macOS Sequoia: The MacStories Review

Sequoia is unlike any major macOS update in recent memory. Annual OS releases usually tell two stories. The first is the tale of that release, which consists of a combination of design, system, and built-in app changes that add to the existing Mac experience. The second story plays out over time, taking multiple years to unfold and reveal itself. The best macOS releases are those that strike a balance between the two.

Often, a macOS update’s multi-year story revolves around new developer technologies that signal a change in direction for the entire platform. Swift and Catalyst were like that. Neither had an immediate impact on the day-to-day experience of using a Mac. However, even though the final destination wasn’t entirely clear at first, the corresponding macOS releases included concrete first steps that provided a sense of where the Mac was heading.

It’s possible to look at macOS Sequoia and see something similar, but the resemblance is only skin deep. This year’s release includes meaningful updates to system apps and even a brand new one, Passwords. Plus, Apple Intelligence promises long-term, fundamental changes to how people use their Macs and will likely take years to fully realize.

But Sequoia feels fundamentally different from Swift, Catalyst, and other past releases. It’s light on new features, the design changes are few and far between, and Apple Intelligence isn’t part of macOS 15.0 at all – although more features are on the way and are currently part of the macOS 15.1 developer beta. So what sets Sequoia apart isn’t so much what you can do with it out of the box; what’s unique about this release is that you could install it and not even notice the changes.

A half loaf may be better than none, but Apple has taught us to expect more, which makes Sequoia vaguely unsatisfying and out of balance compared to other releases.

That’s not to say that Sequoia is a bad update. There’s more to like than not, with excellent additions like iPhone Mirroring, window tiling, the new Passwords app, and Safari’s video viewer. The trouble is that the list of changes, good or bad, falls off steeply after that. A half loaf may be better than none, but Apple has taught us to expect more, which makes Sequoia vaguely unsatisfying and out of balance compared to other releases.

It’s clear is that Apple is placing a big bet that artificial intelligence will pay off for macOS the same way magic beans did for Jack and his mother. The question heading into macOS 15.1 and beyond is whether Apple’s beans are magical too. Perhaps they are, but based on what I’ve seen of macOS 15.1, I’m not feeling the magic yet. I’ll reserve judgement and revisit Apple Intelligence as it’s incrementally rolled out in the coming months. For now, though, let’s consider macOS Sequoia 15.0’s morsels that readers can actually dig into today.

Exclusive Extras & Support MacStories

eBook, Wallpapers, and Illustrated macOS Screen Saver

We’re taking a different approach with paid extras for this year’s OS reviews. First of all, we’ve created a special eBook version of my Sequoia review for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

That eBook is joined by eBook versions of the watchOS 11 and visionOS 2 reviews for Club MacStories Plus and Premier members and the eBook version of Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 18 review, which is available to all Club MacStories members.

But there’s even more, so we’ve teamed up with our friend Chris Lawley who created a trailer that describes everything you can unlock:

So, to sum up:

You can unlock the eBook version of this review, all of our other reviews, the wallpapers, and macOS screen saver by joining Club MacStories Plus or Club Premier using the buttons below:

Join Club MacStories+:

Join Annual$100/year Join Monthly$10/month

Join Club Premier:

Join Annual$120/year Join Monthly$12/month

Scout’s illustrations are gorgeous, and they make for some amazing wallpapers. The screen saver is remarkable, too: since the illustrations were hand-drawn in Procreate (which automatically generates a time-lapse of the entire process), we were able to create a screen saver (developed by James Thomson) that makes the artwork come alive on your Mac’s display.

The macOS screen saver.

Or, if all you want is the eBook of Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 18 review, you can simply join Club MacStories with a $5/month or $50/year Club MacStories plan using the buttons below:

Join Annual$50/year Join Monthly$5/month

Now more than ever, an indie publication such as MacStories depends on income from members who want to directly support what we do. As always, though, we aim to provide as much value as we can in return. If you want to support MacStories and our ongoing efforts to team up with creatives such as Scout and James, I hope you’ll consider signing up for a Club membership and unlock all the extra perks we’ve prepared this year.

For more details on all the extras, membership plans, and release schedule of other digital downloads, you can refer to our standalone article here.

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iPhone Mirroring and Notifications

iPhone Mirroring

Apple has methodically expanded the interoperability of its devices under the umbrella of Continuity since macOS Yosemite, and this year is no different; the trend continues. With Sequoia, you can now mirror your iPhone to your Mac’s display and interact with your iPhone apps and notifications. It’s easily the best feature of macOS 15.0, but it takes a while for it to take hold.

When Apple added widgets to the Mac’s desktop, it included the ability to display widgets from a nearby iPhone. I have to imagine that was a testbed for iPhone Mirroring. And, as much as I’ve enjoyed having my iPhone’s widgets available on my Mac’s desktop, iPhone Mirroring and notifications are a much bigger leap forward in utility.

iPhone Mirroring is added to your Mac’s Dock by default.

After you update to Sequoia, you’ll see a new icon in your Dock for the iPhone Mirroring app. Open it and click through the onboarding explanation of the feature, and your iPhone will appear in a window on your Mac, much like the iPhone simulator does for developers running Xcode. For the feature to work, your iPhone must be within Bluetooth range and connected to the same Wi-Fi network and Apple Account as your Mac, which must either be an Apple silicon model or an Intel-based Mac with a T2 Security Chip. Mirroring also requires that your Mac not be using AirPlay or Sidecar when the connection is initiated.

The alert displayed on your iPhone while mirroring (left) and after you unlock your phone (right.)

While it’s being mirrored, your iPhone will be locked, so whatever you’re doing with it on your Mac won’t be visible to someone looking at your phone. A notification appears on your iPhone’s Lock Screen indicating which device it is mirrored to. Then, when you unlock your iPhone, a notification will appear from the Dynamic Island announcing that it was used on a Mac. The notification also includes a ‘Settings’ button that takes you to the ‘AirPlay & Continuity’ section of your iPhone’s Settings app where mirroring can be turned off.

iPhone Mirroring’s window has no chrome, nor is the window framed by a hardware image. However, a title bar will appear when you hover over the top of the iPhone’s window, revealing two buttons that take you back to the Home Screen and activate the app switcher, respectively.

Hovering over iPhone Mirroring’s window reveals two buttons.

