macOS Big Sur: The MacStories Review

Big Sur is a big deal. The OS picks up where Catalina left off, further rationalizing Apple’s product lineup through design, new ways to bring apps to the Mac, and updates to existing system apps. The approach realigns functionality across Apple’s platforms after years of divergence from their common foundation: Mac OS X. The result is an OS that walks a perilous line between breaking with the past and honoring it, acknowledging the ways computing has changed while aiming for a bold future.

macOS, which OS X has been called since 2016, is a mature operating system, so more often than not its annual updates are incremental affairs that don’t turn many heads. Big Sur is different. It’s an update that promises a future that’s connected to its past yet acknowledges today’s mobile-first computing landscape and harmonizing user experiences across devices.

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Big Sur also clarifies Apple’s Mac strategy, the contours of which began to emerge with Catalina. It’s a vision of a continuum of computing devices that offer a consistent, familiar environment no matter which you choose while remaining true to what makes them unique. In practical terms, that means a carefully coordinated design language and a greater emphasis on feature parity across OSes. Conceptually, it’s also an opportunity for macOS to shed the perception that it’s a legacy OS overshadowed by iOS and reclaim a meaningful place in Apple’s lineup for years to come.

Together, the changes to macOS set the table for Apple’s M1 Macs, the next big step in the Mac’s modernization, and easily earn Big Sur its designation of version 11.0.

But wait, there’s more

Big Sur Review eBook Plus MacStories Unplugged, and Weekly Behind-the-Scenes Story

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[table_of_contents]

Building a Modern Mac

Mac OS X Puma.

Computing in 2020 is drastically different from past decades. Certainly that’s true if you look back to the Mac’s introduction in 1984, but it’s just as accurate looking back to 2001 when Mac OS X debuted. Of course, the difference lies in the ascension of mobile devices like the iPhone, which ignited a computing revolution with its combination of a multitouch UI and insistence on delivering a full, rich Internet experience.

The original iPhone.

Today, it’s easy to forget that a significant factor in the iPhone’s early success was that its OS, originally called iPhone OS, was based on Mac OS X. The idea was so improbable that at the time, incumbent mobile phone makers didn’t believe it could succeed. Other options were considered, but in the end, Apple stripped out the parts of OS X that weren’t needed for a mobile device and added others that were, avoiding the need to design an operating system from scratch.

Another advantage of building iPhone OS from Mac OS X was that Apple could draw on its internal experience building Mac apps when it began creating iPhone apps. The decision also allowed the existing community of third-party developers to leverage their experience on the Mac, which helped jump-start the jailbreaking scene and in 2008, the App Store.

Apple’s Craig Federighi explains the Mac and iOS technology stacks as part of the company’s sneak peek at Mac Catalyst in 2018.

In the thirteen years since the iPhone debuted, Apple’s mobile lineup has been wildly successful and expanded to encompass a wide range of mobile products from the diminutive Apple Watch to the 12.9” iPad Pro. However, what was once a single mobile OS that was a subset of OS X has grown into a family of OSes that are tightly integrated but have diverged from their Mac OS X roots. As a result, macOS entered 2020 as a mature, robust operating system that serves over 100 million users well, but also stands a little awkwardly apart from the rest of Apple’s OSes.

Big Sur is designed to make this a tighter family.

The trouble isn’t so much a failing of macOS itself, but of the gradual introduction of features on each platform that require slightly different workflows to accomplish the same task. As someone who moves between the Mac, iPad, and iPhone throughout the day, the differences are a constant source of irritation.

Personally, I find that these irritations are more like speed bumps than roadblocks. However, when I put myself in the shoes of someone coming from iOS or iPadOS to the Mac for the first time, I imagine the experience for many people is jarring. Even something as trivially different as being able to send an iMessage with effects on an iPhone or iPad, but not a Mac running Catalina, is a turn-off that makes a Mac feel less personal at best and, at worst, broken.

There will always be and should be differences between the Mac and an iPhone or iPad because the hardware and input methods are different. Still, for the Mac to remain a healthy, important part of Apple’s lineup, it needs to adapt to the computing landscape of 2020 and change while remaining true to what makes the Mac uniquely suited to specific tasks. That, in a nutshell, is Big Sur’s objective.

Still, it’s essential to keep in mind that Big Sur hasn’t been conceived in a vacuum. The OS is just one piece of an elaborate transition plan that Apple is still in the early stages of implementing. macOS is an integral piece of the puzzle, but so are underlying developer tools like Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI and the M1-based Macs that will soon begin to ship.

Apple announced at WWDC 2020 that it’s transitioning to chips designed in-house.

It’s against this backdrop that Big Sur must be evaluated. Does it respect what has made the Mac such a fantastic computing platform for so many years while setting off along a new path designed to ensure the Mac’s future? Although the Mac is still at the beginning of this journey, I believe the answer is a resounding ‘Yes.’ Big Sur manages to embrace the past, pragmatically account for the present, and lay a foundation for the future. That isn’t to say there isn’t room for improvement or that I agree with every choice made. There is, and I don’t.

Big Sur manages to embrace the past, pragmatically account for the present, and lay a foundation for the future.

However, as I said in the introduction of my macOS Catalina review:

Transitions are inherently messy, and so is Catalina in places. It’s a work in process that represents the first steps down a new path, not the destination itself. The destination isn’t clear yet, but Catalina’s purpose is: it’s a bridge, not an island.

What’s changed with Big Sur is that Apple’s vision for the Mac, which was only hinted at in Catalina, has come into sharper focus. The future of the Mac depends on more than this single OS update, but between the ambitious scope of Big Sur and Apple’s new M1-based Macs, I’m more optimistic than ever about Apple’s commitment to the Mac and excited about the direction both it and macOS are headed.

Let’s dive into the details.

Testing, Compatibility, and Performance

Every year, testing a new version of macOS is a balancing act. Although I have had good luck historically with macOS betas, there’s inherently more that can go wrong than with iOS or iPadOS. Macs interface with a wider variety of peripherals than iPhones and iPads, which sometimes conflict with macOS betas. Also, third-party apps distributed outside the Mac App Store aren’t prevented from using private Apple APIs that are more likely to break with beta releases. As a result, I spent most of my summer after WWDC straddling Catalina and Big Sur.

For a lot of the summer, I spent about half of my week using Big Sur and the other half with Catalina. As in past years, the primary reason for the setup was podcast recording and editing. I’m very cautious about recording and editing on a new OS until I’m sure the apps I rely on are stable.

I switched back and forth between Catalina and Big Sur on my 2018 Mac mini with a 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 and 32GB of RAM using an external Samsung T7 1TB SSD. As the summer wore on, I also installed Big Sur on the internal SSD of my 13” 2016 MacBook Pro to get a sense of how the update performs on an older laptop and try the new battery management functionality in System Preferences. By the time summer turned to fall, I had switched most of my Big Sur work to that MacBook Pro, primarily because it gave me the freedom to work away from my desk.

I also installed Big Sur on a 2014 Mac mini, the oldest compatible Mac I own, to get a sense of how the update runs on even older hardware. However, the vast majority of the work I’ve done on Big Sur has been on my 2018 Mac mini and the 2016 MacBook Pro.

For more on the setup I used to juggle Catalina and the Big Sur betas side-by-side as I tested Big Sur and wrote, edited, and took screenshots for this review, check out this week’s issue of MacStories Weekly, the email newsletter we publish each week for Club MacStories members.

Backward Compatibility

I’ve tried Big Sur on a 2014 Mac mini, 2015 (pictured), 2016 MacBook Pro, and a 2018 Mac mini.

Big Sur supports fewer generations of MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, Mac minis, and iMacs than Catalina, but backward compatibility remains strong despite Apple’s announcement that the company’s moving away from Intel-based Macs. For some models, that means compatibility stretching back seven years.

