macOS Monterey Top Features! Do you know them all?

how's it going ladies and gents boys and girls jeff benjamin with nine to five mac in this video we take a look at the top mac os monterey features and there's a ton of new items but before we get started a brief word from our sponsor ninifi mac is sponsored by cleanmymacs a name that's synonymous with keeping your mac in tip top sheet 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 axes 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 mac paul for sponsoring nine to five mac [Music] in mac os monterey there's finally the ability to easily erase all content and settings just like you can on ios just open up system preferences go to the menu bar click system preferences select erase all content and settings enter your administrator password to open the erase assistant and it's going to walk you through everything that will be erased along with all the settings media and data it will also get rid of your apple id all your touch id fingerprints all accessories paired with bluetooth and apple wallet cards so click continue it'll ask you to sign out of your apple id to turn off find my mac and all your various apple services so once you click continue this is something you definitely want to make sure you know that you want to do prior to doing it because this will literally delete everything on your mac and there's no way to get it back so make sure you have things backed up if you need them and you get a nice little warning there it signs you out of all your apple id account services sends you out of apple wallet but it's going to give you one last chance says hey all data settings and apps will be erased this cannot be undone so that's it folks if you click erase all content and settings that's it all your data is gone it's wiped out and you're basically restored back to a fresh clean install of mac os which is a great feature in my opinion because previously it was very cumbersome to go in and set up your your mac as a new mac it just wasn't very intuitive like it is on ios and simple straightforward so here we go this is the aftermath of erasing all content and settings i'm going to speed it up a little bit here and eventually it'll ask you to connect your mouse and your trackpad but obviously on a macbook pro so that doesn't really matter so it's going to ask you to go into select your language i'm going to do that now and then it's going to want to activate your mac so you're going to need to connect to wi-fi or hardwired ethernet so i'm connected to wi-fi and now it's going through the activation process your mag is activated so now let's go ahead and restart and once you reboot you're going to be back to the initial mac os setup screen with the hello menu ready to go so this is what you will see upon using erase all content and settings a fresh clean install of mac os monterey so if you often sell your macs to upgrade this is going to be something that you're going to appreciate no doubt let me know down below in the comment section what you think about this new addition to mac os now let's talk about another experience feature and that is low power mode finally comes to the mac so all you do is go into system prefaces battery and then you can enable low power mode for your battery your mac will reduce energy usage to increase battery life and operate more quietly but what's interesting is you can also enable low power mode when connected to a power adapter and in that case your mac will reduce energy usage and operate more quietly so basically if you just want a quieter machine maybe you're charging your mac you want it to charge maybe a little bit faster not use as much battery that's a good idea now another experience feature that i really appreciate is automatically resizing windows so when you move to a different external display and the window is a different size it will automatically resize to match that external display so right here i have a maximized apple music window and watch what happens when i drag this over to my macbook pro because this one right here is running on my pro display xdr 6k display but watch what happens when i move it over to the macbook pro it automatically resizes just like that now let's talk about the traditional desktop and screensaver updates so you do get a new desktop wallpaper actually several new desktop wallpapers of course you get the standard mac os graphic which looks great in my opinion and you can switch between light dark or automatic mode to automatically switch between light and dark depending on time of day but then you see the the green color this is the hello wallpaper so you can switch between light or dark let's show you all of them you have the yellow light dark orange light dark red light dark blue or i guess purple light and dark gray light and dark and then your typical mac os wallpaper just like that so these look great on that new imac as well as you might imagine now you also have the new hello screensaver so we'll go ahead and just preview that there are several screen saver options that you can go in and adjust so click that and you'll see you have the different themes three available themes or you can select all to mix and match between all three of those you also have show hello in all languages i think there's like 34 languages and you can match system appearance between light and dark mode alright let's go ahead and preview this guy right here let's see how it looks so this is folks the new hello screensaver this is a generative screensaver so it's going to be a little bit different you get different camera angles in position so a fresh new look each time different colors different languages like i said 34 different languages what do you think about that new screen saver let me know down below in the comments section now let's talk about window management in mac os monterey so a couple new features here that i appreciate it so we're going to run in