MacOS Monterey Tips & Tricks & Hidden features!

mac os monterey is out now you can download it on your computer and in today's video i want to go through some of the tips and tricks and little hidden features that are packed into this year's software update now it's kind of ironic that we're going to be talking about that because some of the key features for this update namely share play and universal control are not yet available so i'll be talking about those later when they are actually here but anyway today we're going to talk about some hidden features and tips and tricks in mac os monterey [Music] so first things first if you want to run mac os monterey then you probably want to know if your mac is supported if you have a macbook air macbook pro or imac from 2015 or later you can run monterey same goes for the 12-inch macbook from 2016 and later the mac mini from 2014 and later the mac pro from 2013 and later and the imac pro tragically for some reason this year apple chose to drop a number of 2013 and 2014 devices that were supported under mac os big serve for example the late 2013 and mid 2014 macbook pros those devices in my opinion are still perfectly usable i have several of them all running big sur with no issues whatsoever they may not be apple silicon but they will certainly get the job done and it's a little bit unfortunate to see apple dropping those devices however i still can't knock them for the amount of software support that they are giving here i mean we're talking about six or seven years for most devices except for the 12-inch macbook but that thing was kind of terrible so i get why they dropped it early but i am curious to know what you guys think do you think apple is dropping devices too early or are they supporting things for about a reasonable amount of time let me know in the comments below and with that let's start to talk about these tips and tricks feature number one your late model mac is now an airplay device all you have to do is select the mac from the airplay display menu on your iphone or ipad and this isn't just limited to apple silicon by the way so you don't have to worry if you have an intel mac if you have a macbook pro or air from 2018 or later a 2019 or later imac m1 mac mini imac pro or 2019 mac pro you can use this feature and that also works if you have external speakers plugged into the headphone jack so you can essentially turn those into an airplay device as well and that i think is the really killer feature because i don't particularly care to use the built-in speakers on my imac or my macbook pro as airplay speakers but i have a pair of non-bluetooth logitech speakers plugged into those and now those are essentially airplay speakers which is really really nice and you can airplay to those devices with an iphone 7 or newer as well as most ipads from the past four or five years and you can even use older devices if you enable allow airplay for everyone in settings alright let's talk about tip number two and this one's a fun one now personally i'm a big fan of when apple revived the cursive hello text with the imac this year and they brought that to the startup screen when you install mac os fantastic love that well guess what folks now you can have that as your screen saver too if you go to system preferences and set up your screen saver you can choose between soft tones spectrum minimal or all themes and you can also set it to match the color theme you set up on your mac and speaking of colors that brings us on to tip number three are you tired of the old boring black and white mouse cursor it's been around forever literally like 30 years and it is boring well now if you go into system preferences then accessibility you can pick whatever color combination you want for your cursor now obviously this is an accessibility thing this is to help you know if you're colorblind or if you have trouble seeing small things on the screen but also it's a lot of fun because you can make your mouse pink tip number four you know how when you airdrop a photo from your phone to your mac it shows up as an heic file those things are really good file types they're really high resolution high quality but they're really compact files which is great for you know the photos app on your 64 or 128 gigabyte iphone but on a desktop an heic file isn't really as useful well now on mac os monterey if you airdrop a photo you can right click on it and head down to quick actions and click convert image from there you can convert to jpeg png or heif in different file sizes and it makes a nifty little copy for you right in the same folder this is a great feature i'm so happy that this has finally been added and i also like that you can change the file size while you're at it because that will make things a lot easier if you have an upload for example on the web where it has a file size limit and then you can just kind of take care of that or right when you convert the image super handy tip number five this one's a little tiny nugget it's just a little helpful thing that might show up from time to time if you open up quicktime player you can now change the playback speed if you click the little side arrows on the play bar you can choose anything from 0.5 x to 2x speed this is great if you are bored and you want to watch the apple event again but you want to watch it twice as fast that's a fun way to do it tip number six this one has to do with safari and specifically the big feature that apple showed off back at wwdc that they then walked back and that is the compact tab bar this was something that i absolutely loved in the first developer beta that came out back in june basically what it does is condense the entire tab bar into itself