you can actually drag and drop assets from one machine to another machine as if you're running the same os across all these devices as if basically you had one operating system and multiple screens it's really kind of cool so in this example you'll see where you can drag an asset from procreate over to our presentation just like that and then i can also drag something across multiple screens like this title from procreate all the way over to the mac into final cut pro super cool feature and i can't wait to try it out in upcoming beta releases now in mac os moderate there is finally a passwords preference panel within system preferences so you'll see it right here so you no longer have to go into safari to access your passwords now you can do so directly from system preferences which is a welcome new edition so along with being able to manage the individual passwords for the various websites that you have configured you can also import and export your passwords with ease so all you do is you click the little button here select import passwords and you can do that or you can export your passwords to plain text so so it's going to ask us to verify with touch id and there we go there's our passwords and the plain text file but here's what really makes the difference in day-to-day usage a built-in authenticator so you no longer have to use a third-party authentication app in order to have that little six digit code that a lot of passwords or a lot of websites require for multi-factor authentication so this allows you to set up that verification code or use a qr code simply right click on the qr code to verify to set up your verification code which is auto generated and will refresh every 30 seconds or so all right so you can see now it refreshed with a brand new code such a nice feature to have so here is the actual process of entering that passcode all you do is verify with touch id it auto automatically inserts your passcode there which makes it super easy to log into websites with two factor authentication enabled so we're gonna go ahead and submit now i verified successfully i'm able to log in securely but here's what i wanted to show you earlier regarding the qr code so say i wanted to set up a new multi-factor authentication you get the little qr code you simply right click and then select setup verification code and that's nice you don't have to use a camera or anything to capture that qr code you simply right click and authenticate and then you set it up and add it to your passwords all right so let's briefly talk privacy so you'll notice a new recording indicator like you get currently on ios 14 and ios 15. well now you get the recording indicator on the mac in the upper right hand corner in the menu bar you see a little dot there that indicates that something was using a microphone for instance screen screen flow right here shows that something was using your microphone and i assume the camera will be the same deal there as well now here's the question what if you have the menu bar hidden just like i have right now what happens then well you see a little dot it still stays there it's not going to go away that dot's going to let you know that something was using your microphone so that you're kept in the know for privacy's sake now a lot of the features you've probably noticed in mac os monterey are basically the same features that you find in ios 15. for instance private relay which aims to keep your ip address hidden and your safari browsing activity protected makes its way to mac os and what icloud private relay aims to do is to ensure that your traffic leaving your device is encrypted so that no one can intercept and read it all of your requests are sent through two separate internet relays and you have the ability to choose a general location or you can use country and time code so if you choose general location that's going to keep you within a relatively close geographic location so that searches are more relevant and things of that nature you get more relevant search results or when you're shopping you get more relevant results with regard to the stores that are near you but you can also make it time zone based and uh make it even more ambiguous if you will now if you go to your wi-fi settings you can enable or disable icloud private relay directly on that wi-fi connection uh just by unchecking or checking this little box right here now there's also hide my email which was again found in ios 15 as well and if you click on options you'll be able to see all the private aliases that you already have set up with sign in with apple but now you can actually just create a standalone private alias give it a label give it a note you can refresh that alias and you can see it randomly generates these private email addresses that you can use to keep yourself protected so you're not giving out your personal email address but instead emails sent to this address will forward to your real email address to keep your real email address private from unscrupulous activities people wanting to send you spam and all that jazz so once you have one set up you can simply go in and find it here here's junk and then you can either edit it delete it etc so now there's no real reason to go out and create you know several gmail addresses just for junk now you can simply use hide my email and you'll notice that even when you're signing up for new services you get the option to hide my email directly from that signup location which makes using hide my email even easier now icloud plus also includes better homekit secure video support so currently if you want to record video you'll need a 200 gigabyte icloud storage plan to support one camera or a two terabyte storage plan to support up to five cameras but with the upgraded icloud plus two terabyte storage tiers now have an unlimited amount of home kit secure video enabled cameras for just ten dollars a month so you could literally have a hundred cameras