split view here with two windows i have my safari window in my finder window now watch what you can do here in mac os monterey you can actually swap out full screen windows for another so replace just like that select the new one just like that you can do the same thing on the other side as well so just hover over the green stop light and select replace tiled window and then select your other application i don't know why it's showing black there on that side i think it's just a little bug um but typical for early versions of mac os now you see right here another split view setup and watch what we can do now we can make this window full screen and watch what happens it makes this window full screen but it also forces the other into full screen as well so that is a new feature in mac os monterey now let's talk about another so when you go into full screen normally your menu bar is hidden right autohide is enabled by default but now you have the option to actually disable autohide in full screen applications so go to system preferences go up to dock and menu bar and then below you'll see automatically hide and show the menu bar in full screen just uncheck that folks just uncheck it that's all you gotta do now you can see when you go into full screen the menu bar is still displayed super simple super easy let's talk about the finder now so in the finder you get some not so insignificant go to folder enhancement so you get a brand new design you also get enhanced autocomplete functionality so it's easier to go in here and browse and find exactly what you want so that is the go to folder enhancements but it doesn't stop there in monterey if you hover over a file or folder while holding the option key you can easily view the file path macintosh hd users jeff library makes it easy to find out exactly where this guy is and it doesn't stop there you can actually right click on any of these locations and perform specific actions such as opening that location directly in a terminal or copying the path name so handy folks so go ahead and let's open that up in terminal we'll go directly to the users folder just like that super simple super easy now you can also hold the shift key to see or navigate to subfolders just like that that's really slick so i mean there's some def definite quality of life enhancements in mac os monterey as far as the finder is concerned let me know what you guys think and in the sidebar you'll notice a new icloud collaboration folder that contains all shared documents and displays information such as invitation status the person who last modified the file etc now notifications get several enhancements in mac os monterey starting with a fresh coat of paint these notifications look a lot better this go around what do you guys think nice large icons very legible easy to see at a glance what the notification pertains to you can also mute notifications just right click you could select mute for one hour mute for today or turn off notifications all together so let's mute for one hour podcast and then right click we can unmute just like that and you'll also appreciate contact photos for people with larger icons as well so i mean that doesn't exactly look like me but okay that'll work now let's talk about some of the other notifications improvements starting with the ability to receive time sensitive notification so if you go into settings go into notifications and focus you'll see here under calendar for instance allow time sensitive alerts so even if you're in a focus mode which we'll talk about a little bit later you can make sure those important notifications still get to you and we'll expand on focus modes like i said a little bit later now let's talk about one of my favorite new features airplay to mac so your mac basically acts like an airplay to destination you can see here my mac mini so i can use that as an airplay 2 speaker for apple music so i'm just going to go ahead and connect to it like that and now my music starts playing on my mac the mini speaker is pretty terrible but if i was using this on an imac it would sound fairly good now you can also airplay videos directly to your display just like this this is going to look great on the pro display xdr connected to that mac mini so this is a wonderful new addition to mac os and not only that you can also connect hard-wired with a lightning cable even if you aren't connected to wi-fi or bluetooth or anything and still airplay to your connected mac that is awesome now let's talk about live text so in photos you can literally highlight text so this is a photo just wanted to prove it to you but you can literally just simply do like that and copy text or look up text or translate text right there from anywhere so this applies to any photo with text in it you can simply copy that text just like that and of course live text is prominently featured in ios but also very handy on mac os now let's talk about translate because last year the big deal with big sur was the ability to have translation baked into safari right but now translation is actually everywhere within mac os just like it is on ios so all you need to do will go back and switch this back over to japanese just like that so view original so all you need to do is highlight some text from a foreign language right click and select translate so we'll just do that right here right click translate bam you can even play it back even switch the translated languages etc now let's talk about privacy here's one important new privacy update and that is this little indicator see that little dot is a privacy indicator telling you that hey your microphone or your camera has been used and it'll actually tell you the apps associated with the usage so i just opened voice memos gonna go back up in here and we'll see click right here and you can see screenflows have been using the microphone and voicememos has been using a mic now here's something i know you guys will appreciate