so the tab contains the search field and this is great because it saves you a lot of real estate i think it looks really good and it simplifies the experience because it was consistent across ipad os mac os and the new bottom tab bar in ios but then over the course of the betas this summer apple sort of walked that back to the point where if you open up mac os monterey after you install it safari is going to look pretty much identical to the way it looked before and you might say oh man that sucks i really wanted this new compact tab bar well fortunately now in the full release of mac os monterey if you like the compact tab bar you can get it back just go to safari preferences click on tab and then you can enable compact tab bar i'm personally a huge fan of this because it shrinks the tabs up and out of the way it gives you a lot more screen real estate and that's especially helpful on 13-inch devices so i'm a big fan of it but i'm curious to know what you guys think do you like the compact tab bar do you not like it let me know in the comments below continuing with safari we have tip number seven now one of the big things that apple showed off at wwdc across all of its major product platforms is shared with you so you may have noticed this already in ios 15 when someone shares a photo with you sometimes it'll show up in your camera roll or you can add it more easily well this applies to safari as well with links similar to how continuity tabs have shown up on the safari home page links that your friends send you will show up here as well so you don't have to hunt through the messages app to find something that somebody sent you like a week ago shared with you i think is a really good all-around feature and it's sort of been implemented system-wide you know it's not just here in safari it's not just on mac os and i think that makes it a lot more powerful because it can show up on your iphone and your ipad and your mac and you'll see the link that daniel sent you two days ago if you're watching this and daniel sent you a link two days ago and you still haven't opened it you got to get on that he's waiting for you tip number eight apple talked a lot at wwdc about quick notes a new feature that is predominantly targeted towards the ipad but it's available on mac os as well it's really easy to activate just like on the ipad you can activate a quick note on the mac by sticking your mouse in the bottom right corner then just click when you see the little box pop up and it'll bring up a little window for the quick note and just like on the ipad that quick note will be saved in your notes synced with icloud and be available across all of your devices this is a great feature notes is probably my most used apple app i think it's by far my favorite one i used to actually type all of my scripts for videos in pages but now i actually use the notes app that's what i'm reading off of right now i've scripted this video in the notes app i don't know i just really like the notes app do you guys agree is the notes app like the king or what let me know in the comments below and finally here tip number nine if you have decided that you not only don't care about mac os monterey but you don't care about your whole mac you can now wipe it of all contents and settings just like on an iphone by going to system preferences and selecting system preferences and then clicking delete all contents and settings now this might seem like a pretty minor feature but it's actually a really big deal and i hope that it becomes widely known because see the problem is in the past if you wanted to wipe your mac you basically had to go boot into internet recovery wipe your ssd and then do a fresh install of mac os and that was annoying and people didn't really know how to do it which meant that people didn't do it and they wouldn't sign out of anything and they would essentially end up bricking their device because as you may know if you don't sign out of icloud and then you say all right i'm going to take this computer to a recycling center get rid of it they can't do anything with it because it's icloud locked but now hopefully erasing all content and settings will become a normal thing that people do which should save a lot of macs from essentially becoming e-waste now i don't think this is going to be perfect because the feature has existed on iphones for a really long time and people still don't do it there are so many iphones that go to waste pointlessly just because people forget to take a very simple step of signing out and wiping their device leaving it to be used for people for years to come so i really really hope that this is a feature that most people start to learn about and if you don't know about that if you've never signed out of icloud devices that you've gotten rid of in the past definitely start doing it now so those are some of my favorite little tips and tricks for mac os monterey let me know what you think is the most interesting feature in monterey and before you say it i also am really looking forward to continuity i hope apple is able to work it out somewhat soon you know the full os is here we're still waiting on it but they say it's coming this year so hopefully it won't be too long now uh so thank you guys so much for watching this video as usual don't forget to like comment and subscribe and i'll see you guys in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 202,283

Keywords: macOS, macOS monterey, monterey, macOS monterey features, hidden features in monterey, macOS tips and tricks, Monterey tips and tricks, best Monterey hidden features, hidden features, new features, macOS tips

Id: nuH94Wbja0U

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021