i guess none of that's going to count against your storage uh to save that home kit secure video you can see there are lots of home kit secure video cameras either out there or in the works and yeah we have quite a few reviewed over at nine to five mac so you also have the ability to get a custom domain name now this hasn't launched just yet from what i can tell but this will make icloud email way more attractive now you get your own white label address that you can take with you anywhere this will go a long way to making icloud email more competitive translate in mac os monterey is a big deal because now you have finally y translation now of course last year we got the ability to translate a web page just like i'm doing right here translating japanese to english but in mac os monterey you now have the ability to translate individual pieces of text system wide so let me show you a brief example i'm just going to highlight this piece of text i have no idea what it says go to right click and select translate and there we go just like that we are starting to distribute so not only does it translate for you but you can also play exactly what the translation says and even switch to play different languages that is awesome and so powerful you can also copy the translation and paste it elsewhere so let's show you another example of translate anywhere using systemwide translation so here's a note i'm just going to highlight this text right click and translate there we go five star elements company five star elements company limited now watch this i can copy or i can replace with the translation just like that super powerful super handy right now let's talk about live text you have live text in photos so that means i can literally just highlight text within a photo just like that copy that text if i want to and paste it elsewhere that's super cool right let me show you another example so this time in cursive i'm gonna copy and paste it over here in my note there we go hello all right do you want to see one more example let's go ahead and do one more so we're going to open up this image on my desktop and simply copy the text and paste that text into our note and of course this works with screenshots as well so i'm going to simply take a screenshot of nine to five max header image there open up that screenshot and copy that text and paste it in it's so handy right um what about if it is a different language what to do then well you're going to see i'm going to copy this text i'm going to right click and i'm going to translate right there using live text combined with translation super powerful feature and you can also do lookups directly from images and speaking of lookup there's also visual lookup which allows you to swipe up or click the information button on any photo to highlight recognized objects and scenes so it'll recognize landmarks books dogs plants flowers and more and tell you about them so let's talk about the keyboard shall we we have own device dictation so that means i can turn off wi-fi turn off all my internet connectivity and still use dictation the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog there we go so that is a nice feature to have but not just that you also have continuous dictation so notice here the clock's running and i'm just going to say the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy doll the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog i said it like a million times right i sped up this so you can see it goes over 60 seconds previously the limit was 60 seconds but as you can see it's continuous in mac os monterey just like it's continuous in ios 15. so for facetime you now get spatial audio support so you're able to tell where voices are coming from based on the orientation of your conversations on screen that's cool you also have support for portrait mode uh which is yeah um kind of weird but i see the point especially in the current climate that we live in you don't want everyone seeing your background necessarily so this is a nice feature okay so i have my iphone here to help me with this test so i can show you guys the different mic modes available using facetime so to switch between different mic modes all you need to do is while in a facetime call just click the control center button in the menu bar click mic mode and there you'll see the different mic modes so you have three available you have standard voice isolation and wide spectrum um so i'm going to use my iphone to switch between those three so you can hear what it sounds like the difference and to do that i'm actually going to um also turn the vacuum on in the background so you guys can kind of hear what this really sounds like and the differences between these different mic modes so first of all this is standard so i'm going to switch to voice isolation but first i'm going to turn on the vacuum in the background so let's go ahead and do that [Applause] okay so this is standard mode and here is voice isolation mode that's actually pretty loud so i'm going to move the vacuum to another room so you can still hear it but it's not so loud okay you can still hear it it's in the other room um but hopefully now it's not so loud so this is voice isolation mode enabled so hopefully you can hear my voice now i'm going to switch to wide spectrum mode and that should be a pretty big difference being able to really hear that that vacuum in the background hopefully um so those are the three different modes and again i'm testing this through my iphone so you can hear it but you can access those via the mic mode option right here within the control center so in mac os monterey you also get the new grid mode support which instead of making the little bubbles bigger based on who's talking and moving them all around sort of weirdly now when you enable grid mode it's simply going to highlight the speaker with the white outline like that so i think i actually prefer the grid mode i