The iPhone’s window isn’t resizable either, which can make it feel a little small on some displays, depending on your resolution settings. However, having used it on my Mac Studio Display all summer using my display’s default settings, I have no complaints about the window’s size. In addition to your iPhone’s Home Screens, its Today View and App Library are available while mirroring, but Notification Center and Control Center are not.

Landscape games like Zenless Zone Zero automatically switch to landscape mode on the Mac.

Most of the time, iPhone Mirroring will be in portrait mode. If an app or game defaults to landscape orientation or switches to it automatically, the iPhone Mirroring window will switch to landscape. However, there is no way to switch to landscape mode manually to take advantage of optional landscape modes that apps like Mail offer. Also, some apps like video streaming services don’t recognize the iPhone’s mirrored UI as a proper display, so you’ll hear audio if you play copy-protected, streamed video, but there won’t be any image. You also can’t access your iPhone’s camera from your Mac while the device is mirrored. Similarly, mirroring does not work with Continuity Camera, meaning that if you’re using your iPhone for a video call, you won’t be able to access your apps using iPhone Mirroring while you’re on the call.

Navigating apps feels natural and supports Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse gestures, such as two-finger scrolling. My Logitech MX Master 3S for Mac mouse works for clicking and right-clicking in my iPhone’s mirrored UI, but its scroll wheel and other buttons are not supported. The Magic Keyboard’s Touch ID sensor is also available for those times when you’d normally need to enter your iPhone’s passcode.

In addition to the controls at the top of the iPhone Mirroring window, the app has built-in keyboard shortcuts to return to the Home Screen, access the app switcher, and start a Spotlight search query. You can also return to your Home Screen from any app by clicking the bar at the bottom of the window. Clicking and holding with your mouse or trackpad causes your Home Screen to enter ‘jiggle mode,’ allowing you to rearrange your app icons, add widgets, edit Home Screen pages, and customize the look of your Home Screens. However, I’m sorry to report that rearranging your iPhone’s icons is no easier from your Mac than it is on your iPhone.

Also, if you’re a fan of the iPhone’s StandBy Mode, you’re in luck because iPhone Mirroring works even when your iPhone is charging nearby and displaying widgets. And speaking of widgets, if you click on an iOS widget that you’ve added to your Mac’s desktop, it will launch iPhone Mirroring.

iPhone Notifications

Sequoia also introduces iPhone notifications on the Mac, which appear whether you’re using iPhone Mirroring or not and are not range-restricted. The notifications appear in your Mac’s Notification Center just like any other notification, but with a little iPhone icon in the bottom-right corner of the app icon to indicate their origin. I’m glad to see the differentiation between the two sources, but the icons are small and light gray, making it hard to notice them at a glance, so I’d like Apple to try something larger and more high-contrast in the future. Like a Mac notification, you can interact with your mirrored iPhone notifications, reading them and doing things like responding inline when that option is available. Clicking on an iPhone notification will open the associated app using iPhone Mirroring, too.

Examples of iPhone notification actions available from the Mac.

Sequoia has settings for which iPhone notifications show up on your Mac.

Sequoia gives you the ability to manage the notifications your Mac receives from your iPhone with settings to turn iPhone notifications off entirely, enable or disable notification sounds, and turn off notifications for individual apps. In addition, there’s a new ‘X’ button at the bottom of the Mac’s Notification Center that turns into a ‘Clear All’ button when you hover over it and, as the label says, will wipe out any notifications – whether they be from your Mac or iPhone – with a single click. Finally.

At long last, a ‘Clear All’ button for notifications.

When I first started using iPhone Mirroring, I wondered whether it would be of much use to me. As it turns out, I have more iPhone-only apps than I realized. Yes, some – like my bank’s app – can be replicated by visiting a website on my Mac, but others – like the apps for my thermostat, Roomba, and garage door – can’t. Instead of pulling out my iPhone to adjust the temperature, check if my Roomba is stuck under the couch, or see whether my garage door is open, I can quickly check those apps via iPhone Mirroring. It might seem like a small difference compared to grabbing my iPhone, but it’s not as disruptive, which means it’s also less distracting. It took a while, but over the course of the summer, I’ve discovered more and more apps that are useful to access from my Mac. I’ve also found it very useful when writing about iPhone-only apps, which I can now test and glance at as I write.

AirDropping an image from my iPhone to my Mac, using my Mac.

iPhone Mirroring also makes grabbing files and images from my iPhone and sending them to my Mac (or the other direction) via AirDrop easier than ever. That’s something I do a lot, and now it’s far easier because I don’t have to switch between devices. Later this year, Apple says iPhone Mirroring will gain the ability to drag and drop files between your iPhone and Mac, too, but for now, AirDrop is nearly as good a solution.

Dealing with iPhone notifications on my Mac has been a better experience than I expected, too. I manage the apps that can notify me on my iPhone carefully, so adding them to my Mac notifications hasn’t felt overwhelming. On the contrary, it’s allowed me to deal with those notifications in a more quick and timely way without having to switch to my iPhone, which I love. It also means I don’t wind up with a big stack of unread notifications at the end of the day when I stop working on my Mac and grab my iPhone.

Apple’s suite of Continuity features that have been introduced over the years is one of the brightest spots of its OSes. Sidecar, Continuity Camera, Handoff, the Universal Clipboard, and Universal Control are all Continuity features that I use daily and have had a measurable impact on my productivity. Few are features that I would have imagined I needed before they were introduced, but all of them are deeply embedded in my day-to-day workflow now. In the near term, I’d love to see mirroring work with the iPad, but I hope the Continuity team at Apple is also busy dreaming up new ways to make the company’s devices work together even more seamlessly.

Window Tiling

I almost wonder whether Sequoia’s window tiling feature has been sitting in a drawer somewhere inside of Apple Park, waiting to be pulled out in a year like this one when the macOS update was light on features. I mean, why now? Windows has had tiling forever, and there are many third-party window managers for the Mac ranging from simple collections of keyboard shortcuts to complex, full-blown utilities that do all sorts of fancy tricks with windows. That said, I’m glad Apple finally added window tiling, which works whether you use one screen or multiple screens.1 Sequoia’s implementation is simple but likely to satisfy a lot of users’ needs, mine included.

Accessing window tiling from a window’s green button.

Each tiling option includes a keyboard shortcut.

Sequoia’s window tiling options can be accessed in multiple ways, including from the Window menu, the green button in the corner of every window, drag and drop, and keyboard shortcuts. The variety is welcome because it accommodates a range of workflows and makes it easier to incorporate the feature into automations even though windows tiling actions have not been added to the Shortcuts app.

