macOS Sequoia: The MacStories Overview

At its WWDC 2024 keynote held earlier today, Apple officially announced the next version of macOS, macOS Sequoia. As per its naming tradition over the past decade, this new release is once again named after a location in California; the version number for macOS Sequoia will be macOS 15.

Apart from the substantial Apple Intelligence features that were announced today for all of its main platforms, Apple introduced some welcome improvements to its desktop operating system. The new features include enhancements across multiple native apps, an impressive new iPhone mirroring integration, and even some overdue window management features for the Mac.

Here’s a recap of everything that Apple showed off today for macOS Sequoia.

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iPhone Mirroring

This one was both unexpected and impressive. macOS Sequoia will let you mirror your iPhone running iOS 18 directly on the Mac desktop – a feature reminiscent of the great app Bezel that we previously covered on MacStories. When iPhone Mirroring is launched, your iPhone will appear in its own window that can be minimized and moved around like any other on macOS. But iPhone Mirroring doesn’t stop at mirroring. Apple has also announced that you will be able to interact with your iPhone using your mouse, trackpad, and keyboard to enter text in any field. According to the company, the iPhone’s audio will also come through to the Mac, and you will also be able to drag files between Mac and iPhone apps.

In addition to mirroring the iPhone’s display and interacting with iPhone apps from the Mac, iPhone notifications will also be forwarded to the Mac’s Notification Center, and will carry a special badge indicating that they’re coming from an iPhone app. Clicking these iPhone notifications will directly open the corresponding apps on the Mac in iPhone Mirroring mode.

While the iPhone is being mirrored to a Mac, it will remain locked, and StandBy mode will remain active if that was the case.

iPhone Mirroring in macOS Sequoia. Source: Apple.

iPhone Mirroring is joining the ever-growing Continuity family of features on the Mac that also include Universal Clipboard, Sidecar, and more recently, Universal Control.

Window Tiling

I never thought this day would come, but here we are: macOS Sequoia is finally getting the ability to tile windows side by side. Today, Apple announced that you’ll be able to drag windows to the edges of the display to tile them on either half of the screen, or to any of the four corners to have them fill a quarter of the screen. Obviously, this is something that Windows has been able to do for a long time, but I can only be glad that it’s finally coming to the Mac.

Apple says that window tiling will also be accomplished with keyboard and menu shortcuts, but it remains unclear at the moment how advanced those will be, and whether they’ll be customizable or not.

Source: Apple.

New Passwords app

In macOS Sequoia, Apple’s native passwords manager will move out of System Settings and Safari and into a standalone app aptly named Passwords. However, this new app will not be limited to storing passwords and Passkeys. Just like its competitors, it will also let you store Wi-Fi passwords, and other security codes. It’s unclear if users will be able to store secure notes in the app as well.

In addition to macOS, the app will be released as part of iOS and iPadOS 18, and will ship on Windows as well.

The Passwords app, with dedicated sections for Passkeys, security codes, and Wi-Fi passwords. Source: Apple.

Updates to Safari

The Mac’s default web browser is getting a new intelligence feature called Highlights, a new button in the app’s address bar that will automatically detect and highlight information as you browse the web. According to material provided by Apple, this seems to include a variety of data points, ranging from locations and directions, to Apple Music and Apple TV links, and information about people mentioned on the page.

Safari in macOS Sequoia is also getting a redesigned Reader view, which will feature a table of contents on the side, as well as a summary of the page.

Lastly, ‘Viewer’ is a new feature in Safari that will detect videos on a webpage and let you obscure the rest of the page to focus on the player. Apple mentions that, in this mode, users will be able to access full system controls for video playback, and that videos will automatically enter Picture in Picture when clicking away from Safari.

Highlights in Safari’s address bar. Source: Apple.

Redesigned Reader in Safari. Source: Apple.

Video Conferencing

Apple unveiled two new system-wide features for video conferencing in macOS Sequoia.

A new ‘presenter preview’ will display a live preview available from the menu bar to let you know what is about to be shared when starting screen sharing in apps like Zoom.

Still directly from the menu bar, you’ll be able to set a custom background image to use with your camera.

Just like last year’s Live Reactions, we expect the custom background image feature to be supported at the system level, and as such, that it will be available in any third-party app utilizing your camera.

Custom background images in macOS Sequoia. Source: Apple.

Game Porting Toolkit 2

Today, Apple announced version 2 of the Game Porting Toolkit, which is Apple’s software translation layer that can help game developers easily port their Windows games to the Mac. The Game Porting Toolkit 2 is said to feature improved compatibility with Windows games and an easier process for developers to port games to iOS and iPadOS as well.

Apple Intelligence and Everything Else

Apple Intelligence features in macOS Sequoia will include writing tools across the system. Source: Apple.

macOS Sequoia is also getting numerous new features in Apple’s built-in apps:

Messages is getting new text effects, redesigned Tapbacks and emoji Tapbacks, and the ability to schedule a message to send later.

Apple Maps is adding support for hiking routes.

Photos on macOS is getting Collections, the new feature released as part of the app’s redesign on iOS and iPadOS 18, which organizes photos by themes, locations, events, and trips.

Reminders are now integrated in the Calendar app.

Just like in iOS and iPadOS 18, Apple Intelligence will be sprinkled throughout macOS Sequoia, starting with a redesigned interface for Siri. During today’s keynote, Apple most notably demoed their new system-wide writing tools that rely on AI to perform operations on text. According to what we’ve seen so far, this includes summarization, rewriting prompts, tone correction, proofreading, and more. macOS Sequoia is also getting Apple’s new image generation and editing features in Photos and Messages, as well as audio transcription features in Notes. We’ll have more details in a dedicated overview of all that was announced today in relation to Apple Intelligence.

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