that is the ability to access your passwords not just from safari like you have been forced to do in the past so you go to safari preferences go to passwords right but now you'll notice that passwords are handily located within system preferences so there's actually a section within system preferences so let's go ahead and navigate over there open up system preferences and you see right here password so you simply click that and you can access all your passwords just like you would be through system preferences in or through preferences in safari so here all your passwords obviously i blinked them out but you can import passwords directly to here and you can also export your passwords these will be exported of course in plain text we'll just be careful on doing that and uh yeah so those are a couple of the really handy new features in mac os monterey related to password security but here is actually my favorite the ability to set up two-factor authentication one-time passcodes that are natively integrated within mac os so you can actually go into the password section add a setup key from any service that has two-factor authentication enabled and then you can log into your favorite websites using that one-time password it is super nice and super simple so we're gonna go into twitter enable two factor go ahead and paste in the code here to activate and then once we do that we can just go ahead and click ok so now i'm verified so i can just log in with my password all right log in and here it is verification code for twitter you just simply use touch id it automatically submits that code it is so simple to log in now i love this now let's talk about focus so this is basically do not disturb on steroids so just venture up to your control center enable your focus mode in this case do not disturb but as you can see there are several other focus modes ready to go and you can actually add your own custom ones if you want to do that so to disable just click like that and now let's enable a different focus mode so i can enable work for instance or i can enable sleep so let's go ahead and enable work click it and now you can see i can do it for one hour or until this evening let's enable sleep or study and the cool thing is you can set up your own focus modes like i said you can customize them if you go into system preferences go to notifications and focus click the focus tab and there you'll see all your various modes you can remove those or add additional ones pertaining to the specific things that you want to focus on so in this case if you want to focus on gaming or mindfulness or personal or reading actually let's go ahead and add that reading because i do need to focus on that as you'll see a little bit later on this video sort of an inside joke there but as you can see i have reading you can just enable it like that you can also set up to allow notifications from certain people or certain applications if you want to do that because by default it will just basically block out everything except for time sensitive stuff so go in here and add an application that i can receive notifications from i'll go ahead and select the messages app i want to receive notifications still while reading let's add mail-in messages and one of the cool things about focus is that you can share your focus across all devices so if i enable the reading focus that reading focus enables on all my connected devices like my iphone my ipad etc so we're all on the same page i don't have to enable that if i don't want to but it's nice to have that so you can go into study you can enable study right there and that will enable study across all my devices just like that now you can also share your focus status that'll tell people that hey i have my notification silence and it'll allow people to notify you anyway if they really need to get through but that's nice because it'll maybe prompt people not to bother you if you're truly busy now you can also have automation so you can turn on a location-based automation a time-based automation or an app based automation you can switch between the three there as well but here since i'm reading why not make it so that whenever i launch books the reading focus is enabled right makes sense so here it is i'm going to go ahead and click on the books you'll notice watch that reading focus automatically enables just like that now universal control unfortunately is not available with the initial version of mac os monterey but i was thanks to a little i won't call it a hack but thanks to some pew-less editing i was able to test out universal control basically this allows you with one mouse and one keyboard to control multiple devices that are near your mac so for instance i have a imac here i can control that i have a macbook on the other side i can control that with one mouse one keyboard and i can move between the two i can even move files between the two applications i can't move applications between the two apps because these are still two separate computers but nonetheless i think universal control is going to be very popular once it does launch later this fall what do you guys think apple has enhanced its paid icloud service now calling it icloud plus and it has several benefits so first of all you have private relay which is currently in beta and you can enable this right from the mac os apple id preferences and what this will do is keep your internet activity private hide your ip address and browsing activity in safari and protect your unencrypted internet traffic so that no one including apple can see your browsing activity you also have the ability to maintain your general location for your ip address so that websites can provide local content still now the next big feature for icloud plus is hide my email which isn't technically new it's been around for a little bit but here it's more integrated i should say within mac os and it's very nice actually this allows you to create basically