Dragging a window to fill the right half of the screen.

Regardless of how you prefer to access the feature, Sequoia’s window tiling is divided into two categories with four options each. The first category is ‘Move and Resize,’ which allows you to place a window on the left, right, top, or bottom halves of your screen. The second set of options is called ‘Fill and Arrange,’ which includes the following options:

Full Screen for filling all available screen real estate with the active window

2-Up for placing the active and second most recently active windows side by side with each taking up half of the screen

3-Up for placing the active window on the left half of the screen and the two other most recently accessed windows in equally-sized quarters of your screen’s right half

4-Up for distributing the four most recently active windows in equally-sized quadrants

If you have fewer windows than the number necessary for the option you pick, Sequoia will make do with what it has, leaving blank spaces as needed.

Managing window tiling in System Settings.

There are new options in System Settings related to window management, too. In the app’s ‘Desktop & Dock’ tab, you can specify whether your tiled windows touch at their edges, taking up your full screen. Alternatively, you can leave a very narrow gap between windows, which I like the look of a lot. However, judging from reactions I’ve seen online, that handful of pixels around windows is viewed by many as a gross waste of screen space, so it’s a good thing users have an option.

System Settings includes toggles for tiling windows by dragging them to the edges of your screen or Option-dragging them. There’s also a new setting that allows you to double-click the title bar of a window to make it fill the screen. This is something that Windows has done forever by default and one of the few Windows interactions that I’ve always missed despite having left that world years ago. It’s a small touch, but one that I immediately turned on and don’t plan to ever turn off.

Raycast also offers simple window tiling options.

I’ve used Raycast’s window tiling feature for a few years now, and although it’s not as robust as some third-party alternatives, it works well for me because I typically don’t do anything more than maximize a single window or put two side by side. As a result, I’ve found myself continuing to use Raycast’s keyboard-driven tiling implementation, but turning to Sequoia’s new options when my hands are already on my mouse or trackpad.

For people with similarly simple window management needs, I suspect that Sequoia’s new window tiling will be a fantastic addition because it’s built-in and handles the basics very well. For anyone who wants more, apps like the recently-updated Moom (which Niléane reviewed), Lasso, Rectangle, Raycast, and others will continue to be excellent options. I don’t expect Sequoia’s new windows tiling option to have a significant impact on third-party utilities; instead, it will simply be easier for anyone who is new to window tiling to get started and perhaps graduate to a more robust third-party alternative later.

Video Conferencing Enhancements

A FaceTime call using one of my own photos as a background.

Sequoia adds new video conferencing features that will make it easier to participate in calls and share your screen without oversharing.

Background replacement is already a popular feature of a lot of video conferencing apps. For a while, macOS has offered the ability to blur your background to add a modicum of privacy and hide clutter, but with Sequoia, Apple is leveraging its advanced camera processing pipeline to detect the subject of a video feed in real-time and replace the background behind the subject with a built-in scene or one of your own photos.

Another background option is a series of images from Apple Park.

There are two sets of pre-built backgrounds, plus a third set for saving your own photos as backgrounds, all of which you can access from the video menu bar app. The first set includes eight light gradients and a black gradient. The second set includes nine scenes from Apple Park in Cupertino. The photos are nice, but if you don’t work for Apple, would you really use these? I doubt most people would. Finally, you can add your own photos to the mix, which in my experience look good as long as you don’t pick something that’s too distracting.

Regardless of the background you pick, the feature itself works well, fading in when activated with a nice animation and replacing the room you’re sitting in with the photo while managing not to look strange. The background replacement feature even handles my glasses better than the iPhone’s Camera app sometimes does in Portrait mode.

One of the simple gradient backgrounds.

Aside from hiding the dirty laundry in the background of your home office, Apple has improved screen-sharing options to make it easier to limit what you share on video calls. The feature, which Apple calls presenter preview, is triggered when you share your screen, allowing you to choose between sharing a particular app or your whole screen before your audience sees what you’re sharing. If you pick an app, no other open app’s windows or notifications are visible to the people you’re sharing with.

Sharing my entire screen with Federico.

Once sharing is started, you can click on the screen sharing icon in the menu bar to check what you’re sharing with someone, too. Users get the same sort of sharing choices when starting playback of a Keynote presentation (or another app that supports the feature) or, starting later this year, connecting an external display.

Presenter preview in action. Source: Apple.

I don’t participate in many video conferences and rarely share my screen, so I don’t have much to say about presenter preview except that offering ways to hide what you don’t want to share can only be a good thing. In my testing, the feature works well and is easy to use. Plus, it works in any video conferencing app that supports the feature’s APIs, so you can use it in apps like Zoom as well as FaceTime.

System Apps

One of the bright spots of this year’s OS updates across every device is that Apple’s system apps are more in sync with each other than ever before. In the past, it wasn’t unusual for changes made to an app on the iPhone to take a year or more to make their way to the Mac. This year is different.

With very few exceptions, the features added to Mac system apps are the same across iOS and iPadOS 18, too. So instead of covering the same changes twice, Federico and I have divided up system apps between our reviews. You’ll find our coverage of the following apps, which are also available on the Mac, in Federico’s review of iOS and iPadOS 18:

Calculator

Calendar

Home

Messages

Music

Notes

Photos

Reminders

Weather

Likewise, unless otherwise noted, the changes to Safari, Maps, and other system apps discussed below apply to the iOS and iPadOS 18 versions, too.

It’s great to see system apps moving in lockstep in this year’s OS updates, although I would have liked to have seen Shortcuts add personal automations and more system actions. As I argued two years ago:

…if Shortcuts is to become the default way to automate tasks on the Mac, there needs to be steady, yearly progress to make macOS and its default system apps as Shortcuts-friendly as possible.

That hasn’t happened, but perhaps some progress will be made as part of the Apple Intelligence features coming in 2025. For now, though, what I said in my macOS Sonoma review remains true:

At this point, Shortcuts for Mac is beginning to feel a lot like a modern version of Automator – a neglected, dead-end tool that never fulfilled its potential. Perhaps next year will be different, but I’m no longer optimistic it will be.

Still, there are significant updates to Safari and Maps, plus the brand-new Passwords app to cover, so let’s take a look at what you can expect from each.