Here’s the complete list of Big Sur-compatible Macs:

MacBook (Early 2015 and later)

MacBook Air (2013 and later)

MacBook Pro (Late 2013 and later)

Mac mini (2014 and later)

iMac (2014 and later)

iMac Pro (2017 and later)

Mac Pro (2013 and later)

Performance

I’ve been happy with Big Sur’s performance on all my Macs. Going into any OS update, I generally expect performance to be about the same year-over-year on recent hardware, which has been my experience using Big Sur on my 2018 Mac mini. Throughout the betas, my mini never felt sluggish.

Running Big Sur on my 2014 Mac mini.

My expectations were lower for the 2014 Mac mini and 2015 and 2016 MacBook Pros, which were already showing their ages running Catalina. It’s worth noting that I don’t use these other Macs very much. The mini acts as a headless Plex server, the 2016 MacBook Pro is my backup Mac that I also use for traveling, and the 2015 MacBook Pro hardly gets used at all anymore.

An OS update can’t perform miracles, breathing new life into old machines, but all three of my older Macs are running better than I expected and at least as well as they ran under Catalina. My three older Macs definitely struggle a little these days, but that was true before the Big Sur update.

Of my aged Macs, I was most impressed with the 2014 mini, which has a 256GB SSD, a 2.6 GHz Dual Core i5 processor, and 16GB of RAM. The mini started life as a writing machine but handles its current role well as a Plex server that serves live TV via an HDHomeRun. I run the mini headless and access it over my wired network using Screens. The machine is rarely running anything but Safari to manage the Plex server, but even so, Big Sur felt snappy as I used Safari and tested several other apps.

Every time I open my 2015 MacBook Pro, I wish for a 15” iPad Pro. The big Retina screen is amazing, but it’s also a big, bulky machine that isn’t as portable as I’d like.

As with my 2014 mini, I didn’t expect much when I updated my 2015 MacBook Pro from Sierra all the way to Big Sur, but I was pleasantly surprised. The machine has a 2.5 GHz quad-core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. That’s a significant step up from the 2014 mini, and according to Geekbench scores, it performs better than my 2016 MacBook Pro on both single-core and multi-core tests, which I confirmed with my own testing while running Big Sur.

I’ve fallen in love with my 2015 MacBook Pro all over again while testing Big Sur.

I had forgotten just how loud the fans on an older MacBook Pro are. Big Sur got the fans spinning at times, but its performance on my 2015 MacBook Pro has been great. So good, in fact, that I plan to start using it around the house more regularly when I want a bigger screen Mac but don’t want to sit at my desk.

My 2016 MacBook Pro performs nearly as well when running Big Sur. The laptop has a 3.3 GHz Dual Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM. It’s not quite as powerful as my 2015 MacBook Pro, but it’s far more portable, which is why it’s for tasks like editing podcasts when I travel. I haven’t traveled in quite a while, though, so it sat mostly idle until I installed the Big Sur betas this summer.

Since then, I’ve primarily used the MacBook Pro connected to an external display, keyboard, and trackpad. The display is the same one I use with my 2018 Mac mini, so the environment has been the same except for the computers driving the peripherals. I’ve spent a lot of time flipping back and forth and using most of the same core apps on both, and for my day-to-day work, Big Sur on the 2016 MacBook Pro has worked well.

Of course, Big Sur performs best on my 2018 Mac mini with its faster CPU, graphics, and twice as much RAM as any other Mac I tested. As with my other Macs, the 2018 mini has performed roughly the same as it did under Catalina, which has been more than adequate for my uses.

Having run Big Sur on Macs as old as my 2014 mini, I think Apple has struck the right balance and hasn’t pushed compatibility too far back into its lineup. The older compatible models will struggle a little under any recent version of macOS, but for many users, the difference between running Catalina and Big Sur on an older Mac should be acceptable. Of course, your real-world experience may be different depending on your use cases, but overall, I’ve been pleased with the performance of Big Sur on my Macs.

I’ve been less happy with Big Sur’s battery life and stability. As I discuss in the System Preferences Battery section below, I spent most of my time testing Big Sur on a 2016 MacBook Pro that the OS says has 75% of its original capacity left, which isn’t very good. That’s a big caveat worth keeping in mind and undoubtedly is one of the biggest drivers of my poor battery performance, but subjectively, when I ran my MacBook Pro on its battery, the runtime felt shorter than before. Interestingly, the experience was better with my older 2015 MacBook Pro, which doesn’t report any battery life degradation. So, while my sense from typical usage is that Big Sur can be a drain on battery life in some circumstances, the age and health of the battery in your laptop will likely make a substantial difference.

Like any beta, Big Sur’s reliability during the betas was a mixed bag. I didn’t hit any show-stoppers or data-loss issues, but until very late in the beta cycle, there were still plenty of bugs that I ran into with some frequency. That changed with the final beta round. The worst bugs were resolved, so I see no reason to delay updating to Big Sur unless there are known issues with critical apps on which you rely.

Design: Optimizing for Modern Familiarity

At the heart of Big Sur is a refreshed design that touches every rounded corner of the updated OS. The depth of the changes can’t be understated and is fully apparent from the moment you’re greeted with the return of the Mac’s startup chime. Nothing has been left untouched. System sounds, icons, windows, toolbars, sidebars, buttons, the use of color and whitespace, and more have all been reimagined while remaining informed by and grounded in the Mac’s history.

The design of macOS 10 wasn’t broken, but it had become an island of Apple UI design, evolving on its own while new computing devices with OSes spun off from the Mac were introduced and more tightly integrated. Whether I’m using my Apple Watch, iPhone, or iPad, there are design cues that make moving from one to the other frictionless. That wasn’t as true when moving from those devices to a Mac running Catalina.

Despite their common technical underpinnings, switching from working on an iPad to a Mac running Catalina involved adjustments beyond those that can be explained by differences like macOS’s windowed environment and input methods. That’s not a problem if you primarily use just one of those devices, but many people use multiple devices or switch from one to another, and if they’re all made by Apple, there should be continuity among them, including with the Mac.

Design changes are also about sending signals and providing context. Of course, nothing says ‘new’ like a fresh coat of paint. However, the Mac is on the cusp of a major hardware and software transition. Soon, new Apple’s new M1 processors will allow Macs to do things of which only iPhones and iPads were capable. Those Macs will be able to run iPhone and iPad apps natively alongside apps built with SwiftUI, Mac Catalyst, and AppKit.

Big Sur’s design is certainly meant to convey newness, drawing inspiration from iPadOS, but chalking up the changes to little more than following design trends would miss the forest for the trees. Big Sur’s design also serves as a bridge from the Mac’s past to its future.

The result is a careful balancing act that pulls the Mac closer into the fold with Apple’s other devices without abandoning what makes the Mac special. The company’s designers have created familiarity through the use of fonts, glyphs, colors, whitespace, and other elements. Yet Big Sur also sets itself apart from Apple’s other OSes in the way it creates hierarchy fashioned from digital materials using depth, shadows, and translucency, which extends to everything from an app’s icon to its windows. Of course, there are areas that could stand improvement, but I’m impressed by how well Big Sur’s design delivers an OS that, in Apple’s own words, is ‘refined, familiar, and fresh.’

System Sounds

The Sounds panel in System Preferences includes the new alert sounds and an option to turn the startup chime off.

The first thing you’ll experience when you install Big Sur isn’t new at all. The familiar Mac startup chime is back, although it can be turned off in the Sounds panel of System Preferences. Interestingly, the chime has announced the startup of my Mac mini ever since I installed the beta on an external drive, including when I boot into Catalina with the SSD I use for Big Sur physically disconnected.

The startup chime disappeared with the introduction of the 2016 MacBook Pro. Although it was still possible to resurrect the sound with a Terminal command, for most users with a modern Mac, the startup process had become a silent affair.