didn't think i would but yeah i think after using it especially using it in a large group conversation that i would prefer this mode instead now one of the really big additions to facetime is the ability to create standalone facetime links that you can literally send to anyone and they can join from pretty much any browser this is a game changer as far as expanding facetime really opening up facetime now it's not perfect i mean they're not going to get the greatest experience when joining via the web as they would with the native facetime application but at least you're no longer restricted to just apple devices so speaking of facetime on the web let me show you how that works i have a link i'm just simply going to visit that link and look what we have here obviously you have the beta tag this whole thing is beta so not everything is going to be perfect but i'm going to type my name in there it's going to give access or request access to the microphone to the camera and there we go now i can just join this call it's waiting to be let in so i'm going to go in and let myself in so now i'm having a facetime conversation via the browser which is really really cool having that opened up to more people being able to enjoy facetime calls now you also have the calendar integration which allows you to create a new calendar item so new video and then you can add the location or select a video call and just choose facetime like that and now you have that easy join button and it automatically creates the upcoming facetime conversation and it makes it super easy to join just by clicking join couldn't be simpler and of course there is share play support in monterey as well so start a facetime call play a movie and then you'll get a prompt shareplay lets you experience content with other people on facetime so basically being able to watch a movie together via facetime and be able to share that experience at the same time such a wonderful new feature now it isn't quite fully baked just yet from what i've been able to experience here on monterey i was able to get it working perfectly fine on ios 15 beta 2 but here on monterey it is still a little iffy at least when i was testing it here but the premise of share play is going to be a huge game changer for the way we consume content with friends really this is the real social media in my opinion because of the real-time ability to share experiences for instance listening to the same music track at the same time via apple music while on a facetime call with multiple friends such an amazing feature and of course you'll be able to share your screen as well right from facetime so say you're you're looking for a hotel for a group trip right and you want to look at those hotels together well instead of having to send links back and forth you can just browse the hotel website and share your screen while doing so you can share either your entire screen or a particular window if you want to so let me show you that so here's the entire screen but i can click here uh sharing my pro display xtr i'm going to stop sharing change to window select the window and now i'm sharing just this window so if i don't want to share everything else i can do that as well and then there is shared with you which means content sent to you over the messages app automatically appears in special sections it's automatically surfaced within other apps making it easy to find so here when i pin a message in the messages app that's going to be easily discoverable and that pin message is going to be surface at the forefront within safari shared with you section so i can quickly access that and really any link that someone sends me can be surfaced right there on the safari start page you also have share with you for photos so photos that are shared will be surfaced there also apple news someone sends you an apple news link that's surfaced within the apple news app so the messages app also gets some really awesome improvements with regard to photos so now you get photo collections and let me show you exactly what that means here so when i select three photos and i drag it over to the messages app it will be presented as a collection in this case a collage right so that easily allows you to see all those photos in a collage style and of course you can tap back in individual photos you can open individual photos there and of course progress through that collage just like that but it also allows you to add a stack so that happens when you have four or more photos so i'm gonna select just a whole host of different flower images here and then drag those over to the messages app and you'll see a little bit of a difference with the way it's presented because there's so many it presents it as a stack and the cool thing about the stack is yep you can swipe through just like that with your track pad or magic mouse just swipe through the stack left and right and of course you can perform a tap back on an individual photo or double click to open that photo in a larger view and go ahead and click through all those various photos there now you'll also find a button in the upper right hand corner of this view that allows you to view them in a grid mode so you just click that button there and that gives you a quick look at all the photos in your conversation history for that particular user but not just that if you click this little grid button now you get a grid view of that stack which allows you to easily see all those items at the same time now you can also easily save photos now so i can save all the photos in this stack simply by right-clicking and selecting add to photos library just like this and now when i go over to the photos library guess what we find there we see all those photos all seven of them right there in our photos library okay let's talk about what we all came here for and that is more memoji features so we open up our memoji stickers you now see that memoji characters now have the ability