First look: macOS Sequoia Public Beta
macOS Sequoia, out in public beta now and due to be released this fall, is more of a work in progress than most macOS beta versions come July. Not to say that it’s a mess—it’s very much in the tradition of recent macOS releases, which have been fairly solid and lacking in drama—but that its most promoted feature, Apple Intelligence, isn’t ready for public view.
There are numerous other features that I’ve gotten the chance to try, and that anyone can now test drive over the summer if they desire a head start on future features.
Overall, this is a pretty light load of features for this time of year—entirely understandable, given that so many of the features announced in June are works in progress that are likely not to ship until late fall or even next year. Even some features promised for this fall aren’t visible yet. Still, there are some handy features that are already available. Keeping in mind that we’ve probably got more than three months before this operating system ships, here are some of my first impressions of macOS Sequoia.
iPhone mirroring
Every so often, Apple comes out with a new operating system feature that takes me completely by surprise. So it is with iPhone Mirroring, a new app that lets you view and operate your iPhone from the comfort of your Mac.
This is one of Apple’s Continuity features, which means that in order to connect to your iPhone, it needs to be within Bluetooth range of your Mac. Once the connection is established, I’m led to believe that the rest of the conversation between the two devices happens over Wi-Fi. I work about 20 feet away from where I keep my iPhone docked, and I was able to connect and use the iPhone without any problem.
When you’re connected to the iPhone, you see its interface on your Mac’s screen—but the iPhone screen itself remains locked, either at the Lock Screen or in StandBy mode. (If you try to take over an open iPhone, it won’t let you. And when you go back to your iPhone after a sharing session, your iPhone will alert you to the fact that it was being remotely operated, as a precaution.)
When you connect, the Mac’s keyboard and trackpad are interpreted just as you would expect, right down to swipes and scrolling. Requests for authentication can be handled by Touch ID on the Mac. When you move the pointer over the top of the iPhone Mirroring window, a window frame appears, giving you standard Mac window controls (you can minimize the app to the Dock, for instance) as well as two buttons to bring up the App Switcher or go to the Home Screen.
The screen appears flawless, operating at high frame rates and even transmitting audio back to the Mac. I was able to click around and play games as if I were running the apps right on my Mac.
The feature that will make iPhone Mirroring the most useful on the Mac is the ability for notifications from the connected iPhone (which appear in Control Center) to launch their respective iPhone apps when you click on them. I was able to react to push notifications sent from iPhone apps, via those apps, all while staying in the context of my Mac. That’s a big productivity boost, says the guy who works 20 feet away from his iPhone most of the time.
That said, I did encounter some issues. Apple says that the screen will automatically rotate into horizontal orientation when an app requires it, which I found to be true, but there seems to be no way to force a rotation when you’d prefer to use an app horizontally that also works vertically. I also couldn’t seem to bring up Control Center, enter “jiggle mode” to move or remove apps or widgets. And when I was in horizontal orientation, I kind of wished I could make the window bigger—even if all it did was blow up the content from the iPhone.
Apple also says that you’ll eventually be able to drag and drop files from the Mac straight into the iPhone via iPhone Mirroring, but that’s a feature that’s not yet available in the beta.
Put windows in a corner
Over the years, Apple has added numerous ways to organize your windows to macOS, from Spaces to Split View to Stage Manager. In macOS Sequoia, it’s finally offering an approach similar to what Microsoft has offered on Windows for a while now: simple window tiling.
Yes, it’s a feature that’s been implemented by numerous macOS utilities over the years, and those utilities will almost certainly offer users more options and customizability than the basic functionality Apple offers. But most people don’t seek out UI-customization utilities, and adding tiling to macOS will help those people. And as usually happens, Apple’s basic implementation will eventually lead to those users seeking out a third-party app that gives them more control.
In any event, Apple’s tiling is certainly basic. You can drag a window to the top, side, or corner of the screen in order to make it quickly resize and fill that half or quarter of your display. By default, nothing happens until you drag a window and your pointer hits a boundary, at which point you’ll see a ghostly rectangle that indicates where your window will be placed. If you want to see it more quickly, you can hold down Option, which makes the ghostly rectangle appear right away (and if you like what you see, you can release your click and the window will be immediately resized, no boundary needed).
You can click and hold on the green “stoplight” button in the window’s title bar to choose from a few different arrangement options. There are also keyboard shortcuts that let you arrange windows in a hurry. These are bound to an item in the Windows menu called Move & Resize that offers shortcuts for many basic moves. The idea here is that you’ll build up some muscle memory about using keyboard shortcuts to send your windows left, right, up, or down.
(Unfortunately, Apple seems to have bound these commands to the Globe key, and if you don’t use an Apple keyboard you can’t access those shortcuts without third-party add-ons.)
This is all good stuff, though given that most Mac users are using laptops these days, I am not sure how many of them will find tiling to be the solution to their problems. Users with Macs attached to larger displays, however, may find it quite refreshing. I did find the dragging to corners to be a little finicky—sometimes I felt like I really need to wiggle my windows to get the tile preview to appear, especially in the corners. Hopefully that’ll be tweaked as a part of the beta process.