Safari

There’s probably no system app more important to macOS than Safari. Sure, Finder is necessary to navigate the file system, but I’d wager that few users think of Finder as an app. Safari permeates everyday life for most people in a way that few other apps do, whether it’s planning a trip, researching a topic, reading the news, or working in a web app. As a result, users are sensitive to small changes, making it difficult to update Safari without upsetting somebody. This year, that’s me with one exception.

Video Viewer

Watching Brendon Bigley’s Wavelengths using video viewer puts the video front and center, dimming out the rest of the YouTube page.

For my money, the best new feature is Safari’s new video viewer. The more I use it, the more I miss it when I’m on my laptop, which is still running Sonoma. When you come across a video on a webpage, you can activate the video viewer from the unnamed multi-purpose button in Safari’s address bar, which I am hereby dubbing the ‘Webpage Settings’ button. Once you do so, the video expands to take over most of the window, dimming the rest of the webpage behind a nearly opaque black overlay. Standard playback controls appear at the bottom of the video and fade away as the video plays, reappearing when you hover your pointer over the video. To exit the viewer, just tap the Escape key or return to the address bar and toggle it off with a click. It’s an excellent way to watch videos on the web, but it’s the little touches that make it even better.

My favorite detail about the video viewer is that it automatically enters Picture-in-Picture mode when you change your Mac’s focus to another app or switch Safari tabs. Return to Safari and the original tab, and the video pops back into the webpage. While a video is in PiP mode, you have options to close it, manually pop it back into Safari, or stop playback. However, you lose the ability to skip forward and back five seconds at a time using the arrow keys, which is disappointing.

There’s also a strange detail about video viewer that I don’t understand. If a video is muted, the option to activate the video viewer doesn’t appear when you click the Webpage Settings button. I can’t think of a reason why that is, but figured I’d mention it because the first time I tried to activate video viewer not realizing that the YouTube video’s sound was muted, I was confused at first. Another limitation is that only one video can be in viewer mode at a time.

Switching to another tab or app automatically puts what you’re watching in Safari’s video viewer into Picture-in-Picture mode.

Thanks to NPC: Next Portable Console, I’ve been watching more YouTube reviews of videogame handhelds lately. Safari’s video viewer allows me to start a video and then open a new tab to research whatever is being covered or take notes in another app without having to manage the video at all. Instead, as soon as I open a new Safari tab or move to a text editor, the video I’m watching enters PiP mode. If the video gets to a part I’d like to see in a bigger window, flipping back to Safari reverses the process, returning me to its larger viewer.

The biggest downside I’ve found to watching videos this way is that it obscures YouTube’s descriptions, which often include valuable links. I’d love to have a way of accessing those links in viewer mode so I could open them in a new tab, activating the viewer’s PiP mode. Instead, if I want to access a video’s description and links, I need to exit viewer mode, which adds the sort of friction that the feature is meant to eliminate. That said, I love video viewer and have used it nearly every day this summer because it’s made watching videos meaningfully better.

Web Apps Get Extensions

Apple hasn’t publicized it anywhere that I’ve come across, but the web apps that you can create via Safari for Mac now support browser extensions. Web apps, introduced last year in macOS Sonoma, are another Safari update that I’ve found myself using daily. I have web apps set up for social media accounts and a variety of services we use to run MacStories, and they work great.

However, as first implemented, web apps left behind the growing universe of Safari extensions from third-party developers. That wasn’t an issue with most of the web apps I created, but over the past year, I’ve heard from a lot of readers who have one or two extensions that are closely tied to the work they do in their web apps. With Sequoia, most of your Safari extensions should show up in a line along the right side of a web app’s title bar next to the share icon. I say “most” because one of mine is missing, which I believe is due to the fact that it’s only available outside the Mac App Store. In any event, the extensions work just like they do in Safari itself, and while it may seem like a very small change, it will make a big difference for a lot of users who rely on web apps.

Highlights

Highlights works best with large hotel chains.

The feature Apple spent the most time talking about at WWDC is Highlights, a new US-only feature that spotlights important content from a webpage. Apple seems to be tackling two different problems with Highlights: the first is finding important information on a busy webpage, and the second is summarizing articles, which I’ll cover below in the context of Safari’s Reader mode. The example of the first problem used at WWDC was pulling the address, a mini-map, and a phone number from a hotel’s website. Apple also says the feature works with restaurants, landmarks, people, music, movies, and TV shows.

In my testing, Highlights works well for large national hotel chains but is hit-or-miss for smaller hotels. For example, if I visit the website for a Marriott, Hilton, or Sheraton hotel, a purple sparkles icon will appear over Safari’s Webpage Settings button indicating that there’s a Highlight available. Clicking the button pops up a map of the location with truncated details about it such as its rating and hours. Clicking on the map opens the location in the Maps app. Highlights results also include a button to get driving directions to the location in the Maps app.

The feature won’t work if you visit one of the sponsored links at the top of Google search results, which are usually from hotel booking aggregators, nor does Highlights consistently work with smaller one-off hotels. I’ve found a couple of smaller boutique hotels that Highlights worked with, but not any smaller local hotels outside of urban areas. I’d love to see this feature expand to include more hotels and other countries, but as it stands, Highlights is still a useful way to track down the basics of many U.S. hotels quickly.

Highlights works with some landmarks.

Highlights’ landmark coverage is hit-or-miss, too. For example, Safari will offer Highlights for the Statue of Liberty but not the Empire State Building. You’ll also get Highlights for Yankee Stadium, but not Bank of America Stadium where the Carolina Panthers play, or the Rose Bowl. As far as restaurants are concerned, Highlights can reliably navigate you to large chains, but other restaurant coverage is spotty.

Movie information is limited, but links to the TV app if it’s available there.

Musician information is also limited, but links to a bio on Wikipedia or to Apple Music.

Early in the betas, I couldn’t find any Highlights for people, music, movies, or TV shows. Those categories are still a little hard to find, but I’ve begun seeing the familiar purple sparkles more often over the past couple of weeks.

Although visiting music artists’ webpages has never triggered a Highlight for me, they’re starting to appear on review sites like Pitchfork. Sometimes Highlights link to sites like Wikipedia for more information about the artist, but other times, they link to albums in Apple Music.

Movie and TV show Highlights have been hard to find, too, but I have seen examples on Variety, Vulture, and Wikipedia. However, I have yet to run into movie or TV show Highlights when watching trailers on YouTube or visiting IMDb. When they do appear, movie and TV show Highlights include basic information like genre, release year, and rating, and clicking on the Highlight opens Apple’s TV app if the content is available there.