Although it’s a small change, bringing back the startup chime is emblematic of one of the central themes of Big Sur: remixing the old and new with familiar elements from multiple sources. The startup chime makes the right first impression, greeting users with a sound grounded in the Mac’s past. For long-time users of the Mac, the return of the startup chime provides a dose of reassurance, even before Big Sur’s substantial UI redesign appears onscreen. For new users, the chime serves as the same cheerful welcome that it always did.

Sounds have been remixed and remastered throughout Big Sur. Everything from system sounds like emptying the trash and moving a file, to alerts like Glass and Pop, which are now called Crystal and Bubble, have changed. In most cases these changes retain elements of the original sound, grounding them in the past, while also refreshing the Mac’s soundscape. YouTube user Pomamitia made a couple of nice videos demonstrating the sounds side-by-side:

I’m glad the Mac’s startup chime is back. I usually work with system sounds turned down on my Mac, so they are barely audible over the music I’m listening to. As a result, I may not be the best judge of whether the new sounds are an improvement or not. However, I have found that the new sounds grew on me quickly. I appreciate their clarity, which allows them to be heard over the music or other ambient sounds. Plus, it’s just nice to hear something different after years of the same sounds.

The Desktop and Menu Bar

The new desktop features greater translucency and a Dock that floats above the bottom of the screen.

Hot on the heels of the startup chime, before you open a single app, is the next hint that Big Sur is different. Lined up along the bottom of the screen are the system app icons you’d expect, but now they share the same rounded-rectangular shape of iOS and iPadOS app icons and carry a fresh design. The orderly uniformity of the new icons provides an immediate hint about the origins of Big Sur’s design inspiration.

Big Sur’s floating Dock and iPad-inspired app icons.

The other striking feature of the desktop is the aggressive translucency of the menu bar and Dock. In earlier versions of macOS, the more opaque menu bar and Dock, which was anchored along the bottom edge of the screen, made the macOS desktop feel a little like looking through a framed window. The menu bar and Dock served as the desktop’s chrome, defining and anchoring a portal in which to use apps.

The new Big Sur Graphic Light desktop image shows off the menu bar’s translucency well.

The changes to the menu bar and Dock in Big Sur are subtle, but the combination of translucency and uncoupling the Dock from the bottom edge of the screen makes the desktop feel more prominent. Instead of bracketing the desktop, the menu bar and Dock sit on it, more clearly defining the desktop as the base layer upon which other UI elements rest. The effect is reminiscent of an iPhone or iPad Home Screen while retaining the unique character of the Mac desktop, where a menu system and precise pointing device is always available.

The iPad Dock (top) and the Mac Dock (bottom) share more similarities than differences, but remain distinct.

Iconography

The icons in Big Sur’s Dock echo the shape of those found on the iPhone and iPad, but wouldn’t be mistaken for them. Every icon is backed by the familiar super-ellipse used for iOS and iPadOS app icons, but the Mac’s icons reflect greater depth and detail. There’s a more pronounced use of drop-shadows to set glyphs apart from their background and, in some instances, finer image details like the return address on the Mail icon and the hammer in the Xcode icon, both of which are highlighted below. Another clue that you’re not looking at iPhone and iPad icons is that elements of some icons, like Xcode’s hammer and TextEdit’s mechanical pencil, extend beyond the bounds of the backing shape, a touch that macOS 11 shares with earlier versions of the OS.

Big Sur’s icons retain the fine detail of past versions of macOS, and, in some cases, glyphs extend beyond the bounds of the icon’s background.

By and large, I like the new icons, though broader public reactions have been mixed. The new shape adds orderliness to the Dock that I appreciate, and it leans into a trend I’d noticed among some developers coming from iPhone and iPad who were already using iOS and iPadOS-style icons for their Mac apps. The change also makes sense in light of the introduction of iPhone and iPad apps on Apple M1 Macs. Regardless of whether you like the new icons or not, though, the previous-generation icons feel out of place in Big Sur, so I expect the transition to the new format to happen relatively quickly.

The Big Sur icons that have a counterpart on iPadOS are often similar, but with greater use of shadows to convey depth.

Initially, the hardest icons to get used to during the beta were the ones with the simplest glyphs where the drop-shadow was the most pronounced, like Messages and FaceTime. In the final release of Big Sur, though, the originally heavy drop-shadow treatment was dialed back, as I expected it would be, so, for example, Messages’ icon looks less like King Boo now. The final result is a playfulness and level of detail that distinguishes Big Sur’s icons from their siblings on iOS and iPadOS and gives them a personality and style of their own.

Although I like most of the new system icons, there are some that I think could use a little more attention, like these.

Not all of the new icons are created equal, though. I’m not a fan of the Automator and Keychain icons, for example. However, my approach to the icons I don’t like is more practical than principled. The icons I don’t like aren’t things that sit in my Dock, so although I’d prefer all of the Mac’s icons be perfect and beautiful, having these out of sight means they’re largely out of mind too.

The Menu Bar: Translucency and Whitespace

Closeup of the menu bar and Dock translucency.

The merits of the use of translucency in macOS have been debated for years now. It’s not to everyone’s tastes, but it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, having survived for years on macOS 10 and made the transition to Big Sur. This year, transparency was one of the central design concepts championed by Apple at WWDC for its role in creating a layered hierarchy of UI elements.

Although translucency is found throughout Big Sur’s UI, it’s front and center in the menu bar. The Dock shares the menu bar’s translucency, but the fine detail and depth of the icons sitting on it make the translucency of the Dock less obvious. The purpose of the translucency is the same for both the Dock and menu bar, though. Translucency causes the chrome of the Dock and menu bar to recede into the background, focusing the user’s attention on the icons and desktop space.

The translucency of the menu bar makes it take on the character of the desktop picture.

Apple has taken care to render menu bar text and icons in a way that minimizes readability issues caused by the desktop picture behind it, but it can still make text and icons somewhat harder to read at times. Whether this bothers you will depend on the degree to which you use the menu bar. I don’t use the menu bar much, having previously used a Mac with the menu bar hidden for years. As a result, I rather like that it fades into the background.

There is slightly more space between menu bar icons in Big Sur (bottom) than Catalina (top).

In addition to translucency, the menu bar’s pull-down menus and icons are slightly more spread out horizontally. Menu items are more spaced out vertically too. It’s tempting to interpret the spacing as a sign that touch is coming to the Mac, but I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon. I’m not suggesting that touch will never come to the Mac, but I’m inclined to accept at face value Apple’s stated design goal of reducing information density.

The vertical space between menu items has increased in Big Sur (right) compared to Catalina (left).

Also, although the increased spacing between UI elements can be found throughout Big Sur, it’s predominantly a change that’s limited to lists of text. For example, stoplight buttons in the top left corner of windows remain tightly spaced, and toolbar icons seem as compact in Big Sur as before. Also, with the inherent complexity of moving the Mac to Apple-designed SoCs, it’s hard to imagine Apple simultaneously making a fundamental change to the Mac interaction model.

Control Center, Notification Center, and Widgets

Big Sur’s consolidated Notification Center and widgets.

The menu bar’s changes don’t end with the menu bar itself. Apple has brought Control Center over from iOS and iPadOS and redesigned how notifications and widgets are handled too.

Control Center

Control Center’s familiar icon in the Mac menu bar.

Control Center is accessed from the menu bar using the same icon found in the Settings app on the iPhone and iPad, but it works a little differently than on those devices. Control Center integrates with the other menu bar apps on your Mac, which makes it more flexible in some respects and, in other ways, substantially more limited than its iOS and iPadOS counterparts.

In its default configuration, there are nine modules in Control Center, with three more available via System Preferences. Each Control Center module provides quick access to settings that can also serve as standalone menu bar items or be accessed from the Mac’s System Preferences app.

The default modules can be interacted with from the pane that appears when you click on the Control Center menu bar icon, but they can’t be reorganized within the pane. However, users can drag any module out of the Control Center pane and deposit it on the menu bar where it behaves like the other standalone menu bar items. Control Center modules can also be added to the menu bar from the ‘Dock & Menu Bar’ section of System Preferences.