Videoconference boosts
One of the areas of macOS that’s seen the most improvement in recent years is how the system processes video input. Rather than passing through webcam video directly to apps like Zoom and FaceTime, that video is processed by macOS, using a lot of the same techniques Apple uses to process video and still images on the iPhone.
In 2021, the Mac got support for Portrait Mode. In 2022 it was Continuity Camera, which threw iPhone-quality optics into the mix. And last year, macOS Sonoma brought a slew of layered animated effects, reaction, and presentation overlays.
This year, Apple’s added background replacement to the mix. This is a feature that you’ve seen in a million different apps, in which your background can be replaced entirely with a different image. (I use this when I’m playing D&D—for atmosphere!—or when I’m traveling and want it to look like I’m still in my home studio.)
In a way, Apple’s late to the game with this feature, but its presence means that you can replace your background in any app, not just ones with their own replacement feature. And you may well find that you’ll prefer to turn off the app’s background feature and use Apple’s instead. Apple is clearly using its very good machine-learning-based subject detection algorithm to separate you from your background.
It’s the same technique it uses for portrait mode and its clever cut-out presenter overlay feature, but background replacement does expose the flaws of this technique better than just about any other feature. Apple’s implementation is great, better than I’ve seen in any videoconferencing app, especially in good lighting. Apple supplies some background images and color gradients, but you can also add in your own.
Safari additions
Apple has expanded Safari’s Reader feature to be a lot more than just reader. When a page has more information to offer, the new Highlights icon appears at the left side of the Smart Bar, where the Reader icon has lived up to now. (To use Reader, you now need to click on Highlights and then click again on the prominent blue Show Reader button.)
Apple says the Highlights pane will be populated with useful information gleaned from the page and site you’re on, such as a summary of an article, the location of restaurants and other businesses, and even links to movies, TV shows, and music when you’re browsing relevant articles. This all is supposedly powered by Apple’s own search engine, the same tool that has powered Spotlight searches for a while now. Unfortunately, the feature seems to not be functional yet, so I have no opinions about the utility of that information.
Likewise, Reader has been updated to add a sidebar featuring a table of contents and summary. This is also a feature that’s not currently functioning, but it’s one of those areas where I am dubious about the utility of applying AI functionality. If I’m choosing to use Reader on an article, do I need a summary? Is Reader for readers, or people who don’t want to read? Is the summary in the Highlights pane not enough?
Fortunately, there is one Safari feature that I was able to try: Viewer. This is the video equivalent of Reader. Viewer identifies embedded video on a page and displays a Viewer icon in the Smart Bar that lets you expand the video to fill the entire Safari window. It’s meant as an antidote to sites that embed video but surround it with garbage and don’t let you expand the video yourself.
It’s a nice idea, and when it worked for me, I could see its appeal. It dropped out everything else on the page, provided standard macOS video controls, and even offered a quick built-in way to send the video into picture in picture mode! Unfortunately, it worked quite inconsistently. But it’s beta season. I hope it’s more consistent in the future.
Passwords becomes an app
After several years of building a full-featured password manager inside the Settings app (not to mention the separate repository of information in the Keychain Access utility), Apple has gone all-in on building a free-standing Passwords app, and it runs nut just on the Mac, but on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. (You also have access to passwords on Windows via the iCloud app. It feels like one platform is missing here, somehow.)
So, the good news: the Passwords app puts Apple’s password management front and center in a way that it never was going to be when it was locked inside Settings. It’s got a nice, modern interface—think Reminders, but for passwords—and shows not just standard web logins but things like Wi-Fi passwords and rotating time-based codes and Passkeys. And since Apple lets you share passwords with other people—you can create a seemingly unlimited number of arbitrary groups and then move passwords into those groups—it’s really a full-featured option that will suffice for many users.
The Passwords app is missing some features that you might expect from using other password apps, though in most cases it’s because Apple offers a different approach to solving the same problem. Password doesn’t offer secure notes, because that’s what Notes is for. It doesn’t save credit cards, because that’s what the Wallet settings panel does. I also use 1Password to save all sorts of other information—passport numbers, software serial numbers, even SSH keys—in a sort of digital junk drawer. Should Passwords do all those things? Probably not, but I do think that there probably should be an answer for more disordered important information that’s not just “put it in a Secure Note.”
While the Passwords app existing is a very good thing, based on this first beta it’s got some work to do to become a good app. I can’t drag an item out of the list and drop it on a Shared Group to assign it to that group, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for a Mac app to allow. And when I imported my 1Password file—a couple thousand passwords that, I admit, could stand to be pruned back—the app slowed to a crawl. Deleting items would sometimes just not stick, search results appeared and disappeared, and even small tasks like deleting a few selected items generated a beach ball pointer. I sure hope these are beta growing pains, because if this performance persists to the fall, the Passwords app runs the risk being branded a dog. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one all summer and hoping for some serious improvement.
Messages finally gets me
Across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, Apple is upgrading Messages to let people express themselves better. That’s a good impulse, and after a false start last year (in which Apple attempted to catch up with literally every other messaging service by misguidedly repurposing its sticker functionality), the company has really delivered.