spoofed email addresses that will forward to your real email address so you're not getting spam and when you're setting up a new account for instance it'll automatically prompt you in safari to use hide my email so it's a very seamless experience just go ahead and use that and it'll automatically populate that email address in the email field now icloud plus also brings forth the ability to use custom domains with your icloud account so here i have jeff at duckybenjamin.com don't ask why but it works i've tested it out i appreciate the ability to bring my own domains to icloud that's one of the things that kept me from really using icloud before and that's nice to have now there are some accessibility improvements in mac os you can add an image description to markup which is nice just click the little markup button or the image description button and then put in your description and then done and so voiceover will be able to read those you'll also be able to add uh descriptions to your signature as well so i'll just go ahead and sign my doctor's signature there and then i can go ahead and enter a description for my signature that voiceover can interpret as well so jeff signature yeah all right so let's talk about a couple other accessibility features so go into accessibility and system preferences go to display go to pointer you can customize your pointer i mean who hasn't wanted to be able to do that you can customize the outline color the fill color even the size so that's pretty cool what do you guys think all right let's talk about one more accessibility feature that is the ability to have more or improved full keyboard access so now you can basically navigate mac os everything about it with just your keyboard if you wanted to do that it is possible so many commands to use now in mac os monterey all right so facetime obviously gets the big improvement with shareplay we'll talk about that in another video uh once more shareplay compatible apps and everything gets rolled out completely with that but here in mac os you do get some notable facetime updates this is the ability to enable portrait mode for now obviously this isn't me speaking right here so i just want to make sure i'm not confusing you guys it's just me speaking on a pre-recorded video but here you can enable portrait mode and you can see the background gets blurry and then if i disable it the background goes back to normal so that's kind of a nice new feature in facetime for mac os and ios 15. so you also have the different facetime microphone mode so you can choose between standard voice isolation wide spectrum standards basically a mix of the two voice isolation will better isolate your voice from background sounds and wide spectrum will keep those background sounds if you want that ambiance you also have the ability to create facetime links and send them to anyone including yes indeed android users you can do that so here in this example i'm going ahead and visiting that facetime link within safari and now i have facetime in safari so basically in mac os in ios now you have facetime anywhere facetime's open now sort of right you don't get all the cool features that you get with native facetime but it is so nice to be able to finally invite others outside of the apple ecosystem to a facetime video chat now this is emphasized by the ability to embed facetime links directly within meetings so now it doesn't matter who receives your meeting they can join your facetime just like that now the messages app gets tons of new improvements headlined by shared with you which will automatically surface shared material in selected apps so for instance i can share photos i can share um you know websites you can see right here share with you it appears right there in safari so a link that was shared here in the tv app a link from jeff here in the podcast tab you can see share with you and then when you click it you get inline location for that share so you can actually reply directly to that share and you could say hey i really enjoyed that podcast that was one of the most excellent podcasts ever you should probably subscribe but here you can see share with you within the news app as well and one of my favorite new messages app features especially on ios but here on mac os as well you now have stacks of photos when you share multiple photos so that is a stack easily view all three of those at the same time and you can see they're all grouped together so you can easily swipe through or navigate through each of those photos but what if you share four or more photos so let's go ahead and do that now i'm gonna drop five here and you're gonna see it shares as a stack which you can swipe through with your track pad or mouse pretty pretty spiffy there even better on ios and in moderate you can also quickly and easily download a group of photos and save them to your icloud photos on all your devices nomimoji does get a significant upgrade starting in headline by clothing so yes you can actually go in customize clothing customize colors up to three different colors depending on the article of clothing that you select so if you select something like that you get three colors looking spiffy and then those articles of clothing will be showcased in your full body or sort of three-fourth body stickers so you can drag those stickers directly to your messages with the clothing that you customize but that's not all you also have separate eye colors now so you can add a separate eye color and have two different color eyes i think this looks really cool and you also have new glasses new eyewear so you have stars hearts and old school glasses and then you can go and customize the color of the frames and the lenses separately now there's also brand new memoji stickers so you can go in here you'll find several new stickers i'm going to tell you which one is my favorite though i love the head and the clouds and i also love the little light bulb the