MacOS Sequoia - The 8 BEST features coming to your Mac!

earlier this week Apple announced the latest Mac operating system that will be landing on compatible Macs in September of this year Mac OS Sequoia I've already made a video this week where I talked about the features I'm most excited by in iOS 18 and iPad OS 18 so I wanted to round off the main operating systems by talking today about Mac OS although I'll be candid I have found this one the most difficult to make so far because for whatever reason the developer beta that I'm using is so hit and miss for me I don't know if it's a geographical thing it's definitely not a hardware issue as I'm running the developer beta on an M2 Max MacBook Pro if you're using this beta drop me a comment and let me know how you're getting on with it just quickly an important point to make this is a preview of features that are coming soon I'm using a developer beta you won't be able to follow along with this video on your device unless you are also running a developer beta and I would generally recommend against that unless you need to as they can be inherently quite risky on your device okay let's get into it by far the most significant new feature to come to Mac OS this year is a feature that sadly I've not been able to test in the developer beta just yet and that's a feature called iPhone mirroring the way that I would describe it is it's almost the next logical step forward in Apple's handoff and universal control rollout you'll remember a few years ago at WWDC Apple showed off universal control for the first time and the fact that you could use an iPad to control a nearby Mac or vice versa was mindblowing and I still use it all the time this is kind of like that but with the i iPhone so the idea here is let's say that for example you're working at a coffee shop and you're on your Mac and you've left your iPhone in your bag a notification comes through on your Mac for your iPhone and you can simply click on that notification a screen will then appear on your Mac that perfectly mirrors what your iPhone would be seeing you can then interact with your virtual iPhone using the keyboard and trackpad of your Mac as if you were using the iPhone directly all of the functionality that you'd normally have on your iPhone is available to you so you can open app you can order food you can scroll through Instagram or from the comfort of your Mac without having to reach for your iPhone and the nice thing about this is the entire time your iPhone remains in locked mode wherever it was that you left it which could include standby mode on a MAG safe charger as I say it's an amazing looking feature and the tech demo that Apple showed certainly made it look pretty seamless and if it's anything like universal control it's going to be one of those features that so long as it's working well it will be really really good it is just unfortunate that it hasn't sh with the first developer beta because I can't wait to try this one out Apple have this year released a passwords app and while it's also available on the iPhone and the iPad the Mac is probably the place where you're going to use the actual app itself the most the idea here is that this is designed to replace the third-party password apps out there bringing everything in house into the Apple ecosystem and using iCloud keychain so when you open it up you have access to all of your individual login credentials and you have the usual options for sharing them editing them adding them to groups adding notes to them or whatever else it is that you might need to do you also have a dedicated space for your pass keys and a dedicated space for any Verification codes that you might have had to create for an app or a website all of your Wi-Fi logins are also stored in here so if you ever want to go through and have a bit of a cleanup this would be the place that you would go to to do that you recently deleted passwords are shown in here as well so if you know that you got rid of something recently that you've now changed your mind about this is where you would come to to get that information back and in the security section you can see any security recommendations that the passwords app is making to you typically around things like compromised passwords making it very easy to go to those dedicated websites and make the changes that you need to make to ensure that you're safe you can also create shared password groups in here much more easily this is an app that you're going to use across all of your devices and you might find that the passwords function is something that you use more on your iPhone but I think that the dedicated app is probably something that you going to use more here on the Mac another example now of Apple taking aim at a specific category of apps and looking to completely destroy them this time it would appear to be screen snapping apps like rectangle magnet and my personal favorite Moon although I will say that after playing around with the feature in the developer beta I don't think I'm ready to give up on moon just yet the idea here is that you can now snap Windows to specific sizes on your Mac the way that you would do this is you would grab an app window and you would pull it all the way to the left to tile it on the left or pull it all the way to the right to tile it on the right likewise if you take an app tile and you kind of move it up to the top right for example it will look to position that app in the upper right quarter of the screen and the same applies for all the others the major gripe that I have with this is that if you're using a Mac with an external display for example it's very easy to accidentally hold the app for just that little bit too long on the side and inadvertently move it over to another display they have however added a hover over feature like the one available in Moon where you can hover for just a moment over the green button to reveal all of the available tiling options which is probably the way that I'll be using it personally also and this is just a personal issue the stylistic choice that apple have gone for here is really unusual the apps don't actually cover the entirety