Control Center modules that are dragged to the menu bar are not, however, removed from Control Center. Instead, they exist in both locations, although some of the Control Center modules that are added to the menu bar can be set up to only appear when the feature is active from the ‘Dock & Menu Bar’ section of System Preferences.

Control Center.

The default Control Center components are:

Wi-Fi

Bluetooth

AirDrop

Do Not Disturb

Keyboard Brightness

Screen Mirroring

Display

Sound

Now Playing

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and AirDrop are grouped, which makes sense given their related functionality, and along with Do Not Disturb, their icons toggle from gray to bright blue when activated. To turn any of these four settings on or off, just click their icons. When you hover over each with the pointer, you’ll notice a caret glyph appears, indicating that you can click to access additional settings or jump to the related section of System Preferences too.

Click on the Wi-Fi settings in Control Center to reveal additional options.

The additional Wi-Fi settings reveal options to connect to hotspots, preferred networks, and other networks. Clicking Bluetooth reveals all the devices you’ve paired with your Mac before. The detail view for AirDrop lets you switch between AirDropping to contacts only and everyone, and Do Not Disturb’s detail view lets you pick between turning the feature on for an hour, until the evening, until tomorrow, and always.

The expanded keyboard brightness control.

Keyboard Brightness and Screen Mirroring are a little different. Instead of rectangles like the other controls, they are squares. The difference helps balance the buttons in Control Center. Clicking Keyboard Brightness displays a slider for adjusting brightness, while Screen Mirroring lists the devices you can mirror to.

The Display module.

Display and Sound incorporate sliders for adjusting brightness and volume, respectively. Clicking Display also includes options for turning dark mode and Night Shift on and off and connecting to nearby iPads using Sidecar, while Sound displays devices to which you can output your Mac’s audio. Also, if you’ve got the Sound module in the menu bar, it dynamically updates to reflect the source, displaying an AirPods Pro icon when they are connected, for example.

The Now Playing menu bar item supports third-party audio sources like Google Chrome and IINA too.

The Now Playing module shows information about the currently playing song, album, and artist along with a small album artwork thumbnail, a play/pause control, and a skip forward button. Clicking the Now Playing module expands it to reveal all open apps that can deliver audio, including third-party audio sources. For example, the expanded module might show playback controls for where you left off in a Music playlist and in a second one for a podcast episode in the Podcasts app. Click on one of the available sources and you get more player controls, including a button for skipping back song-by-song and an interactive scrubber for advancing to a particular point in a song. Unfortunately, AirPlay 2 isn’t supported. Also, it’s worth noting that the Music module was buggy in the late stages of Big Sur’s betas, occasionally showing an extra blank audio source. It has improved, but I’m still seeing the bug on one of my Macs.

The Accessibility module provides shortcuts to Vision, Physical and Motor, and other accessibility settings.

Accessibility Shortcuts, Battery, and Fast User Switching can be included in the menu bar, Control Center, or both. Clicking the Accessibility Shortcuts module provides quick access to the vision accessibility features, VoiceOver, Zoom, and Invert Colors, physical and motor accessibility features, Sticky Keys, Slow Keys, Mouse Keys, and the Accessibility Keyboard. The battery widget displays your battery’s charge status and can be set to display the percentage charge in System Preferences. Clicking on the battery icon displays the same information, plus alerts you if your battery needs to be serviced and indicates which of your apps is using the most energy.

I appreciate the flexibility of having the option to include settings in Control Center or as standalone menu bar items, but Control Center has a long way to go before it’s as useful as the feature is iOS and iPadOS. The iPhone alone supports over 30 different Control Center modules, while the Mac supports just a dozen, including the three that aren’t activated by default. When you add the inability to rearrange modules within Control Center, the differences between the Mac version of Control Center and what the iPhone and iPad offer are stark.

Control Center needs more modules on the Mac. Modules for input devices, peripherals like printers and scanners, and third-party menu bar apps would all be welcome. I’d also like to be able to modify the layout. Big Sur’s Control Center is a start, and it’s worth remembering that Control Center on the iPhone and iPad wasn’t always as customizable as it is today, but there’s ample room to make it more useful.

The Control Center settings in System Preferences could stand to be condensed because they dedicate an entire pane to one checkbox and in some cases a drop-down menu too.

Also, if there’s a keyboard shortcut for activating Control Center, I haven’t been able to find it. It’s a small wish, but sometimes, all I want to do is see what my current settings are without changing them. One solution is to use a little AppleScript and an app like BetterTouchTool to trigger Control Center, as is described in this Reddit post, but it should have a keyboard shortcut.

Still, despite its limitations, Big Sur’s Control Center will be one of many familiar touches added to the OS from the iPhone and iPad that will serve many users’ needs and declutter their menu bars. I expect power users will continue to use apps like Bartender to organize their menu bar apps, but even they will benefit from the consolidation and organization of the system menu bar items that Control Center provides.

Notification Center

Notifications and widgets have been consolidated in Big Sur into a single panel that seemingly floats above the desktop. In prior versions of macOS, you clicked on a dedicated Notification Center menu bar app, which caused it to slide in from the right side of the screen. Once open, notifications and widgets occupied separate views that you could switch between by clicking on the segmented control at the top of the panel.

The new Notification Center (right) feels like it floats above the desktop compared to Catalina (left).

Now, however, notifications and widgets live in the same space, so there’s no need to switch between two views. What’s unusual, though, is that Notification Center is accessed by clicking on the day and time in the menu bar, which is highly undiscoverable. Although it’s reasonable to expect that something will happen when you click on the time in the menu bar, there’s certainly no affordance that would suggest that notifications and widgets are hidden behind there.

Also, when Notification Center had a dedicated icon in the menu bar, you could option-click on it to enable Do Not Disturb. That still works, but now, you option-click the time instead, enabling the feature’s always-on mode, further emphasizing the absurdity of hiding notifications behind the clock.

A stack of News notifications (left) that have been expanded (right).

Still, once Notification Center is open, I greatly prefer its new organization. Notifications have been grouped by app into stacks, saving a ton of space. With a single click, stacks expand to reveal every notification. A second click on a ‘Show Less’ button that appears returns the notifications to their stack. Also, when you hover over the ‘x’ button at the top of an expanded stack, it turns into a ‘Clear All’ button that allows you to dismiss the entire stack.

With the click of a button, you can expand the Notification and Widget panel to show all your stacks of notifications.

Even so, if you haven’t cleaned out your notifications in a while, the list of stacks can get long. To accommodate that, Apple has limited the notification section to a few stacks. After the last stack is a button indicating the number of remaining notifications that you can click to expand the column of stacked notifications, revealing them all. The section beneath the first set of stacks is labeled Notification Center and includes an upward-facing caret button to collapse the view again and an ellipse button for clearing all the notifications. From here, you can also open the Notifications section of System Preferences.

Notification Center expanded.

As in the past, the notifications you receive can be managed from the dedicated section in System Preferences. However, similar to iOS and iPadOS, if you right-click on a notification, you can now choose to deliver it quietly or turn off notifications for the associated app altogether. For more options, there’s also a right-click option to open the notifications section of System Preferences.

Some notifications like News and Podcasts can be expanded and include buttons for opening stories or playing an episode.

Apple has added richer content to notifications too. Hover over a News notification and a caret icon replaces the time in the top right corner of the notification. Click it, and a summary and image from the story are displayed. You can also view a photo from a Photos memory notification, respond to messages inline from Mail notifications, start playback of a new podcast episode, and accept an event invitation from a Calendar notification. Rich notifications are a terrific example of a Mac interpretation of a feature that has been available on iOS and iPadOS for a while via long-pressing a notification. I look forward to seeing what third-party developers do with this.

Widgets

Adding widgets on the Mac.