Yes, in addition to slapping a fresh coat of (color!) paint on the classic set of Tapbacks icons, Apple has finally introduced proper support for any emoji to be used as a reaction to an iMessage. When you tap back (or control-click/two-finger-click on Mac) to a message, you now get two lines of reaction options: the first contains the more colorful classics, and the second features the emojis you’ve most recently used to react. You can, of course, use the emoji picker to find the right one.
(When you react, people with older versions of Apple’s operating systems will see a new message that says something like reacted 🚡 to “HAHA”. Inelegant, but it maintains backward compatibility.)
There’s also support for per-character text formatting, so you can finally use bold and italic in messages, as well as apply animation effects to individual words instead of the entire message. Giving people a broader palette to use to express themselves is always a good choice.
There’s also one more pragmatic new feature: Send Later. You can now tell Messages to send a message at a later time. Last night I remembered, just before going to bed, that I wanted to send a few pictures of a new addition to the family to my mom. It was way past her bedtime and I didn’t want I disturb her. With the new Messages, I could’ve set that message to send in the morning when she was certain to be awake.
This appears to be a server-side feature; Apple says that if your device isn’t connected at the moment when the message is set to send, it’ll still send. Another good choice. After years of Apple seeming to take Messages and iMessage for granted, these are all welcome updates.
More new features
But that’s not all! There are even more features on the way this season:
Apple Maps has added trail navigation and topographic maps, across Apple’s major platforms. I was disappointed to discover that a trail near my house that’s been closed for five years still shows up in Apple’s maps. What sources is it using? Still, letting hikers plan out their hikes and navigate on trails is a great upgrade.
Notes now will let you record audio and generate a transcript of the recording, which you can display in a column alongside your notes. I feel like there’s more to be done here in terms of taking notes during a lecture or meeting and linking the comments to the transcript, but it’s a start. You can also now do math inside a note automatically, just by typing an equation followed by the equals sign.
Photos has changed dramatically on the iPhone and iPad, which is notable because it hasn’t changed at all on the Mac. There’s a new Collections section in the sidebar, which helps surface some new automatic groupings of photos. But after several years in which Apple aggressively merged the Mac and iOS Photos apps so that they were pretty close to equivalent, this year’s interface changes are entirely on iOS.
Depending on how you feel about the new Photos app interface—and it’s definitely got some issues—it might be a blessing that Apple has passed over the Mac. Also, at last, Apple’s building a proper tool for removing background clutter for images! Third-party apps have been able to perform these kinds of tasks for years, but Apple has chosen to roll that feature into Apple Intelligence (which bars older Macs). What a frustrating turn of events.
Desktop and Screensavers get an injection of fun with the new Macintosh screen saver and wallpaper settings, which generates dynamic, colorful artwork based on classic bitmap graphics images from old Macs. The results are gorgeous. The other day, my desktop wallpaper featured the classic System Error bomb icon and a bright green background. Chef’s kiss.
Security prompts appear to have been ramped up a bit, much to my chagrin. When I tried to launch an app that wasn’t notarized by Apple, I was unable to force it to open by right-clicking and then choosing Open, which was the old standby. Instead, I had to open the Settings app, go to the Security pane, and click through a warning dialog that the app in question was “blocked to protect your Mac.” Once I clicked Open Anyway, I could open the app—but even then, I was forced to put up with another alert, and then forced (as an administrator with full privileges!) to enter my password before the app would launch.
It turns out that the second app I tried this with didn’t require a visit to the Settings app, so that’s something. But I still had to click through a scary dialog box and then authenticate on first launch of an non-notarized app. I appreciate Apple’s attempts to get in the way of social engineering designed to convince hapless users to install malware, but my Mac belongs to me and if I want to run software not approved by Apple, that’s my business. Throwing up a warning on first launch is reasonable. Asking users with full privileges to authenticate on top of that is unreasonable. Is there anyone at Apple who cares enough about user experience to stop warning dialogs and authentication requests from running rampant? If so, they should speak up.
AI, eventually, maybe
Theoretically, Apple Intelligence is coming to macOS starting this fall, and then rolling out throughout the next year. None of those features appear in the betas I used, though—it sounds like a late summer/early fall thing, if that. Improved Siri and some new AI-powered writing tools as well as the new Image Playgrounds image-generation tools are all on the agenda, at some point. There’s no way to tell what sort of state they’ll be in when they ship, so I’ll withhold all judgment until then. Other than to say that if the new Photos Clean Up feature and AI-driven Memory Movies aren’t on the Mac for some reason, I’m going to riot.
Beta advice
The usual advice applies: Don’t install macOS Public Betas on Macs you absolutely rely on to get your work done. If you do want to take the plunge, make sure mission-critical apps are compatible. Keep a backup. Consider installing on an external drive instead of your main boot drive. These are all smart strategies.
Thus far, I’ve found the Sequoia beta to be pretty stable. It even works with some of my mission-critical software that previously proved resistant to beta testing, which is exciting. Still, I’ve been using it on a laptop that’s not my main computer—and I don’t regret that one bit. Be wary, be prepared, and have fun out there, kids.
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