of the display there's this kind of border around the tops and sides of them that allows you to still see the desktop underneath and whilst I understand the concept here which is that you can click in that little Gap to quickly get to the desktop it isn't something that I like personally had much rather it if the apps fully filled out the space that's available to them also some of the apps simply don't work on a 50/50 split on smaller displays and they will naturally take up more space although again this isn't something that I necessarily mind so it's a good feature I'm really glad it's here I just wish that it had been implemented a little bit better this video is all about the exciting new features coming to Mac OS later this year so what better time than now to give your Mac a clean up but doing this manually deleting files one at a time can take hours as the guys that clean my Mac proved recently when they uploaded a video showing them cleaning a 2012 Mac manually in a 9-hour video I don't know about you I don't have time for that and that's why when I want to get my Mac cleaned up and running like new I use clean my Mac X who are sponsoring today's video it all begins with the smart scan button it'll run a cleanup process to find all of that unwanted junk clogging up your computer but it will also look for any possible threats as well as increasing the overall system performance it takes around 2 minutes on average to get even a dead slow Mac running quicker again if you want to take a look at things in more detail you can use space lens which is an interactive dis visualizer so you can work out where your storage is actually being used and which files are taking up too much space and I personally love the uninstaller here because it properly uninstalls apps at the touch of a button without leaving behind any of the frustrating files that can be left behind if you simply drag apps to the bin if this sounds good to you you can enjoy a 7-Day free trial to get your Mac running like new again and as a viewer of this channel you also get 20% off with my code proper Tech so why not get started today there are some ecosystem-wide improvements that have been added to the messages app which are particularly useful if you tend to use messages here on the Mac first of all you can format text and I guess the number one reason why this is particularly useful on the Mac is that you can make use of the command key so while you're typing if you decide that you want to bold or italicize some text you can do that using the command b or the command and I function respectively this works for bold italic strikethrough and underling text so you can use a combination of different formatting options to really get your point across you can also select some text that you've just written and then right click on that text and go to text effects where you can choose from a wide range of different visual text effects keep in mind that if you test this out on the beta while you're doing this and send it to someone that isn't using the beta on their device the text will just come through like regular text it won't show with any of these effects the other major change that has come here is the ability to tap on the plus button down here at the bottom left and choose send later this then lets you choose a date and time for your message to send great feature glad it exists and I think people are going to use this a ton I just hate the implementation here on Mac to me this should be a separate send button it feels a bit weird to have to choose it from the plus button and also the edit button when you've submitted the message should let you choose to edit the sending time or the actual message you have to rightclick on the message if you want to edit that you know it's a bizarre year at WWDC when the calculator is a key focal point for all of the major operating systems but in Apple's defense it is a very good calculator now when you first open it up you probably won't notice too much of a change other than the fact that the overall look of it has been ever so slightly cleaned up but the real difference comes from the button that's been added to the bottom left of the screen which allows you to choose between a number of different modes you can have a scientific calculator and a programmer mode I'll admit that I'm nowhere near mathematically inclined enough to make use of these but if you're someone that would find this kind of functionality useful it is great that you now have this available on your Mac math notes is a major New Edition on the iPad and that makes sense because over on the iPad you can use the apple pencil to really make the most of the math notes function something that you can't really do here on the Mac interestingly on the iPad there is a dedicated math notes app whereas here on the Mac the notes get integrated directly into the the regular noap instead the other feature that seems to have been added here on the Mac is a convert option which is pretty useful it's probably a little bit more long-winded than using Spotlight search which is the way that I typically tend to convert stuff on the Mac but if you wanted to go into a wide range of different conversions maybe pick out something that's a bit more obscure you can see that you have lots of options here at the top to choose from I'm guessing that AI will benefit greatly from this later this year the notes app has seen updates across all of the main Apple operating systems this year but as someone who mainly uses notes Here on the Mac this is the place where I'm most excited about the changes I appreciate the fact that apple have added a couple more text formatting features like the ability to highlight text it'll certainly make formatting notes that little bit easier they've also added collapsible sections which is where so long as you include content directly underneath the section header the notes app will automatically create a collapsible version of that header so if you're working on a particularly long note which is something that I tend to avoid on notes because of the formatting issues this will make it much easier moving forward my