A bio of Steve Jobs included in Highlights for a post about ‘The Crazy Ones.’

I was also able to find a Highlight with a short bio of Steve Jobs when I visited a website with an article about ‘The Crazy Ones.’

The bottom line is that if you have a road trip coming up and are staying at a major hotel chain in the U.S., Highlights is a handy way to get driving directions. The other available categories have potential, but the coverage is still too spotty to be something you can expect will show up regularly as you browse the web, limiting its utility.

Reader Mode

There’s actually one other feature of Highlights that I saved for this section because they’re so closely tied. Safari will often display its purple sparkles icon over the Webpage Settings button when you open an article. Click the button, and a summary of it will appear along with a button offering to open the article in Reader mode.

When you open Reader mode, the familiar stripped-down UI appears, but with a hideable sidebar on the right that includes a summary of an article and, in some cases, a table of contents. Like Highlights, I don’t find these summaries very useful.

First of all, they appear in far fewer articles than I expected. I’ve spent a lot of time comparing longform stories from sites like The Verge from similar time periods and on similar topics, and there doesn’t seem to be any discernible pattern for whether or not summaries appear. However, I have noticed articles that previously had no summaries gaining them later, so I suspect Apple’s web crawler is still indexing and summarizing in the background. As a result, article summaries may become more prevalent over time.

Summaries don’t always do a good job of parsing webpages. For example, David Pierce’s article for The Verge about robots.txt files pulls too much information into the article’s title. In contrast, Safari does a surprisingly good job with Mia Sato’s story (also on The Verge) about how the Internet molded itself to fit Google’s algorithms, despite the story’s atypical layout.

Moreover, the summaries are too short to be useful. In the examples above, Pierce’s robots.txt story is roughly 3,000 words long, while Sato’s on Google comes in at about 6,000. Both summaries are far too short to meaningfully summarize the articles, and surprisingly, the summary of Pierce’s story – which is half the length of Sato’s – is 80 words compared to Sato’s summary at 60 words.

Article summarization feel like a feature that was added because summaries are one of the things that AI is good at, not because anyone thinks you can effectively boil a 6,000-word article down to just four sentences. Perhaps Apple is being conservative with the length of these summaries to avoid copyright claims by authors, which would be understandable, but I’d prefer if it had abandoned the feature instead of shipping something with such limited utility.

This and the next article on MacStories were formatted the same way, but one includes a table of contents, and the other doesn’t.

The second addition to Reader is that it sometimes includes a table of contents for articles. I say “sometimes” because it’s even harder to find an article with a table of contents than a summary. That seems to be because tables of contents usually appear in articles that are summaries themselves, which is already a somewhat rare thing, and only builds a table of contents if the article also uses H2 or H3 headers. Still, that doesn’t entirely explain when you can expect to see a table of contents because, of two identically-formatted MacStories articles about our favorite HomeKit devices – both of which were summarized – only one includes a table of contents.

When a table of contents does appear next to the Reader version of an article, it’s far more useful than a summary. As you’d expect, clicking on an entry in the table of contents jumps you to that part of the article, making it easy to skip around in a longer story. I’d like to see tables of contents added to a wider variety of articles because when they show up, they’re an excellent way to navigate the content.

It’s also worth noting that entering Reader mode used to take a single click on Safari’s Webpage Settings button. Now that the Webpage Settings button has been loaded with additional features, it takes two clicks, which is a lot if you spend as much time as I do in Safari. Fortunately, you can also enter Reader mode using ⌘ + ⇧ + R.

Distraction Control

Highlighting a webpage element for hiding.

The remnants of an ad blown away like dust.

Distraction Control is yet another option chucked onto the increasingly-crowded set of features accessible from Safari’s Webpage Settings button. Click on it, and you enter a mode that highlights elements of a webpage as you hover over them. Click on whatever the highlighted element, and it disintegrates Thanos finger-snapping style. It’s a cool effect for a feature that I’m not sure anyone needs or wants.

Don’t get me wrong: the web is littered with pages full of nonsense that gets in the way of reading. But Reader mode already handles that well, whereas Hide Distractions is a chore to use. After activating the feature, you have to click on every element you want to hide, which can be a lot and isn’t very effective on sites that use infinite scrolling. Plus, elements that refresh periodically, like some ads, will return after a while anyway. Elements that are static will remain hidden between visits to a site.

Apple has been careful to say that Distraction Control is not an ad blocker, pointing to the fact that ads that refresh automatically come back after a time. I’d spin the feature a little differently. Distraction Control is a very effective ad blocker for sites that display static ads, but not a replacement for a third-party ad blocker that can handle dynamic ads.

Effectively, Apple is penalizing sites that use less distracting ads by making them easier to block long-term than the dynamic variety.

My concerns about Distraction Control are twofold. First, static ads – like the kind of ads we display on MacStories – are often chosen because they are less disruptive than dynamic ads. Effectively, Apple is penalizing sites that use less distracting ads by making them easier to block long-term than the dynamic variety. I’ve checked, and as things stand today, if someone hides a banner ad on MacStories, it will never reappear. That’s a problem if you’re running a website.

Hide the MacStories banner ad, and you lose the entire masthead as well as navigation controls, which isn’t great.

Second, Distraction Control is not very precise. If you try to hide the banner ad at the top of MacStories, it will wipe out the masthead and site navigation along with the banner. That’s a potential support nightmare we (and I suspect other sites) will have to deal with. I know from experience that ad blockers are the number one cause of complaints we receive that MacStories isn’t working correctly. Not that many people use third-party ad blockers, but with this feature built into Safari, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more people start hiding elements, leading to an increase in support requests.

But those are issues for people who run websites. As a user, Distraction Control’s utility is limited. I don’t think it gives me anything that isn’t solved better by Reader mode, at least for articles I want to read. Sure, it preserves more of a site’s layout, but it’s so much more laborious than entering Reader mode that I haven’t run into a situation where I prefer using it, except when I visit a site that has annoying overlays and similar elements to do something other than read. Like article summaries, Distraction Control’s limited utility makes it feel like a feature that might not have made the cut in a year with a more robust set of feature updates.

