macOS Sonoma on the OLDEST Mac Supported!

if you go back to right after I watched dub dub 2023 Mac oestinoma was by far the most exciting thing for me I was so excited for all of the continuity camera changes the screen capturing software I could not wait to try it out but unfortunately I've made a vow to myself to never put a beta on my main editing rig again because of some horror stories that happened way back in 2018 where basically my Mac was bricked and I couldn't get any work done on it so that leaves us with the iMac Pro from 2017 it'll be turning six years old in a couple months and it's still capable of running a Mac OS Sonoma and while I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen and heard of all of the new and great changes I thought it might be fun to talk about what updates are coming to six-year-old Intel based Max now that it's been a couple months that the betas have been out and available and basically all of my favorite features that are coming with it let's begin so yes unfortunately the things I was most excited for with Mac OS Sonoma were exclusive to Apple silicon primarily a lot of that screen capturing software and you know masking out the subject and overlaying them and all that requires a certain amount of neural engines which the iMac Pro is not rocking even though I've done export tests and stuff where the iMac Pro was able to beat out the M1 chip it doesn't matter because it doesn't have the neural cores those things are paying off a heck of a lot more than I was honestly anticipating but there's still some pretty great and fairly noticeable upgrades that they've brought to a six-year-old Mac like this including the first one which I'm sure a lot of you guys can tell right off the bat the screensaver definitely not super functional or practical but I think it was right of Apple to assume that okay Mac OS it's basically the oldest operating system that we're still working on and for a lot of people running Mac OS their screens are on all the time because they don't have battery power they're just plugged straight into the wall so we should try to make our desktop Max look as gorgeous in his beautiful beautiful as possible by having kind of a default screen saver that is slowly moving and animated kind of like the aerial screensaver on tvos except by putting that little apple character on it and adding the little time and date at the top which just makes it feel a lot more like iOS and iPad OS you get that ecosystem Symmetry and it's an iMac right this is an all about function there is some form arguments to be made for Mac OS and how aesthetically pleasing it is and how clean it looks and this was a great addition not to mention on top of that how seamless and easy it is to just start moving the mouse and boom it jumps straight into your desktop in that screen saver transitions into a wallpaper for your Mac which is just an amazing demo again it doesn't really help you work faster or increase your productivity by any means it just looks freaking awesome and that's super cool I love this feature and I'm so thankful that my iMac Pro is still capable of doing that because my MacBook Pro when I'm not using it is typically closed or sometimes if I'm moving it around it's in a bag so I don't care too much about screen savers on my MacBook but given my iMac Pro is a desktop and it's a stationary device it makes sense to make it look as beautiful as possible and this definitely helps there's also minor tweaks as well like I noticed when installing the software update to Mac OS Sonoma beta it had the progress bar more towards the bottom for some reason I guess that's to help it stay more consistent with the new login screen which hides the little faces at the bottom a lot better it just looks cleaner it's a much more elegant approach to the user interface and I'm sure there's tons of little tweaks like that throughout this whole update but I'm not going to be going into all of them but once you finally get straight into that desktop the first big change is of course widgets are now on Mac OS and you can just drag them right on to your desktop and of course you got a heck of a lot more screen real estate on your Mac desktop than you do on an iPhone so you can just load this thing up with as many large widgets as you want and yes it is quite hilarious how the icons on your desktop will all move accordingly it's not even jiggle mode anymore we're just talking straight up dance party mode where all of these icons will flash all over the screen to get out of the way for the your One widget the widgets come first for Mac OS they will always take priority but yeah they're essentially the exact same widgets that you'd find on iPad Os or iOS which unfortunately means in my opinion they're not all that functional yes there are some interactive widgets now but I think the bigger problem I'm experiencing with widgets on Mac OS is I I guess I'm just kind of a cluttered guy when it comes to my apps and my windows so most of the time even when I'm done working on my Mac and I close the MacBook or I put this one to sleep I tend to just kind of leave all those apps running so I realized as beautiful as all this is I rarely just see my bare blank desktop you know like all of those widgets are basically constantly covered by all of the windows and apps that I'm using so putting something that's interactive in a place that's meant to be a navigational menu which is really what the desktop is for here's all your folders here's all your files I don't know I haven't found them particularly helpful unfortunately but it's cool to have it as an option that's one of the things I appreciate so much about Mac OS compared to iPad OS is that Mac OS basically has like 510 different ways for you to do everything and whichever one fits your needs best you can use that one whether you want to use apps from the Mac App Store or bring in apps from iOS or iPad OS you can just load those on there or you can download them straight from the web bypass the whole App Store entirely and you've got file management systems as well as terminal commands so the beauty of Mac OS I think is being very intuitive and user friendly while also having a crap ton of customization options I'm not inherently against customization I think that there's a good way to have lots of options for those who want it while simultaneously being user friendly and clean and aesthetically pleasing and that's what Mac OS is like thriving on that's what they're really really great at so the widgets similar to Stage manager are just not that useful to me but I hope they can be useful to you what has been far more useful to me that may not seem like a big deal for a lot of you guys is the ability to turn websites into shortcuts directly on your dock there's a Twitter for Mac app that is still technically available and it kind of works but every single month that Elon changes something on X there's more and more things that don't work for Twitter for Mac so I knew that it's time inherently was going to be limited so thankfully now that I have Mac OS Sonoma I can turn the websitex.com into a little shortcut into my Dock and treat that as its own separate app and for the most part it works fairly well like I really appreciate it because I've always felt like Twitter runs better in kind of a portrait mode you know smartphone style user interface but when I had to access Twitter through my web browser I have to switch between all these tabs and I've usually