Below notifications are widgets. They look just like the widgets introduced with iOS and iPadOS 14 because they’re built the same way using SwiftUI. Also, like the iPad, widgets are tied to a dedicated panel and cannot be placed on the desktop. However, there are fewer widgets available on the Mac than on iOS, a limitation similar to the lack of Control Center flexibility that I hope Apple will address over time. Big Sur has widgets for nine system apps and features:

Calendar widgets come in three sizes and include the date, upcoming events, and, for the medium-sized widget, a tiny monthly calendar.

Clock offers a single-city, analog clock in the small-sized widget and a four-city version in small and medium.

Notes includes a widget for accessing folders in small, medium, and large and a single note widget that comes in the small size.

Photos is available in all three widget sizes for accessing the app’s Memories feature.

Podcasts enables continuing playback of your current episode and those next in your queue that comes in small, medium, and large.

Reminders widgets come in all three sizes and display one of your reminders lists.

Screen Time shows summary Screen Time data in three widget sizes and opens that section of System Preferences when clicked.

Stocks offers a small widget for tracking one stock and a second widget in all three sizes for tracking a watchlist of stocks.

Weather provides the weather forecast in varying levels of detail depending on which of the three sizes of widget you pick, and like on the iPad, takes you to weather.com when clicked.

Also, the Weather widget can display the conditions for your current location or a different one you pick and incorporates precipitation predictions for the next hour based on the technology acquired when Apple bought Dark Sky, severe weather alerts, and alerts of upcoming significant changes in conditions.

The Weather widget displays severe weather warnings and anticipated precipitation.

The iPad has twice the number of system widgets compared to the Mac and the iPhone a couple more still. Some of the differences can be explained by the differences between the OSes, but most can’t. For example, there are no Batteries, Music, News, or Maps widgets, and the Calculator widget from earlier versions of macOS is gone. Also, you cannot stack widgets like you can on iOS and iPadOS, limiting the number you can add without subjecting yourself to lots of scrolling.

Another limitation of Big Sur is that unlike iOS and iPadOS, previous-generation widgets aren’t supported, which is a shame. On iOS and iPadOS, widgets from iOS and iPadOS 13 and before are at the bottom of the column of widgets in the Today view. On the Mac, Catalina and prior widgets are nowhere to be found. Between the thinner support for system widgets and lack of backward compatibility, users’ widget options are limited at launch, but I expect they will expand quickly as third-party apps are updated.

As on iOS and iPadOS, widgets can come in up to three sizes and are configurable. Similar to the previous versions of macOS, there’s an ‘Edit Widgets’ button below your installed widgets for adding and removing them. Clicking the button opens a translucent overlay for picking which widgets to install.

Adding widgets.

On the far left of the widget installation panel is a search field with the apps that offer widgets listed alphabetically beneath it. The center of the installation panel is reserved for card-like entries for each widget with its name and description, examples of the widget, and small, medium, and large buttons if multiple sizes are available.

What’s curious about the example widgets is that they don’t list the apps they’re associated with anywhere. That’s fine if you select an app from the list on the left, in which case the connection between the app and widget is obvious. However, when you first open the widget installation view, no app is selected, so all of them are shown, and especially with third-party apps, it’s not always clear to which app they belong. It’s an issue that’s easily solved by clicking on the name of an app on the left, but if you want to browse all widgets at once, the setup isn’t ideal.

Dragging widgets into the widget panel.

Adding widgets works about as you’d expect coming from the iPhone or iPad. There isn’t a dedicated ‘Add Widget’ button like there is on iOS or iPadOS, but when you hover the pointer over an example widget, a small plus button appears in its corner. Click on the widget to add it to the bottom of your widget panel or click and drag it into a different position. Existing widgets can be deleted by clicking the minus button in their corner and moved around by dragging them.

The fact that you can click on a widget to add it is obvious but bears emphasizing because you can’t simply tap a widget on iOS or iPadOS to add one. Instead, you must tap the dedicated ‘Add Widget’ button, which I had all summer to get used to but never did. I still find myself regularly poking at an example widget on my iPhone or iPad instead and wondering why nothing happens.

Another nice touch is that you can right-click on an installed widget and switch among the sizes it offers, which isn’t possible on iOS or iPadOS. When you do so, the widget animates to the new size. The effect looks great, and it’s a handy, quick way to manage widgets that I wish was available on the iPhone and iPad.

Third-Party Widgets

Despite the holes in Apple’s lineup of widgets, their popularity on the iPhone and iPad promises to ensure that a wide range of options will be available from third-party developers. I’ve tried a few third-party widgets, and they’re great. Because they are based on the same technology used to create widgets on iOS and iPadOS, they will be very familiar if you’ve been following our coverage of widgets on MacStories.

Please note that the apps discussed below are betas and may be modified before they are released.

LookUp

Lookup’s small and large widgets.

LookUp is a MacStories favorite on iOS and iPadOS and one of the best Mac Catalyst apps I tried in the run-up to Catalina’s release, so it’s no surprise that Vidit Bhargava is ready with a widget for Big Sur too. LookUp’s widget is simple but should appeal to anyone who uses the app’s ‘word of the day’ feature. The widget comes in small and large versions and displays the word of the day overlaid on one of LookUp’s signature illustrations. Clicking the widget opens LookUp’s app.

MusicHarbor

MusicHarbor includes Stats and Latest and Upcoming Releases widgets.

MusicHarbor’s widgets are also among my favorites. As on iOS and iPadOS, the Mac Catalyst version of the app includes a Stats, Upcoming Releases, and Latest Releases widget. All but the Upcoming Releases widget are available in all three sizes. As on iOS and iPadOS, clicking on any of the albums in the widget’s cover art grid opens that album in MusicHarbor’s Mac app.

I don’t use MusicHarbor’s Stats widget, which reports data about the number of new and upcoming albums in the app, but I’m very happy to have MusicHarbor’s Latest Releases and Upcoming Releases widgets at my fingertips on the Mac now. I spend a lot of time listening to music as I write, and I’m always looking for something new to try. With hundreds of artists tracked in MusicHarbor, it’s easy to quickly find something new with a couple of clicks.

GameTrack

GameTrack offers Now Playing and Upcoming widgets.

One of the best use cases for widgets is their ability to deliver information quickly. GameTrack is an app for tracking and discovering videogames that I recently reviewed. The app offers a widgets for your Now Playing and Upcoming games lists. I use GameTrack on my iPad and iPhone more than I have on my Mac. However, I particularly like the app’s Upcoming widget because if I’m working at my Mac and my mind wanders to how I want to spend some downtime, I’m just a click away from accessing my GameTrack list. Like MusicHarbor, I could grab my iPhone or iPad to check GameTrack, but prefer to do it from the context in which I’m already working.

lire

Lire includes Hot Links and Articles widgets.

Lire is an RSS reader that’s available on iOS, iPadOS, and Mac. The app offers small, medium, and large widgets that display the app’s Hot Links section, which collects the stories most frequently linked in the RSS feeds to which you subscribe.

The Articles widget comes in all three sizes too and can be configured to show any feed, folder, or author along with the app’s Calm Feed, which features feeds that don’t update frequently. Lire’s Articles widget also includes a search field for quickly finding the source you want to show and other settings I covered when I reviewed the iOS and iPadOS version of the app.

CardPointers

CardPointers has widgets for Available offers, Best Card to Use, and Card Summary.

CardPointers is an app for tracking rewards offered by a long list of credit cards to help you maximize your rewards. Like the iOS and iPadOS version of the app, CardPointers offers multiple types of widgets to track your cards, their annual fees and expiration dates, as well as details on the best card to use for certain types of purchases and whether your cards have any current special offers available. I especially like the ‘Best Card to Use’ widget, which comes in handy while shopping from my Mac when I want to check which card to use without digging through the card provider’s website.

Glimpse

Glimpse has medium and large widgets that offer a portal to a region of a webpage.