only complaint here is that you can't grab those section headers and treat them like chapters and move them about like you can in an app like craft for example that would be a really welcome addition here the other feature that I think is going to be great here is live audio transcription which is where you hit the little waveform button in a note and you can then just begin talking or recording a lecture or a meeting or whatever else it might be and your Mac will automatically transcribe the content as you're going along one issue that I found with the developer beta at the moment is that although the transcribing does seem to work really well I can't find a way to expand the transcription out into a full view like they show you in the preview website so I know the feature exists it's just possible that again there might be a bit of a glitch in the current developer beta also just something that I noticed if you're using this in quicknotes it doesn't seem to work but if you use this in the regular notes it does the big change in calendar and reminders that I'm really pleased about is the welcome integration of calendar and reminders so now when you're working in the calendar app if you go to create an event like you normally would you'll see that you also have the option of creating it as a reminder instead you would create the reminder as normal the reminder will then show in your calendar so if you know that you've got to complete something at a certain time this is going to make planning your day so much easier not to mention the fact that you can also complete a task directly from the calendar this works in Reverse as well you can create reminders in the REM finders app and provided you include a completion date and time it will show in your calendar at the corresponding date and time by the way if you're enjoying the content here why not consider signing up for my free newsletter the proper weekly I discuss Tech news from the week share links to content that I've been enjoying as well as a tip for an item in the Apple ecosystem the newsletter goes out each Friday it's completely free and you can sign up via the link in the description of this video or by scanning the QR code that you can see on screen Safari highlights is another one of those features that I've really struggled to get to work on my Mac so if you're in the UK and you're running the developer beta of Mac OS Sequoia and you've got this working drop me a comment and let me know where you managed to get this working and what you did but the principle here is that if you're using Safari on relevant websites Safari can extract certain information like phone numbers physical addresses links to music albums links to movies and then quickly present links to those in the address bar up at the top of your screen as a highlight so the example that used in the keynote would be a hotel website where you might be struggling to find the hotel's phone number on the website you'd simply press the button at the top of the page and it would give you a snapshot of information in apple branded formatting that gives you things like the address that you can then open in maps or use a directions button to get directions to and the phone number that you can hit the call button and immediately place a call in the example with music it would identify an artist or an album and provide you with an apple music link to that particular media the same with movies and TV shows it will show you an immediate link to get you access to it through Apple TV this is a really useful feature and it's something that I could imagine I'll use quite frequently especially as some websites can be an absolute nightmare to navigate it's also an absolute genius power play by Apple because what they're doing here is essentially creating hundreds if not thousands of opportunities to keep you locked into the Apple ecosystem if you see an album that you want to listen to it's entirely possible that you might grab your phone and open Spotify but if you follow the L here and use Safari highlights you'll be taken through to Apple music if you want to get directions to a place that you've just found on the web you might make a mental note of the address and then open Google Maps and type it in there again this stops you from doing that it keeps you locked into the Apple ecosystem I'm including gaming in this list because even though I'm not much of a gamer these days I dabble with my PS5 every now and then and I've got a Nintendo switch that I take with me if we go on trips I do enjoy playing games when I get the rare opportunity and the fact that the max is getting even better at running games these days is something that I'm really pleased about the fact is if I'm going anywhere I'm likely to grab my MacBook Pro and my iPhone and take nothing else so the idea of being able to maybe pack a Bluetooth games controller and my airpods and if I get a free moment be able to jump into a game like Assassin's Creed Shadows or Resident Evil or control is really appealing to me especially because thanks to the latest Apple silicon these games look as though they're going to run at really incredible rates the list of available games is still a little bit lacking and I'd like to see more of the real AAA titles that are being released on PC getting released at the same time over here on the Mac but it does feel like we're starting to move in that direction so this is definitely something I'm looking forward to seeing improve not just this year but in the coming years as well so there you go in a somewhat sparse update year for the Mac those are the features that I'm most looking forward to coming to the Mac later this year what about you anything you're really pleased about anything you're disappointed has been left out drop me a comment and let me know and as ever if you found this video useful do please consider leaving me a like and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future see you on the next video

Channel: Proper Honest Tech

Views: 61,072

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Id: ovA3JUKqFew

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2024