light bulb above the head that doesn't happen to me too much but i do appreciate that so there's that one and you also have support for tri-color headwear so depending on the piece of headwear you choose you can select a main second and third color so this one let's go ahead and switch that third color up there we go and accessibility comes to me mode you have an oxygen tube you have cochlear implants and you also have a padded helmet as well so that's a nice addition to memoji and memoji comes to the lock screen as well and actually it'll smile at you when you when you first wake your computer up it'll go to sleep if you take too long and he even will chastise you with a head shake like that when you enter the wrong password i think that's pretty cute what do you guys think so of course safari has been steeped in controversy over this beta period both on ios and in mac os more specifically the tabs people hate the way the tab bars have looked apple has updated them to to look a little better and easier to decipher and discern so that's appreciated but here's the big standout feature for me for mac os and that is tab group so you see i have the whole nine to five mac family of websites here i want to create a new tab group with all these tabs so i'll just call it nine to five family like that and now all those tabs reside in that tab group i can go to a new start page let's visit some ev websites we'll go to tesla we'll go to rivien we'll go to lucid and then we'll create a new tab group with these three tabs and call it evs so just click the new tab group button and we'll call it evs alright so we have two tab groups let's go back to our start page and let's let's go to just another website let's try new york times i don't know alrighty so we have one tab with new york times then we have our two tab groups with evs so i can quickly switch between that tab group visit all the tabs within that group then go to my nine to five family visit all the tabs within that group you haven't checked out drum dj be sure to do so connect the watts be sure to do so but are you getting it are you seeing how this can help with organization really keeping like-minded tabs in their own groups that's so handy you can even create a new empty tab group and i'll call this one sports and then eventually i'll continue populating that with different sports related websites so obviously the big one that stands out espn so there i got three tab groups sports evs nine to five family and you can see just organization wise this is cool and this is helped by this new sidebar which is very nice keeps everything organized your tab groups you receive links your bookmarks etc and then you can still even with that closed you can still access all your tab groups here you can see which tab group you're currently in at the top upper left hand corner so that's very handy now let's talk about those tabs again because apple has gone back and forth refining trying to update just trying to make sure everyone's happy with these tabs and i don't think you're going to make everyone happy but i do think it's a good compromise so if we go into safari preferences go to tabs you see the tab layout option defaults to separate but you can switch to the compact view which was sort of controversial so the compact view basically combines the address bar in the tab bar no one so every tab is actually an address bar you see that so if i click a tab it'll switch to that tab and then i click the tab again i can actually choose the website that i want associated with that tab right so it's the address bar and the tabs combined now in mac os moderate you also have improved privacy so now your ip address is also hidden from trackers along with the website you visit now if you've been following the ios 15 updates you'll know basically what to expect for notes in mac os monterey notes gets access to tags which is a wonderful feature for staying organized so here i can create tags just add a hashtag then type the name of the tag right after the hashtag and that will create that tag automatically highlight it in yellow and then it will add it to the tag browser so you can see monterey there and if we go down to the tag browser in the bottom left-hand corner there we can basically sort or basically filter on one or more of these tags so if i have monterey selected i can also select feature which will filter on both of those or i can uncheck monterey select ios 15. it's a great way to stay organized and to help with that there's also support for tags with smart folders so i can go in here name that smart folder in this case monterey and then add the monterey tag to it so now any note items that have monterey will automatically appear in this smart folder and for collaborative notes you also get highlights so this will allow you to view edit times and dates with highlighted text color coded to match collaborators as you can see down below notes also supports mentions just at mention the person you want to notify now you also have the note activity which will show you what others have added to a shared note while you were away quick note was a feature that was first found on ipad os but now here mac os you can highlight some text for instance add to quick note and there you create a quick note right from that highlighted text and what's cool is that when you visit that website you'll see the related highlighted text in yellow like that and there's also a specific section within the notes app for quick notes right there at the top just like that and you can click on there to open that site you can also access quick notes with a hot corner which is kind of interesting so to set that up you can just go to system preferences hot corners are one of my go-to staples in mac os so you go to system preferences mission control click hot corners and there you'll see quick note now the shortcuts app comes to mac os and mac os monterey so you'll find it under the