to have clothes yeah i'm not making that up you have clothes with three different levels of colors so you have this basic t-shirt with the various poses here but that's just of course the tip of the iceberg we have a lot of different clothing styles to choose from so something a little a little out there you got a little referee mode going on or the hoodie these are some really cool outfits there and again you can customize the colors on three different levels so if i want the red to be the main color i can do that the secondary color and then the third color so you can see how those color patterns really reflect in all those different outfits so if we want to go like some really like black tie affair sort of thing or really looking good you can do that let's find something a little bit more dressy let's make it let's make it classy no not that let's make it real classy man here we okay well we're getting there there we go that's what i'm talking about looking gq right so that's the thing it's like you can customize this and no doubt this is just the beginning of clothing for an emoji this is just the start but you can see he's looking quite fresh in his threads uh what do you guys think about mumoji characters let me know down below in the comment section your thoughts and opinions on what apple's done here with clothing hopefully you don't feel like that guy right there because he's not very happy but along with the new clothing comes new memoji stickers so you'll notice several new stickers here in mac os monterey for instance you see the little light bulb above the head see the head in the clouds you see the dude blowing his nose you also get the whispering and the biting of the nails so some nice new additions here in mac os monterey and you also have the ability to have two different eye colors which is actually a real thing and it's really cool so you could choose a red eye and a green eye or a blue eye and a brown eye memoji is slowly becoming hyper customizable and there's also new accessibility options for headwear so you get the little helmet there padded helmet you also have the ability to add an oxygen tube under the nose section and then if you go into the ear section you'll notice the cochlear implant so if you click that and scroll all the way down you'll see it there on the right memoji characters also get new glasses and you also get the ability to choose the frame and lenses colors independently of one another so you can really customize the way your glasses look but like i said there's also new frames so you have a new star frame and three different types you have the heart frame in three different types and then you have this sort of old school spectacles in three different types and you also get multi-colored headwear so you can choose a main second and third color for the headwear now the third color won't always apply depending on the design of the headwear but you at least get the second and the main the third does apply though in some some cases with different types of headwear so you'll see as i scroll through there some of those details and you also get memoji on the mac login screen so for your users and groups you can add in amimoji you can add an animoji you can change the pose if you want to do that so let me just choose one of my emoji characters you can zoom in and out like this move it around with your mouse cursor change up the pose so if you wanted to look a little bewildered or just chilling you could do that and then you could change up your style which basically is just the background color but what's really interesting is that this character appears on your lock screen and it's fully animated it also will go to sleep after a period of inactivity it's a really nice addition to spice up the look of the login screen okay so here's where things get just a little bit controversial with safari it starts with the streamline tab bar which as you can see looks wildly different than anything we've seen from safari in the past but as you can see the tab bar takes up less room at the top of the page and you can see that each tab is actually its own address bar as well doubles as the search slash address bar so you click on a tab and there you see the address and also notice how safari extends the webpage to the edge of the window and will adjust the colors to match the colors of each respective site now there's also the more menu which you click the little ellipsis button to the right of the address that allows you to access things like share or bookmark your privacy report and of course there are other ways to gain access to these features as well so it's not the only way to reload for instance as you can see the reload button will appear on hover and of course you have that integrated smart search field which allows you to search from that active tab so all you literally have to do is just click in that tab type your search term but you'll also notice that when you select a tab and click in there it reveals the full address of the website that you're currently on so if i click in here it reveals the full url obviously these are at the top level so i'm not going to reveal a url there but also i can just do a search just like you would expect to do a search in safari so just type in porsche and there's our search results so pretty straightforward to the point although the whole tab bar streamlining is going to be a controversial topic for sure and i understand why so let's talk a little bit more about those tabs you see they have a rounder and more defined appearance and also the tabs fluidly adapt to the environment so the more tabs you add the shrinking will automatically occur and it will reveal the favicons there and then when you remove tabs they will resize accordingly as well uh so this was sort of already implemented in the previous version of mac os in safari with apple taking it to the next level in mac os monterey but here's one of the more