got YouTube videos going or I've got Apple's website up or I've got spreaker up you know I've got so many different websites that I have to log into and manage and having Twitter in between all of those gets a little bit old so rather than just having to drag out more windows all the time now I can just have a dedicated shortcut straight on the dock it fits the icon it appears for the most part like it's basically just an X for Mac app and it basically works the only limitation I've run into is sometimes when I want to add an emoji to a tweet or something it usually takes a few seconds for it to finally queue up I'm not sure if that's a bug or an inherent limitation of turning a website into a fake little shortcut app like Mac OS does but it's been incredibly helpful for me to have a whole separate icon and be able to jump to it like it's a different application in the dock and while of course they didn't bring a lot of my favorite changes to continuity camera in this update there was still surprisingly some changes they brought even to the iMac Pro from 2017 which includes a different section for all of those continuity camera features so it's no longer embedded into control center which makes a ton of sense because there was a lot of different customizations and they were kind of buried within menus so now you get this whole separate little menu bar that opens up and they give you a few more controls than you did before like you can adjust the blurriness of the port mode effect and bizarrely enough they actually let you use Center Stage without the ultra wide lens that didn't sound that important to me until I realized that if you're kind of far away from the iPhone camera but you still want Center Stage to work the main lens actually does a much better job even for me with my iPhone 11 which is like a four-year-old iPhone now the main sensor is just inherently way more sharp more Zoomed In which is good if you're trying to zoom in on something via Center Stage that's a bit further away so I'm glad that they give you the option to use center stage on both lenses now whichever one is more convenient for you and I know from experience anytime I activate center stage on continuity camera everybody in the live stream tends to go ew that one looks so much more grainy it looks so much more pixelated because it used to force you to use the ultra wide lens so I guess now you don't have to but the one downside I have to admit is they still don't give you the option at least on the iMac Pro I don't know if this is different for Apple silicon Max but I would like the option to just access the ultrawide lens as your webcam without Center Stage turned on that was a complaint I had last year of like you know the ultrawide lens isn't really that bad it's just when you activate Center Stage IT forces itself to crop in and when you're cropping in on this inferior sensor you're gonna notice a lot more of that softness a lot more of that noise which is definitely a bit of a bummer but I feel like if they let you access that lens without Center Stage turned on you wouldn't notice as much noise and you would just have kind of a cool super wide angle webcam which I think some people would appreciate a lot of live streamers or people doing meetings and they have things to show the camera and they want to get things really close to the camera activate macro mode and that kind of thing which you can kind of do with Center Stage turned on but it's not always that great at keeping people centered so I can tell because they added so many screen sharing options now that that's probably where all that's going to be buried at once hopefully next month I'm able to add Mac OS Sonoma to my MacBook Pro that's got Apple silicon and of course that's gonna have access to all of the features they talked about so I can't wait to try all of those things out for for you live once that becomes available but for now I'm still just testing Sonoma beta on my iMac Pro because I don't really care if this thing gets bricked it's basically just a glorified TV but I will admit now that it's got a lot of exclusive features that my MacBook Pro doesn't get yet it's made me really appreciate it more I was like okay other than the fact that this has an Intel processor this thing has got great i o on the back it has an amazing sound system and I can still connect my iPhone to it and use it as a webcam for live streaming and stuff so this is just like a beautiful canvas of like a basic at-home computer which is I guess how it should be living its retired life now that it's no longer my main editing rig it can still do video editing pretty decently but it just can't keep up with the amazing performance of my M1 Max chip in the MacBook Pro and of course I've been traveling a lot over the past three months which is why I haven't been able to use this thing at all or try out Mac OS Sonoma with that much depth but now that I'm back I've got it on the latest beta and I'm trying out all the features and I will admit I'm very tempted to put it on my MacBook Pro because this has been very stable at least in the past few days I've been messing with it absolutely no bugs like universal control is still working flawlessly the widgets are working great the web apps are working fine continuity camera stuff was working surprisingly well I think the only thing I might suggest is that you know this screensaver is on a loop and it kind of just jump cuts to the beginning when it's done I feel like it could more graciously cross dissolve but that might just be a feature request than a bug that needs to be patched and at the end of the day I'm just so grateful that my iMac Pro from 2017 which could potentially be on its last software update there's a very real chance that when Mac OS Mammoth or whatever comes out next year when all that drops it might not be compatible with the iMac Pro anymore you know Mac OS Sonoma was already killing support for a decent number of Max but that's okay because this has been a pretty awesome update I know there's more to it there's a bunch of iMessage sticker features that I didn't get to try out but I'm not much of a iMessage sticker guy anyway but how I often rate whether or not an update is substantial and no Worthy is you know can you tell if a Mac is running the latest version of Mac OS just by looking you know like how long do you have to use the Mac before you realize it's on a newer version and this one is practically instant you know you can just look at it once see the time and the date and the moving screensaver and be like yep okay that is definitely on Mac OS Sonoma even if it's not a lot of practical productivity focused updates it's still ones that I appreciate especially as Mac's age and become more of a just General Media consumption device this is just being great at being a big screen what are your guys's favorite features in Mac OS Sonoma feel free to let me know down in the comments below and thank you to everybody supporting this channel directly seriously helps us out a ton as does just watching these videos so thanks again this is Rob sleep here and I will see you all in the next one [Music]

Channel: Tailosive Tech

Views: 28,056

Keywords: Tailosive, Tech, Technology, mac, macOS, macOS Sonoma, macOS Sonoma Beta, iMac, iMac Pro, Older Mac, 6 Year Old Mac, 2017 iMac Pro in 2023, Living with iMac Pro in 2023, iMac Pro Review, iMac Pro 6 Years Later, 2017 iMac

Id: Yq2K4fcF0BQ

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023