If you want to keep tabs on a particular website, Glimpse’s widget is a good option. It lets you configure a viewport to a specific section of a webpage, a little like what was possible with Dashboard until it was removed with Catalina. I’ve set up a widget to display the first story on MacStories. That’s probably not something I need since I’m on the site all day long already, but I could see using it for webpages that don’t have RSS feeds when you want to know a change has been made, such as Apple’s developer news site.

1Blocker

1Blocker has three different views of your Blocking Stats depending on the size of widget chosen.

Finally, 1Blocker is one of the most comprehensive ad and tracker blocking apps I’ve tried on the Mac. If you like to keep tabs on what your ad blocker is doing to improve your browsing experience, 1Blocker’s widget provides just the right level of detail in a widget-friendly glanceable UI.

You can view stats about everything it blocks from its Safari extension, but if Safari isn’t open, another nice option is its upcoming widget that breaks down ads, trackers, and other items blocked in its medium and large sizes with the small version limited to total items blocked. The medium and large versions of 1Blocker’s widget add graphical breakdowns of what’s been blocked too. All three versions can be customized to display today’s data, this week’s data, or all blocking activity since you started using 1Blocker.

The new combined notification and widget section is a significant improvement over prior versions, but it’s far too limited. By making both notifications and widgets accessible from a single panel and immediately viewable, clicking and scrolling is minimized, which I love. I also appreciate having the same widgets on the Mac as on my iPhone and iPad, though I wish there were more system widgets at launch and that they could be stacked. I’m not a fan of hiding the feature beneath the time in the menu bar, either. The choice is consistent with cleaning up menu bar clutter, but it’s too undiscoverable to be worth the elimination of an additional menu bar icon. Still, the new combined notification and widget panel is an overall improvement and a good start that I hope Apple iterates on quickly.

Windows

The design of the menu bar is a combination of new and updated functionality integrated with design changes that provide a cleaner, less cluttered menu bar that recedes into the background. The changes to windows are different. The core structure and functionality of windows are the same in Big Sur as they were in Catalina, but their changes are no less important.

Using layout, typography, and color, Apple has reimagined one of the most basic building blocks of the Mac’s operating system – and I’m enthusiastic about the new design. Big Sur’s windows are cleaner, more readable, and complement Apple’s other operating systems in a way that makes macOS feel like part of a family of OSes and not just the Mac’s OS.

The Finder’s proxy icon is hidden in Big Sur (left), but animates into view when you hover over a window’s title (right).

The Finder window is a terrific example of how Big Sur window titles are left-justified, toolbar buttons are borderless, and search controls are often collapsed.

There’s a lot to unpack with Big Sur’s windows. The toolbar is taller, but its iconography feels more compact without button borders. The title bar is gone. Instead, the window’s title is in line with the toolbar’s buttons and left-justified. The title bar’s proxy icon representing an open file is still available, but now, it only appears when you hover over the window title, animating into view after a short delay along with a caret that lets you pick a new save destination. If the animation is too slow for you, hold down the Shift key make it appear immediately, which has the added advantage of making the entire title area part of the draggable proxy and expanding the file’s title if truncated. The corners of windows, as well as nearly every other rectangular element throughout Big Sur, are more rounded than before too, lending them a more organic, softer feel than macOS 10.

LookUp (left) and MusicHarbor (right) are excellent examples of upcoming third-party apps that have evolved from tab bar-based iOS apps to use the Mac’s sidebar.

Translucent sidebars now span the full height of the window, interrupting the toolbar and any status bar or other elements along the bottom edge of the window. Within the sidebar, the ability to collapse sections of textual information serves Big Sur’s goal of reducing information density, too, allowing users to focus only on what’s important to them. The changes have the effect of shifting a user’s focus from the top edge of a window to the left side where content navigation is emphasized. In fact, if you squint a little, where previously a Finder window loosely resembled an index card with the title neatly centered along the top edge of the card, a Big Sur window is more like a book or a sheet from the Cornell note-taking system.

The use of color has changed too. Window chrome is far less pronounced. Where once there were multiple shades of gray to highlight the top and bottom frames of windows and their sidebars, now everything is considerably lighter. Light mode on Big Sur is very white. Dark gray chrome is gone, replaced by subtler shades to offset sidebars and other elements.

Window sidebars and toolbars use Apple’s library of SF Symbols, which were designed to work side-by-side with Big Sur’s system typography.

Color has also been drained from toolbars and the iconagraphy of tabbed preferences windows, which now feature glyphs from Apple’s SF Symbols 2 icon set and its 750 new symbols for Big Sur, over 150 of which are multicolored. Toolbar buttons have been reduced to monochrome gray icons that sit on an uninterrupted expanse of white in light mode without any indication of the bounds of the buttons.

Hovering over toolbar icons reveals that they are buttons in a way reminiscent of how the pointer works on iPadOS.

Only when hovering the pointer over a glyph is it highlighted to identify it as a button. The effect bears a loose resemblance to the recent addition of pointer support to the iPad, though without the more exaggerated animation or magnetic snapping you’d find there. In apps like Mail, the visual density of toolbars has been further reduced by eliminating search fields, which have been replaced with a simple search icon that expands into a search field when clicked, although other apps, like Preview, retain a full search field. The new toolbar style feels lighter weight than before, preventing from competing for attention with the content of the window.

Even Music’s sidebar, which already ran the length of the app’s window, stands out in Big Sur with its use of the app’s icon color in the sidebar.

Although color has been eliminated from many parts of the window chrome in Big Sur, it still plays an important role in window design. To anchor the sidebar visually as the starting point for browsing content, Big Sur uses color paired with the SF Symbols iconography. Each glyph is designed to work with Apple’s San Francisco font, both in style and weight. Developers can assign an accent color to their app to serve as a unifying visual that helps guide the user and differentiate one app from another. For example, Mail uses blue for most of its sidebar icons, while Music uses the same coral shade found in the app’s icon. The same accent colors extend to the text selection indicator and controls like sliders.

The same accent colors extend to the text selection indicator and controls like sliders if your Highlight color is set to Accent Color in the General section of System Preferences. If your Highlight color is set to something else, the sidebar and elements like checkboxes and drop-down menu controls retain their developer-specified color, but selected text will use the color you pick.

Accent colors extend to other UI elements like text fields, checkboxes, drop-down menu controls, and buttons. A Smart Playlist dialog in Catalina (left), Big Sur (right).

Developers aren’t limited to a single color in the sidebar, though. Mail’s star icon marking VIP messages is yellow, and Smart Mailboxes are identified with a gray gear. It’s a system that allows for color variance when called for by a feature, with a fallback to the default color that matches the app’s branding.

Mail uses unique colors in the sidebar for VIPs and Smart Mailboxes.

Whitespace is used by Big Sur to make information more glanceable, and windows feel more expansive too. Toolbar icons feel more compact without button borders, but the toolbar itself is taller, adding padding around the icons that visually separates them from content in a manner that makes them more legible. The same is true for the sidebar, where the text is spaced out vertically more than before.

Sketch running on Catalina (top) and its beta on Big Sur (bottom).

The new window design works on a wide range of Mac apps from Mac Catalyst apps from Apple and third parties to more complex AppKit apps like the beta of Sketch 70, which has been redesigned for Big Sur. Sketch 70’s beta retains the same functionality but with a more approachable clearer look. Among other things, the redesign incorporates a sidebar that runs the height of Sketch 70’s window, a taller, simplified toolbar with icons that bear a resemblance to Apple’s SF Symbols glyphs, and orange accent color that echoes the app’s icon. I like what the beta of Sketch 70 a lot. The toolbar has been rethought to accommodate the window’s title and in the process crafted a UI that looks more modern and less busy than before, which makes it more approachable.

Sheets, Alerts, and Controls

Sheets associated with a window no longer extend from the toolbar (left), but hover above the window, which is dimmed (right).