If it were me, I would have added the video viewer to Safari and extensions to web apps, and called it a day. Everything else feels underdeveloped, incomplete, or ill-conceived. Highlights has potential, but currently, the places where you’ll find it are limited. In contrast, Reader mode summaries and Distraction Control seem to be features in search of a problem. Perhaps they can be refined over time to become more useful, but as they stand, I’d like to have a setting to simply turn them both off to declutter Safari’s increasingly crowded Webpage Settings menu.

Passwords

For years, Federico and I have wished for a standalone Passwords app, and it’s finally here. We’ve split most of the system apps between us for the purposes of our reviews, but not Passwords. It’s new, and so you’ll find it in both of our reviews because it’s not only here at long last, but it’s also very good.

I had a feeling this day would come eventually, so I’ve been weaning myself off of 1Password for about three years, moving passwords to Safari’s built-in system as I accessed sites and services. I could have imported them into Passwords all at once, but with so many years of passwords saved (many of which I no longer use), I figured a slow transition would provide me a cleaner start, and it has. I still keep 1Password around; I just find myself using it less and less. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s cover what Passwords does before exploring why you might want to switch to it too.

Passwords is a thoroughly modern Mac app that anyone who has used system apps like Reminders will feel comfortable using. That’s a big deal because people will only use an app to manage their passwords if it’s easy to use, which Apple’s Passwords is. It’s worth noting, too, that there is still a Passwords tab in Safari’s Settings, but all it includes is a button that opens the Passwords app – a smart addition for those who were in the habit of looking for their passwords there. The Passwords section of System Settings features a similar button and has been relocated to the General tab under ‘Autofill & Passwords,’ which includes a handful of other password-related settings too.

Passwords greets users with a login screen reminiscent of Safari’s passwords Settings tab.

The app, which must be unlocked with your user password upon launch, has a classic three-pane layout. The left pane gathers top-level password categories, plus any groups you’ve shared passwords with. The second pane is a list view of whatever category or group is selected in the left pane, and the third and final pane shows the details of the selected item. At the top of the middle pane, you’ll also find buttons to add new credentials and sort lists by Title, Website, Date Created, or Date Edited in either ascending or descending order. There’s a prominent search field in the toolbar, too.

I love Passwords’ approachable, simple design.

The six top-level password categories are automatically created by Sequoia:

All

Passkeys

Codes

Wi-Fi

Security

Deleted

What I like most about Passwords is its simplicity; the app has very few settings. I like tweaking app preferences as much as the next person, but not with my password manager. I’m invariably coming from somewhere else when I open Passwords. I want to get in, find what I need, and finish a purchase or log onto a site, not linger.

The beauty of Passwords is that it takes care of organizing things for me. With a single click, I have access to my two-factor codes, Wi-Fi passwords, and passkeys. Then, in the Security section, I can chip away at alerts, looking for vulnerabilities and fixing them. And, if I delete something that I shouldn’t have, I can scan through the Deleted category too. But most of the time, I just run a quick search to pull up what I need and move on.

Shared passwords.

Below Passwords’ categories are Shared Groups. If you created a Shared Group when passwords were accessible from Safari’s preferences, they’ll show up in Passwords automatically when you upgrade to Sequoia. You can add new ones, too. Hover over the Shared Groups section title in the left pane, and a plus button appears for adding a new group. From here, you can also click on the caret icon to hide your Shared Groups. As before, Shared Groups are not limited by things like Family Sharing; for example, I have a Shared Group with my family, but I have another one with Federico for MacStories passwords.

In Passwords’ Settings, you can display accounts as Titles or Websites. There are also checkboxes for showing the Passwords app in the menu bar, detecting compromised passwords, suggesting strong passwords, and automatically creating passkeys.

Passwords’ menu bar app suggests relevant passwords for whatever app or website you’re using.

If you choose to display Passwords in the menu bar, it will enable you to add new passwords and search for existing ones. Clicking on an entry opens its details view, where you can copy a username or password simply by clicking on it or choose any website to be taken there. My favorite feature of the menu bar app is that it detects the app or website you’re using and suggests any passwords for it at the top of the list. For instance, as I was writing this section in Obsidian, I clicked on Passwords in the menu bar, and it suggested my Obsidian passwords.

As I mentioned at the top of this section, I’ve been migrating passwords away from 1Password for a long time in anticipation of this day. 1Password is a good app, but it’s more than I really need, and I’ve always felt that version 8 makes it harder to find things than it should be.

That said, I do miss a few features from 1Password that I would like to see added to Passwords:

file attachments, which can be partially handled by setting up a password-protected note in the Notes app, but that solution isn’t as robust as the one 1Password offers; and

a new category for things like government IDs, credit cards, and insurance details.

The lack of a notes field and document attachments has made me hesitant to fully migrate MacStories to Passwords, and not having credit cards in the app is a pain for me personally, but for a 1.0 system app, Passwords is excellent. If there were more to say about Passwords, I would. The team behind it deserves a lot of credit for migrating years of work to a standalone app in a way that’s so simple that there’s very little that I can say about it, except that I highly encourage readers to give Passwords a try.

Maps

Maps is one of those system apps that sometimes flies a little under the radar, but it shouldn’t. The app has evolved over the years to encompass far more than driving directions. That’s an essential core feature that I use more than anything else, but Maps has become as much about exploring the world around you as it is about getting from one point to another.

Maps already allows you to pin locations, save places, and create guides. This year, the app adds new Routes features, and along with them, a new Library section to organize everything.

Maps’ Library collects pinned locations, places, guides, and routes all in one place.

To access the Library, click on your profile button and select Library. That opens a view with Pinned, Places, Guides, and Routes sections, followed by recently added items. Ever since I moved a couple of years ago, I’ve been saving places I’d like to visit in Maps, so the new Library, which makes it easier to find everything you’ve saved, is a very welcome addition.

The Routes section of the Library is entirely new, and it’s another feature I know I’ll use a lot. If you’ve ever used an app like Footpath, you’ll be familiar with how this new addition works. Like a lot of system features, Routes is simpler than similar third-party apps, but I expect it will get the job done for a lot of people.

Maps’ new Routes creation feature.

At the top of the Routes section of your Library is a ‘Create’ button that activates Maps’ route creation mode. Choose a starting point, click it, and then add additional points along your route. You can click on any point to remove it, reverse your start and end points, create an ‘out and back’ route, or close your loop. As you lay down points, Maps automatically snaps to the nearest roads and paths.