useful features in the new safari and that is of course tab groups we talked about this in depth in our ios 15 walkthrough same thing can be said here tab groups basically are groups of tabs that hopefully i mean they don't necessarily have to but hopefully ideally i guess i should say they would contain like tabs or related tabs so i have my evs tab group and then i have my nine to five tab group with all the nine to five family of websites there so i can easily switch between those i can open up just a single tab and then i can even create a tab group from that tab so i'm going to go click the little down arrow button there and then you'll see new empty tab group that allows me to create a blank tab group if i want to do that and you see the sidebar open i can give that a name and then i can start adding new tabs to that group just by going to nintendo i have analog there playstation so there you go brand new tab group gaming and i can quickly swap between all those available tab groups with just a couple of clicks and that's super handy if you have like a certain workspace that you want to set up for safari now you can also create a new tab group from an existing open tab and that's what i just done so i'm going to call this electric and then i'm just going to open up mini electric tabs for that tab group so there we go and speaking of that sidebar you'll notice it's more clean more elegant but it also has new features like the tab groups that we mentioned like receive links for shared with you then you have your collected links like bookmarks and reading lists as well and you also have your start page there at the very top so that's a nice clean layout for that sidebar here in mac os monterey now let's talk about new privacy protections so of course you have your privacy report there that you can enable but now you'll see your ip address is hidden from known trackers and websites you visit so even more enhanced privacy protections for mac os monterey's safari okay so let's talk about focus now in my ios 15 walkthrough i basically said that focus was like do not disturb on steroids and that definitely is the case it is essentially a much more powerful much more capable version of do not disturb the point is you want to match your devices to your mindset with focus that will automatically filter notifications based on what you're doing and you can set up custom focuses you see the little icons how that changes i have a reading focus or a gaming focus or you can have a study focus or you can have dog time whatever the case may be i just made that up but the point is you can completely customize it to your liking now let's talk about some of the features of focus and that of course starts with customization so if you go into preferences and go to notifications you'll see a dedicated focus section under notifications and this contains everything you need to create new focuses to filter notifications to set up automations and much much more so let me show you how to create a new focus so you just hit the little plus sign at the bottom of the screen like this and you get the name so you can give it a name of course you can give it an icon as well and a color so first of all let's find an icon i like that one right there we'll call it work so there is our work focus you can give it a different color if you want to but once you're finished you just click on where it says add and there's your new focus it automatically appears in the list and now you can go through and customize that focus we can go back and edit change the color if we want to we'll make it purple or red or whatever the case may be once you do that there you go so there's our work focus and now we can change up all the various parameters related to that focus so that once i enable it those parameters go into effect so now let's configure our focus to allow notifications from vips so the people and the apps that we want to receive notifications from while this focus is enabled it's a work big focus so obviously i want slack enabled and i want my work colleagues enabled and you also have urgent messages so you can allow time-sensitive notifications from apps and people to notify you immediately even when you have your focus turned on so this can be important if there's an app with critical notifications you want to make sure that app is always able to get through break through your focus regardless and there's also automations that you can set up so there are time based automations location location-based automations or even app beast automation so that when you use a particular app that focus automatically turns on and it will turn off once you close that app and there's also focus status so contacts that try to contact you while you have a focus enabled that aren't in your allowed list will be told that your notifications are silenced there's even a third party api for this and you can turn on auto reply as well uh that will auto reply that you're not available so that's an option too so let me just show you what happens i'm going to go ahead and enable my work focus and i'm going to receive a message or i'm going to send and receive a message you see jeff has notification silence with focus so that notification was delivered quietly but the user can have the option to notify anyway click that you see the little exclamation on that on that message and they receive that notification anyway so basically a way to break through your focus in case of an emergency or if they really need to contact you so notifications get some changes in mac os monterey as well there's a new look for instance now you have a much larger little icon app icon or a contact photo to the left of the notification so that's it's much easier to identify who that notification or what that notification is from so that's a nice new addition you also have the ability to easily mute notifications simply right click you can mute for an hour mute for today or