Sheets and Alerts have been updated for Big Sur too. Sheets previously extended down from an app’s toolbar like a window shade being closed. Big Sur detaches sheets, so they float in the center of a window, which is dimmed, causing it to recede into the background visually. Sheets also have a cleaner look now that is devoid of borders or bezels. Alerts have gained a more card-like look in Big Sur and use centered text, which is the layout used on the iPad and iPhone. Both sheets and alerts have also added rounded corners like Big Sur’s windows.

Alerts in Catalina (left) and Big Sur (right).

The centered text of alerts has been criticized as less readable. That’s true if an alert contains large amounts of explanatory text, but if you look at the system alerts used in Big Sur, short, single-sentence messages dominate throughout. With shorter text, readability is far less of a problem, and what alerts may lose in readability, they gain in consistency and familiarity with the way they are used in iOS and iPadOS. Both are small changes, but serve the overall design direction of the update and fit quite comfortably and neatly into it.

Apple has even subtly tweaked standard controls like sliders and checkboxes, and the ‘Add People’ option in the share menu for sharing iCloud Drive files has been changed to the more straightforward ‘Share File.’ The changes are slight but demonstrate the depth of thought and attention to detail that has been applied throughout the OS.

Spotlight and Siri

Spotlight is faster and returns more comprehensive results. Catalina (left) and Big Sur (right).

The design and functionality of Spotlight and Siri have been updated too. I don’t use Spotlight often, but in my tests, the results returned by Big Sur appear faster, more comprehensive, and easier to navigate. In Catalina, Spotlight generated a list of files, organized by type with a preview on the right side of its UI. Big Sur dispenses with the preview loading immediately. Instead, a compact list of results is generated that is organized by type. Click once to load a preview and twice to open a document.

Like iOS and iPadOS 14, Spotlight on Big Sur incorporates web search suggestions in its results, as you can see from the screenshot above, along with Spotlight search suggestions that are tailored to what’s on your Mac. For example, in the screenshot at the beginning of this section, typing ‘MacStories’ suggests ‘MacStories selects awards’ as a Spotlight search suggestion. Clicking on it reveals relevant documents, notes, and other items on my Mac, whereas clicking one of the suggestions marked with the Safari icon opens a Google search (my default search engine) for the suggested search terms in a new Safari tab. Apple says that Spotlight’s technology also powers the Find functionality in Safari, Pages, Keynote, and other apps.

Siri. Catalina (left) and Big Sur (right).

According to Apple, Siri can answer more questions directly in Big Sur and handle more complex queries because it sources answers from across the Internet. Siri has lagged behind iOS and iPadOS for some time, so it’s good to see Apple spending time improving it, although the claimed improvements are too vague to meaningfully test independently.

Since the introduction of the Mac, Apple has used design to tear down barriers between users and computers. Good design makes computers less intimidating through visual metaphors that resonate and are familiar.

Classic Mac UI

The original Mac pioneered many of the interface idioms that helped transform the computer from a device that required expertise to a tool that’s accessible to anyone. Elements of the Mac’s innovative graphical user interface endure today. The desktop, windows, folders, buttons, pointer, and so many other elements that made those early Macs approachable play the same role on modern Macs.

However, interface design isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s a reflection of the history that came before it, the tastes of the moment in which it is created, and the capabilities of the hardware underpinning it. At various times, the design of Apple’s UIs on all of its platforms has been influenced by technology that constrained or liberated what was possible and swung from one end of the fashion spectrum to the other.

What I find fascinating about Big Sur’s design is that it’s a remix of so much of what has come before. There are echoes in Big Sur’s icons of the skeuomorphic, Delicious-generation style that reached its zenith 15 years ago, and the translucent Vibrancy effects introduced with macOS 10.10 Yosemite are more pronounced today than ever. Yet it’s also impossible to pin a few influences on Big Sur and declare it a hybrid.

Source: Apple WWDC 2020 Keynote.

macOS 11 applies the design ideas of the past to create building blocks that are as tactile as they are purely digital. Big Sur’s roots in the Mac’s past form a familiar, tried and true foundation. However, it’s the synthesis of depth, translucency, and layers along with the use of vibrant color, organic rounded corners, and judicious use of whitespace, that combine to fashion something entirely unique, making clear that Apple is declaring a new era for the Mac.

I’m not surprised that we got a redesign of macOS with Big Sur, but I am surprised at its extent. In a year when Apple is in the midst of migrating all of its apps to work with Apple M1 Macs, sticking with a design closer to Catalina would have been a safe, understandable choice. I’m glad, though, that Apple took a bolder approach that complements the character of the changes coming with Apple M1 Macs. It’s a design for a new kind of Mac, one that leverages the traditional strengths of the platform and promises to draw on what the company has learned from over a decade of iPhones and iPads to reinvent the Mac.

Apps

Scanning the Mac app landscape, it’s evident that Apple is pursuing multiple internal and external goals with its system apps. Chief among the company’s objectives is a fundamental shift in perspective away from thinking of apps as software that runs on individual devices to apps that support its entire family of devices. It’s an ambitious, multi-year plan being pushed forward on several fronts that first became apparent at WWDC 2018 when Craig Federighi previewed Mac Catalyst. Today, those efforts are in full swing, underscored this year by Apple’s migration of Messages and Maps to Mac Catalyst.

However, there’s more to Apple’s app story in 2020. Competing for attention alongside Mac Catalyst is Safari. The company’s browser received a lot of attention this year, pushing Apple’s focus on privacy and security forward while also expanding the ability of users to customize their web experience and extend the app’s utility. After using the wide range of updates found in Safari, it’s readily apparent why Apple calls this update the biggest since the browser launched.

Big Sur also pushes many of Apple’s other system apps forward with new features and refinements. Some of the changes reveal a company still struggling to achieve feature parity across OSes for its apps, which also serves as a handy roadmap for predicting the apps that might receive a Mac Catalyst makeover next. Other changes are simply part of the natural iterative process of app development. There are hits and misses among Big Sur’s stock apps, but the breadth of attention they’ve received is nonetheless impressive given the simultaneous design refresh and migration to Apple M1 Macs.

Mac Catalyst Grows Up

This July I revisited Apple’s progress on Mac Catalyst. It’s been a bumpy road to get to where the technology stands today, but as I concluded at the time, the announcements made at WWDC renewed my optimism for where the technology is heading. In the months since, I’ve been testing betas of third-party Mac Catalyst apps, which has further reinforced my early impressions.

It’s important to keep in mind that Mac Catalyst is only part of a broader strategy. Apple is realigning how apps are developed for its platforms, especially where the iPad and Mac intersect. In 2019, Mac Catalyst’s role was unclear, but as I said in July:

Apple also did a better job at WWDC 2020 of articulating Mac Catalyst’s position among the company’s many developer tools. Developers with a mature AppKit version of an app are not being encouraged to abandon AppKit. Those frameworks may not be the long-term future of Mac development, but they aren’t being deprecated any time soon. Likewise, iPadOS developers with an established UIKit app aren’t being encouraged to leave UIKit behind. Instead, iPad developers have options that range from running their app directly on M1-based Macs with no changes to building standard Mac Catalyst apps and Optimized for Mac apps. It’s a practical, realistic acknowledgment that the economics of moving an app from the iPad to the Mac vary widely, so the development paths should too.

The point is that there isn’t one best way to bring an app to the Mac. Big Sur and the underlying technologies available to developers represent the most complete picture of Apple’s vision of a realigned computing lineup we’ve seen to date. Through a combination of SwiftUI, Mac Catalyst, AppKit, and native iOS and iPadOS apps running on M1 Macs, Apple has created an extensive menu of options for developers to add their apps to the Mac in a way that minimizes the technical and financial burdens.

Maps and Messages are Apple’s most ambitious Mac Catalyst apps to date.