other folder and you can see once you launch it you have the gallery with shortcuts specifically made for mac os very accommodating new shortcuts app here but what's interesting is that you can sync shortcuts between your ios devices and your mac and even run shortcuts originally created on your iphone right on your mac just like i did there random wallpaper that was something i created for my iphone back in the day you can also add shortcuts to your dock just like that also the menu bar and not just that shortcuts are so much easier to share now you simply copy icloud link share and you'll see it right here once i visit that link this is what the recipient will see so they can easily add that shortcut and it's also easier to build shortcuts thanks to next action suggestions so this will help you to see what action you might add next as you build out your shortcut now the maps app like on ios gets a big improvement starting with the sort of google earth style globe view you can go in there spin the globe zoom in and get some really nice 3d details on various different types of topology here you get some enhanced detail for certain cities like san francisco which is just provides a ridiculous amount of detail in 3d you see crosswalks you see underpasses all in 3d space trees and more super impressive look at that elevation there's also an update to the books app not a huge update but you do get some features previously exclusive to ios like reading goals remember i talked about reading earlier well i probably need to up my goal a little bit right five minutes a day but you do get support for reading goals and you also get support for what to read as well and reading now by the way you also get an updated search interface so improve search results yes so find my also get some updates number one you get live locations for friends and family so you can see continuous streaming updates providing a sense of direction and speed now although they aren't quite working here in my example you do get some find my widgets you get a items widget and a people's widget on people's a people widget and you get find my network support for airpods so let's talk about gaming whenever you download games now they will appear in a game folder automatically so if you you're an apple arcade subscriber you'll definitely appreciate that there's also a friend request inbox and improve multiplayer experience now the mail app gets protect mail activity and it works by hiding your ip address and loading remote content privately in the background so this should help reduce the effectiveness of email trackers now the news app gets a redesigned news feed with more prominent publish times and bylines you can also save and share more easily the photos app gets visual lookup support in the enhanced metadata view here you go so if i click the info button you'll notice a little flower because it recognizes it's a flower on the scene it'll tell you the type of flower or type of animal etc now icloud sinking on that initial sink is much faster in the photos app on monterey and now you can actually import photos from an additional library into an existing library so here i'm going to review this library for import and i can just select photos from that library and import into my main library really nice addition in the podcast app gets better personalized recommendations to help you discover new podcasts about topics that you are passionate about like the notes app the reminders app gains support for tags in mac os monterey so i'm just going to type out a new reminder and add a tag in there mac safe and we'll do another one here review new version of final cut pro tagged so what's cool again you get the tag browser so you can filter on those specific tags one or more like that and you also get yes and d just like notes smart list so you can make a smart list just give it a name i'll call it youtube give it a color you can customize the icon and you can see you can filter on all sorts of different things including tags and i'll just add a youtube tag just like that so there we go there's our smart list for youtube you can also show and easily clear completed items so i'm just going to clear all completed and delete those completed items that cannot be undone and better natural language support in mac os moderate for reminders and additional suggestions quick suggestions so final cut pro review now you can quickly suggest tags as well like that and last but not least voice memos has been updated in mac os monterey so it gains support for faster playback speed and also skip silence so if i go up here to the settings button i can adjust this the playback speed i can enable skip silence and now when i play back you can see how fast it goes you can see it skip over those parts that are silent so ladies and gentlemen that has been a look at the top mac os monterey features what are your thoughts what's your favorite feature let me know down below in the comment section if you appreciated this video leave a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe for more mac os content like this this is jeff with nine to five mac special thanks to mac paul's clean my mac x for sponsoring 995 mac on youtube if you just got a new macbook pro 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 max 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: 246,976

Keywords: 9to5Mac, macOS top features, macOS 12 top features, macOS 12, macOS Monterey, What's new in macOS Monterey, What's new in macOS 12, macOS Monterey top features, Best macOS Monterey Features, macOS Monterey hidden features, macOS 12 top features and changes, macOS Monterey what's new, macOS Monterey universal control, macOS Monterey 12, macOS 12 monterey, macOS 12 Monterey top feature, macOS Monterey changes and feature, macOS Monterey install, macOS Monterey release date

Id: yaG9mFlrB8k

Length: 36min 39sec (2199 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021