Once you’ve finished a route, Maps will show you how long it is, the time it will take to walk it, elevation changes, and a graph of those changes over the course of the route. You can add Notes to a route, too. Maps will also offer directions from your current location to the start of the route, as well as the option to save the route to your Library.

Creating a route.

I wish I’d had this feature two years ago when I first moved to North Carolina. I spent a lot of time picking out walking routes in my area when I first moved here, and Routes would have been incredibly useful for that. Still, I plan to use the feature as a handy way to pick a route that matches the time or energy I have when I head out for some exercise.

This leads me to something I hope Apple adds to Routes in the future: integration with the Apple Watch. Planning a route is something walkers, runners, and cyclists do all the time, and it would be great to be able to plan a route in advance and then navigate it with a combination of the Apple Watch and voice prompts via AirPods. I’ll be surprised if Routes doesn’t come to the Apple Watch next year, but for now, the initial implementation is excellent and a nice addition that continues the app’s evolution beyond driving directions.

Maps also includes a set of built-in hiking routes for U.S. national parks that can be filtered by length, elevation, and type. They’re similar to the custom routes you can create anywhere in the app and include the same sort of data. However, although hiking routes are a terrific addition to Maps, I hope they’re expanded beyond national parks and to other countries because, unless you live near a national park with hiking trails, you probably won’t get much out of them.

Maps includes hiking trails in U.S. national parks and topographic data.

If you look at one of the hiking trails added to Maps, you’ll notice something else, too. Topographic data has been layered into Maps in the U.S. and Japan. The topographic contours of the landscape seem to show up a little differently depending on where you are. By default, you won’t see topographic features, but if you search for a park with trailheads, like Yosemite National Park, and click on the Trailheads button in Maps’ search results, the contours of the landscape will appear. They also appear if you click on the marker for the park itself or a trail, but they disappear when it isn’t selected. In other parks, I’ve noticed that topographic features only appear when you select a trail. Either way, it’s worth noting that topographic maps aren’t limited to U.S. national parks. I’ve checked multiple North Carolina state parks, and they work there, too.

Another addition for hikers this year is the option to save hiking trails for offline use. If you’re hiking far from civilization, this will be a great feature to have, but I haven’t had the opportunity to try it yet.

The detail cards for locations have been updated in Maps too.

Apple has also reorganized the detail cards for locations in Maps. There’s a new ‘+’ button next to the ‘More’ button on a location’s card for quickly adding a destination to your Library. Click on the ‘More’ button, and there are new options to add a note to a location or pin it too.

Maps’ new ‘Search Here’ button.

Finally, if you search for something in Maps and then pan around, search results will automatically update to show the new area. That’s not new. However, now, if you pan Maps’ view just a little bit, instead of updating the search results, the app will display a ‘Search Here’ button at the bottom of the map to update the results for your slightly changed view.

All in all, this year’s update to Maps is great. It continues to expand the app beyond the table stakes of navigation to include more ways to explore the world around you. Maps is an app that by definition will never be finished, but it’s great to see the team behind it not just updating existing data but expanding what’s available too.

All the Rest

The new Sequoia Sunrise wallpaper.

As with any OS update, there are a lot of smaller changes to Sequoia, too. I’ve rounded up my favorites below.

Wallpapers

Examples of two of Sequoia’s new wallpapers.

There are three new wallpapers available in System Settings this year:

Macintosh is a Dynamic Wallpaper that cycles through classic Susan Kare Mac iconography.

Sequoia is an abstract Dynamic Wallpaper that reminds me of sunlight filtering through water.

Sequoia Sunrise is a live wallpaper of a forest of Sequoia trees, and it’s my favorite.

System Settings and More

Every macOS review comes with a bunch of updates scattered throughout the system. It’s impossible to catalog them all, but I’ve picked out the biggest changes, along with smaller system app updates that are notable.

One of my favorite changes is that, in many apps, if you select text and type ⌃ + ⮐, the right-click contextual menu will appear. As far as I can tell, this new keyboard shortcut works in all native text fields but won’t work in a webview. That means you can use it in apps like TextEdit, Things, and Notes, but it won’t work in Safari, Obsidian, Slack, or Discord. Still, it’s a handy shortcut to keep in mind.

HDMI passthrough is an option in multiple system media apps.

Sequoia has also added HDMI passthrough for the home entertainment nerds in the audience; it can be found in the TV app, QuickTime, and Music. That means Dolby Atmos and other formats will be passed directly to soundbars, receivers, and speakers from your Mac. What’s most interesting about this change is that it seems like something that’s been built in anticipation of a more home entertainment-friendly and potentially smaller Mac mini.

AirDrop’s new progress bar.

Other system and System Settings updates include

a progress bar that appears when a file has been AirDropped to your Mac;

a reorganization of the System Settings sections, which are still a bit of a mess, but better;2

a redesigned and dedicated iCloud tab in System Settings that remains accessible from your profile picture too; and

a switch from the Appearance tab to the General tab as the default section that is displayed when you open System Settings.

With Sequoia, Apple says it has also refined Game Mode, which shifts system resources to prioritize a game when one is launched. The mode kicks in automatically, and according to Apple, Sequoia improves on the feature with smoother frame rates and better power management.

Apple has ramped up privacy notifications for apps that require screen recording privileges, too. Although the initial approach was to require user confirmation at least once a week, notifications now appear monthly, which is better, but it’s still annoying that alerts can’t be turned off entirely.

Sequoia’s new rotating Wi-Fi network option.

Sequoia extends ‘Private Wi-Fi,’ the feature that sets a unique MAC address for each wireless network to which a device connects. A new ‘Rotating’ option that allows devices to cycle between multiple MAC addresses when they connect has been added and can be found in the Wi-Fi section of System Settings by clicking on the ‘Details’ button next to the Wi-Fi network your Mac is connected to and changing the ‘Private Wi-Fi address’ option to ‘Rotating.’

Accessibility

You can read more on the accessibility features coming to macOS Sequoia and Apple’s other platforms in this story that we published in May.

Smaller System App Changes

Freeform

Freeform adds Scenes for presenting canvases that can be printed or converted to PDFs.

The headlining addition to Freeform on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone this year is the Scene navigator. If you have a big, sprawling board, the feature allows you to create incremental views that you can then navigate as you present your creation to others. Scenes can be created and navigated from the floating toolbar, which includes the app’s zoom tool and can be reordered using drag and drop. Scenes can also be printed or saved as PDFs. In addition, Freeform now includes

an option to snap board elements to a grid for easy alignment;

the ability to pan a canvas by holding down the space bar and dragging your board; and

a sharing feature that lets you send of a copy of a board via an iCloud link.