turn off the notification completely so i'm gonna mute for one hour uh you also have muting suggestions when you receive a lot of different notifications from a single app and we touched on this before with focus but time sensitive notifications are an option uh you see allow time sensitive alerts under the notifications panel for each particular app that supports that alright so we're going to talk about notes one of my favorite updates in mac os monterey and ios 15 for that matter uh so the first thing that you'll notice here in notes is the ability to add tags tag support is huge for notes it's going to help keep things much more organized and easy to find your notes as well so this is how you create tags all you do is use a hashtag just like you would expect right so you use a hashtag it offers tag suggestions that already exist but if you want to create your own tag you simply type the word or the name of the tag after the hashtag so in this case we're just going to type games and there's our new tag but again what if you want to use an already existing tag well you already know how to do that i kind of showed you already but let's go ahead and do it just to be thorough so if you if i want to use an existing tag i just do this hashtag use my download arrow or use my mouse cursor to select the tag i want to use now the benefit of tags is that you have the tag browser which allows you to quickly filter and drill down to tags so you have all tags of course that will show notes with all tags on there but then you can select individual tags so that will filter only apple tags or you can combine tags so only notes with apple and iphone tags will be displayed there or i can switch to games or software etc super simple to drill down and really filter these tags using that new tag browser and it's really powerful when you have a lot of tags and you select multiple tags and i'm talking two three four tags at the same time to really filter and drill down now there's also custom smart folders as well so you go to new folder create smart folder and then you give it a name and then you can filter on tags and notes that feature these tags will automatically be filtered into these smart folders for even better organization so you see i have a games smart folder and what do you know there's our note with the games tag so that that smart folder is a little bit lonely so we're going to create a new note and add the games tag to that note to give that folder another note that was a tongue twister but yeah this is another note i got about games so don't forget the hashtag games so you see the games smart folder now it has two items the one we just created and the note that we created initially so smart folders are very powerful in notes so you also have activity view so when you share a note to collab with another user or multiple users you can show all activity and see where edits were made so you even have the little memoji icon and that allows you to quickly see where changes were made now you also have highlights so you can go and select show highlights and that will show on the the margin where those changes were made or where those highlights are you can also view highlights simply by using a gesture so you can just swipe over like that and that'll show your highlights just like that so that makes it really easy to see who did what at any given time within a shared note and there's also mention so when you have a whole bunch of people that note it could be very handy to mention someone uh that you shared with so i can just at miles and then he's going to get a notification alerting him that hey i mentioned him in this shared note so here's an example what a notification looks like miles mentioned me earlier so there you go and if you watched our ipad overview you already know all about quick notes but in mac os quick notes are a thing as well you can actually set a hot corner for creating a quick note so i'm going to go in here and change my start screen saver hot corner to quick note so when i drag my mouse cursor up to the upper right hand corner that will invoke quick note and as such quick notes are available everywhere so just put my mouse cursor up in the upper right hand corner and there's my quick note that is an already existing note there but i can of course create a new one if i want to do that and you can also create quick notes using keyboard shortcuts as well if you prefer to do that way it's still a little bit uh needs a little bit more time in the oven the whole quick note thing the way it works on mac os it is quite a bit buggy but that's to be expected given the fact that we're in the beta and it's only the second beta at that now quick notes can also have links so if you're on safari you open a quick note you click add link that's going to put that link from safari right there so you can easily get at back to it and you have the contacts as well it's also very adaptable so you can move your quick note around you can make it larger smaller whatever the case may be just easy to keep that there and always be ready to take notes there's also persistent highlights with safari so you can highlight and then say add to quick note it'll add that highlighted portion to your quick note and then make it easy to link back to that highlighted portion of the website that you're on so you can see highlighting here new quick note from those highlights you can create a brand new quick note from that highlighted portion as well now similar to notes reminders also gets tag support smart list support tag browser support in mac os monterey so i'm going to go ahead and create a new reminder review windows 11 and i'm going to add a new tag just like that or i can add an already existing tag it's really up to me however i want to add that tag in my reminder so i have two tags here windows and youtube and i also have the tag browser which allows me to drill down uh to find reminders based on those