Voice Memos

Voice Memos’ transcription occurs in real-time and is very accurate.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to think aloud, the new Live Transcription in Voice Memos, available on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, will be appealing. The feature, which is similar to voice transcription in Notes, allows you to simply speak into your Mac’s microphone or an external mic connected to your Mac, and as you speak, your words will be transcribed in the app. Voice Memos’ default view remains a visualization of the audio waveform as you speak, but by clicking the transcribe button in the toolbar, you can switch to a view that shows your words as they’re spoken.

In my experience, the transcription is accurate and fast. It’s simple to copy the resulting text into another app, too. When you’re finished, you can listen back in transcription mode, and your words will be highlighted as the recording plays, much like the way lyrics work in Music. The app can even go back and transcribe older recordings you’ve saved, adding a little transcription icon to the recording’s listing.

The new transcription feature has a lot of potential for students listening to lectures and anyone conducting an interview. It could also be a good way to create a hands-free rough draft or quickly preserve your thoughts about something for later.

Chess is prettier in Sequoia.

In addition to the foregoing:

The Calculator app has added calculation history and unit conversions, along with Math Notes, which I covered in the context of my Smart Script story last month.

The Home app has gained guest access, allowing you to grant trusted people access to your home at defined times.

Mac App Store downloads no longer require twice the storage of the app’s size at installation. Instead, they only require the space they’ll take up when installed, which seems like the way it should have worked from the beginning.

The Podcasts app in Sequoia doesn’t allow you to share timestamped links to episodes like you can on iOS or iPadOS, but links shared to a Mac from those platforms will load to the timestamp as expected.

The Chess app has better graphics than before but fewer style options.

Conclusion

So, that’s Sequoia. There’s no getting around the fact that Sequoia is an odd update. It has its highs and lows as any OS release does, but it feels incomplete. In some ways, that’s easily explained by the absence of Apple Intelligence, but not entirely.

Sequoia feels like visiting a bookstore and finding a book you want to read, only to discover that half the chapters have been torn out.

Instead, Sequoia feels like visiting a bookstore and finding a book you want to read, only to discover that half the chapters have been torn out. The OS feels unfinished in a way past releases that started down a path of implementing new technologies like Swift and Catalyst didn’t.

Is that because Apple changed course midway on the path to Sequoia and scrapped features to focus on Apple Intelligence? Perhaps. It’s a theory that tracks with the fact that macOS 15.1 was released in beta to developers long before 15.0 was even released to the public, and even when 15.1 is released, its Apple Intelligence features will receive a ‘beta’ label. Those are unusual moves by Apple that arguably acknowledge that the Sequoia you can download today is incomplete and unfinished.

It’s tempting to ignore how Sequoia wound up in an odd spot and solely focus on the merits of what’s in 15.0, but I think that would be a mistake. Apple is known for waiting to announce hardware and software until it’s ready and the company can articulate a clear message about where it fits among their products.

At WWDC, Apple laid out a vision of Apple Intelligence as a personal, private, integrated approach to AI. It’s too early to judge whether Apple Intelligence will succeed at meeting those goals, but what’s different from other announcements that took years to implement is that there’s no trace of Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.0 today. In the past, even when the payoff of a new technology was years away, macOS has always included some sort of first step into the future for users alongside a full menu of standard year-over-year updates.

A good example is Mac Catalyst, which was announced at WWDC with macOS Mojave. Catalyst started as a Sneak Peek that made it clear the technology was more about the future than the present. Also, in contrast to Sequoia, Mojave offered a significantly deeper set of standard OS updates along with the first Catalyst system apps. Apple may have made it clear that Apple Intelligence is being released in stages over time, but it’s also a central part of the Sequoia story.

It’s hard to have that one both ways, which is at the core of what makes Sequoia different and has left me with a nagging sense of unease all summer. The update’s shipping features aren’t at fault; some I like, and others I don’t. Instead, it’s my, “Is that it?” reaction that concerns me and leads me to wonder what features may have been shelved to focus on Apple Intelligence.

Maybe this will all work out in the end, and we’ll look back at 15.0 as part one of an odd, quick two-part release when 15.1 comes along. I hope so, but those are stories for another day as Apple incrementally releases its AI features.

Regardless of Sequoia’s backstory, though, the result is an update that’s easy to miss unless you go looking for the new features. That may be music to some Mac users’ ears, but to me, it makes Sequoia an underwhelming release.

That’s not to say there aren’t bright spots. iPhone Mirroring is one of those Continuity features that I never knew I wanted, but I’m glad I now have. I don’t use it every day, but it makes my iPhone feel more like a part of my Mac workflow. The addition of iPhone notifications on the Mac has had a similar effect. Being able to manage and clear notifications in one place is simply more efficient.

Likewise, I’m a fan of the new window tiling system in Sequoia. It should have been added a long time ago, but it’s still a great addition. A dedicated Passwords app and Safari’s new video viewer make working with passwords and watching videos substantially better too. Plus, I appreciate the ability to create custom routes in Maps from my desk before heading out for a walk.

Other features, like Safari’s article summaries and the curiously rare tables of contents, aren’t ready for prime time. The late beta period addition of Hide Distractions to Safari strikes me as an ill-advised solution to a problem that’s better solved by Reader mode. It’s hard to imagine many of these Safari features making the cut in a year when macOS had more to offer users.

On balance, though, macOS Sequoia is fine, which is also the source of its biggest problem. Apple has taught us to expect more than fine. Maybe Apple Intelligence will fill Sequoia’s gaps and elevate it beyond fine, but I’m skeptical based on what I’ve seen of macOS 15.1 so far. Of course, there’s a long road ahead before I or anyone else can fairly judge Apple Intelligence. But by putting off those features until later and shipping a 15.0 update that’s light on other features and long on promises of a better tomorrow, Apple has simultaneously failed to tell a compelling story about this release and Apple Intelligence as the future of the Mac. Hopefully, macOS 16.0’s storylines will be more compelling on both fronts.

Whether it's related to window tiling or not, Apple seems to have broken the ability to move the Mac's Dock from one display to another. ↩

It's still popular to dump on System Settings, which is understandable because it's not great. But System Preferences isn't coming back, so I think it's time to move on to more important macOS limitations and make friends with System Settings' search field. ↩