specific tags i can select multiple tags to select reminders with multiple tag items and just like notes it works very similar allows you to drill down and find exactly what you're looking for in just a few clicks and custom smart lists are actually even more powerful in reminders than they are in notes because you can create smart lists not just based on tags but also other parameters within a reminder so of course you can create your own custom icon or glyph and you can select your color of course give it a name as well and then all you do is check make into smart list and there you have the various filters so you have tags there but you can also filter on daytime priority flag location so i'm going to choose tags and we'll give it a let's give it instead of windows let's choose youtube and we're going to click our plus sign there and add a different parameter so i can add a date if i want to do that but i'm not going to do that let's go ahead and choose priority and let's make it a high priority so any reminder that features the tag youtube with a high priority will be featured in this smart list so right now there's nothing there because nothing meets those requirements but i'm going to go into this reminder add high priority it has the youtube tag so it meets the requirements for this smart list and thus it shows up there now you also have the ability to delete completed reminders so i'm going to go ahead and complete this reminder and then click the show button to show all reminders even those that are completed and then click clear select all completed and then i can delete just like that and there's also improved natural language support so i can type something like this brainstorm ideas every two days and it will suggest and you'll notice reminders is now smarter you can now parse natural language even better and you also have expanded suggested attributes so notice now you have things like tags in your suggested attributes so you can just click that and then add a tag on the fly so that just makes it all the more easy to quickly create a new reminder so the shortcuts app comes to the mac for the very first time and with it comes an updated gallery with some mac centric shortcuts for instance here under get organized you see organize your desktop your mac and everything else with handy shortcuts like the ability to quickly clear your downloads folder for instance now shortcuts also features cross device management so that means i can manage a shortcut on my iphone that's going to be updated on my mac which is going to be updated on my ipad basically icloud syncing being able to create shortcuts on one device use them on another device etc and system-wide shortcuts means that i can access shortcuts from all sorts of locations such as spotlight or i can access the shortcuts from the menu bar so i just drug the random wallpaper to the menu bar access it there or i can access it as a quick action so you can see in the finder in the services menu so here in the finder i can right click run shortcut and select my shortcut in other words it's just super flexible now you can also run compatible iphone and ipad shortcuts on the mac with an m1 or an intel based mac system with catalyst apps so here in this example i have random wallpaper you may remember the video i did on that a while back but i just ran that i didn't make any modifications and was able to do so right here on my mac change that wallpaper just like that now there's also improved sharing so now i can just go to share obviously all this is new for the mac but on ios you get the improved sharing as well and that is beneficial on the mac too which makes it super easy to just share a link and then import that with ease and there's automator compatibility so i can open up my resize automator workflow right within shortcuts if you can see all the parameters have been ported over this is going to be really cool for automation if you watch my ios 15 overview you were no doubt impressed by the updated maps app it's really got a lot of new features under the hood and a lot of new features are here on the mac in mac os monterey as well including the new globe view which gives you sort of a google earth style view that you can easily navigate around the globe and home in on any specific area on earth it just makes it really easy to get to a specific location on one side of the globe and then quickly move to another side of the globe so here i am in tokyo you also get enhanced details for things like mountain ranges and deserts and forests and oceans i think the name of the game for the updated maps app is that just everything just looks way better much more attention to detail has been paid in the updated maps app and speaking of detail like hyper detail you get new city experiences in certain cities or obviously san francisco is going to be one of those cities it's not everywhere but look at this look at the 3d models here for all the buildings hyper detailed i mean we're talking down to trees we're talking like like signs on streets and like turning lanes and things like that i mean this is insane the amount of detail that you see here in the maps app for these cities unfortunately there's only a few cities that have this san francisco being one los angeles new york london but unprecedented detail and there's new driving features so you now see exchanges with overlapping 3d highways which if you're navigating that's just going to make it all the more easier to kind of tell or gain context as to where you are and make getting around these cities even easier in the updated maps app i'm super impressed with this especially impressed when using maps app navigation on the iphone and like on ios 15 you get a new user profile so that contains all of your different settings and preferences and redesign maps contributions so you can quickly report a street issue or report a place issue right there from one handy convenient location ios 15 had some amazing accessibility improvements in the mac gets its fair share of updates as well you get voice over image descriptions for markup so you just click the little image description icon and type in your description and voiceover will be able to read those descriptions now voiceover descriptions for pdf signatures is also a thing so when you create a signature you have the ability to add a description as you see below in the little drop down box so you can choose the type of signature you want and then add your description below you can even add a custom description if you want to do that now you also have improved full keyboard access in accessibility settings so if you go to preferences accessibility go to keyboard you'll notice new enable full keyboard access and this allows for even more fine-tuned fine-grain control over your mac using just your keyboard perfect for accessibility if you click commands you can see a list of the various commands for navigating around all the various sections of mac os including control center or the menu bar or the dock so we're going to go down to the dock now using a keyboard shortcut and there you go now you can just navigate between all those dock icons and you can do something similar with the the menu bar as well with control center etc so full keyboard access definitely a welcome addition to mac os now there are also custom mouse pointers so not only can you change the size of the mouse pointer which you go to accessibility display pointer not only can you change the pointer size but you can also change the pointer outline color so you can it of course defaults as white but you can change it to pink for instance and you can change the pointer fill color as well which defaults as black but you can change that to white if you want to so quite a different looking pointer there and you can of course reset it and change the pointer size back to normal as well and voice control adds new language options including mandarin chinese for china mainland cantonese for hong kong french for france and german for germany in the books app gets a nice new fresh coat of paint a brand new redesign for the sidebar it's not a drastic change but it does look a little bit more consistent across ios and now the mac so now you can access features like reading goals or want to read and reading now those are features previously only available on ios and search has been redesigned so search results come up as soon as you begin typing and will also correct spelling mistakes so let's search for getting things done and there you go right there on the fly search results are populated just like that and the home app gets package detection so if you go to home and go to the home app settings go to recording options more options specific motion and now you see the toggle where you can enable package detection and for you news app junkies you now will enjoy a redesign or subtly redesigned news feed with rounded corners you also have bylines at the bottom and updated margins similar to the ipad os 15 app and the photos app enjoys several updates as well including that richer info ping that i wax poetic about on our ios walkthrough so if you just click the little info button there you'll notice the info pane which is just filled with all sorts of useful data like your iso the focal length the f-stop the shutter speed resolution file type etc etc you also appreciate faster icloud photo library syncing on the initial sync and this is really cool you can import photos from another photos library so let me show you how that works so just go up to file import and then you can actually select your library just like that review for import and now you can review the images that you want to import select the ones you want choose the the folder that you want to import it to and you're good and screen time gets the new downtime on demand update that we had on ios 15 so all you do is go to downtime and then simply click turn on and then you can turn on downtime on demand and voice memos gets an update this is a test this is only a test please subscribe to nine to five so now you can adjust the playback speed just by dragging this little slider and you can enable skip silence so let's actually show you both of those in action this is a test this is only a test please subscribe to 95 mac if you haven't done so already so ladies and gentlemen that has been a look at over a hundred features for mac os monterey what do you think about it do you plan on running the public beta let me know down below in the comment section also let me know what your favorite feature is down below as well and be sure to thumbs up if you appreciate this video and subscribe for more videos like this this is jeff with nine to five mac special thanks to matt paul's clean my mac x for sponsoring 995 mac on youtube if you just got a new m1 mac this is the perfect companion app to always keep it running in tip-top shape clean my mac x includes tons of tools to help you analyze and delete computer junk saving you precious disk space and it's also great for protection against mac specific malware and adware for the next two weeks matt paul is offering viewers a five percent discount click the link in the description to get it today and special thanks to matt paul for sponsoring nine to five mac you

Channel: 9to5Mac

Views: 287,346

Keywords: 9to5Mac, macOS 12, macOS Monterey, macOS 12 monterey, macOS 12 changes, macOS 12 features, macOS monterey changes, macOS Monterey features, macOS Monterey top features, macOS Monterey what's new, macOS Monterey hidden features, top macOS 12 features, macOS 12 in-depth, macOS 12 walkthrough, macOS 12 review, macOS 12 preview, macOS Monterey review, macOS monterey preview, macOS Monterey tips, macOS monterey tricks, macOS Monterey hands-on, macOS 12 hands-on, macOS SharePlay

Id: AmYDXFaA3Yk

Length: 63min 53sec (3833 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021