The range of Mac Catalyst options is illustrated by Apple’s own apps. They run the gamut from standard Mac Catalyst apps like News and Stocks – relatively simple apps that hew closely to their iPad variants – to Maps and Messages which are virtually indistinguishable from the AppKit versions in Catalina. The result is that not all Mac Catalyst apps will be paragons of high design, but that’s never been the case with AppKit apps either: some are great; others not so much.

Instead of looking at the bottom end of the Mac Catalyst spectrum and seeing a glass half empty, I’m encouraged by Maps and Messages and the examples of early third-party Catalyst apps that adopt Optimized for Mac, which I discuss below. Mac Catalyst has come a long way since it was introduced and is becoming a realistic alternative development path for more developers than ever before, while also providing a better user experience than in the past.

Still, the story from the perspective of developers isn’t all rosy. I’ve been impressed with the apps produced by several developers who have gone the Optimized for Mac route. Unfortunately, those developers had to endure many bugs over the course of the betas that do not appear to have been fully resolved in the shipping version of Big Sur. I hope Apple addresses Catalyst’s outstanding issues quickly, because I would hate to see bugs slow the adoption of Optimized for Mac the same way they slowed the original introduction of Mac Catalyst.

Messages and Maps

No two Mac Catalyst apps released by Apple are more important to its adoption than Messages and Maps which adopt the company’s Optimized for Mac initiative. Both apps use standard Mac controls like checkboxes, and neither has scaled UIs, both of which are hallmarks of Optimized for Mac.

The results are striking. Messages and Maps look, feel, and behave in a manner that is far closer to traditional AppKit Mac apps than Apple’s early Catalyst lineup.

Messages

There’s a lot riding on Messages, which has served as a powerful means of locking customers to their Apple devices. On the Mac, Messages had become a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. The app started life as iChat in 2002 with Mac OS X 10.2 and supported instant messaging platforms like AIM. The app became Messages in 2012, and slowly legacy chat technologies were left behind, but the app never kept up with advancements on iOS or iPadOS.

Catalina and previous versions of Messages sucked all the fun out of message effects.

There, that’s better.

The core messaging functionality was solid on Catalina but lacked the fun and personality found on Apple’s other OSes. Mac users weren’t greeted with balloons when someone wished them a happy birthday, and what could be more lifeless and sad than a message ‘(sent with Lasers).’ Messages on Big Sur brings all the fun of the app to the Mac while retaining Mac-specific functionality and adding enhanced search, which also shows you who sent items and includes thumbnails of photos and rich links.

Search shows you who sent images, links, and other items.

Lasers are available along with all eleven other effects found on iOS and iPadOS. The main difference is that on iOS, you access Bubble and Screen effects by long-pressing on Messages’ send button, whereas with Big Sur, Message Effects is one of four options when you click the oval app button to the left of the text entry field. I’m sure Apple stuck with the oval app button because it will be familiar to iOS and iPadOS users, even though Messages on the Mac doesn’t support iMessage apps.

Message Effects, Photos, Memoji Stickers, and #images are all available from the app button next to Messages’ text input field.

The other Messages options on Big Sur are Photos, Memoji Stickers, and #images. Photos loads a popover image picker with search functionality that taps into the metadata associated with your iCloud Photo Library. Memoji Stickers make Apple’s emoji-style stickers available based on any Memoji you’ve created on your Mac or other platforms, plus the same set of emoji-inspired animals and other creatures available on iOS. There’s even an ellipsis button that reveals options to Edit, Duplicate, Delete, and Create new Memoji, which launches the entire Memoji editor available in a sheet that floats above the Messages window. Finally, with #images, you can search for the perfect GIF to send from your Mac.

Big Sur brings the fun with Messages.

What you won’t find on Big Sur are iMessage apps and stickers, which makes the App Store glyph on the app button feel out of place on the Mac. If a conversation includes a sticker or iMessage app, clicking on the link underneath it opens an iOS App Store preview and, in some cases, the Mac App Store. You can’t purchase iMessage apps and stickers on the Mac, but with iOS and iPadOS apps coming to the Mac with M1-based systems, it’s possible these previews have been put in place to permit purchases in the future.

The design of replies needs work because the connections are very hard to follow.

Messages has added other features that are new to iOS and iPadOS this year too. Replies and mention notifications are supported. Replies can be accessed by clicking on a message and typing ⌘R or right-clicking on a message and picking ‘Reply.’ The command dims the conversation, except for the message to which you’re replying. After a reply has been sent, the original message gains a curved line that points to your reply, just like on iOS and iPadOS 14. However, in a thread with multiple people responding to different things, the reply UI can get unintelligible fast. Mention notifications work the same way as iOS, too, alerting you whenever someone mentions you by name in a group thread.

As on iOS and iPadOS 14, mentioning a person’s name grays it out as you’re typing, providing a hint that the system has recognized it for notification purposes.

You can also pin up to nine conversations in Messages by dragging them to the top of your conversation list, just like you can on iOS and iPadOS 14. Changes you make here are synced to all your devices, so you only have to set up your pin order once, which I appreciate. Another way to pin a conversation is to swipe right on it using a trackpad. In Catalina and prior, swiping right revealed an option to mute a conversation. That functionality has been moved to a left-swipe, which also includes an option to delete the conversation.

Mute and Delete are revealed by swiping left on a conversation, while swiping right uncovers an option to pin it.

You can share your name and image in Messages, picking a photo, Memoji, emoji, or your initials, and choose a background color for every option except when you use a photo. Another nice touch added when you right-click a conversation is an option to ‘Show Times,’ which displays timestamps next to every message in a conversation, something previously reserved for swiping left on a conversation on iOS and iPadOS.

Right-click to turn on Show Times, which adds timestamps to messages in the right margin of a conversation.

Early betas of Big Sur dropped AppleScript support for Messages, but it returned late in the summer to the relief of fans of the scripting language. What was originally assumed to be a casualty of Messages’ move to Mac Catalyst turned out to be a good example of the fact that Mac Catalyst isn’t synonymous with the elimination of power user features.

Maps

Maps is Apple’s other marquee example of what’s possible with Mac Catalyst and illustrative of Big Sur’s new design direction. Gone are the big search field and buttons in Maps’ toolbar. They’ve been replaced by a sidebar with a search field at the top followed by three collapsable sections: Favorites, My Guides, and Recents.

However, it’s the fact that Maps has been rebuilt using Mac Catalyst more than its design that promises to have the most impact on Maps. As I said in my feature story on Maps this summer:

…Maps being rebuilt as a Mac Catalyst app means it now enjoys feature parity with the iOS and iPadOS versions of the app. For the first time, Maps on the Mac supports Favorites, Look Around, and indoor maps. You can also send routes to an iPhone or iPad and track arrival times for anyone who has shared their ETA with you. Maps on the Mac will support the new iOS and iPadOS 14 features that I covered above too. With a full sidebar on the left and toolbar across the top of the app’s window, Maps on macOS 11.0 remains unmistakably a Mac app, but with all the features users will expect.

I won’t belabor the features that have been added to Maps this year. If you’re interested in the details, it’s worth reading my overview from August, which covers Maps across all of Apple’s OSes. What’s notable is that instead of catching up on features from years gone by but falling behind on the latest features, Maps has caught up to and matched iOS and iPadOS. You’ll find the same curated and self-created Guides, Look Around, cycling routes, electric vehicle routing, congestion zone, and license plate restriction features added to Apple’s other platforms this year on the Mac too.

Perhaps Maps should have always been kept on a parallel track with the iOS and iPadOS versions, but the reality was that it wasn’t. Mac Catalyst promises to change that, not only for Apple but for third-party developers too.

Building for separate platforms using different frameworks and APIs, when an app like Maps is so clearly dominant on the iPhone, makes it hard to prioritize the other platforms no matter the size of the company. Maps on iPadOS benefitted from being built on the same code base as the iOS version, but without that same benefit, the macOS version lagged. We won’t know until we’ve been through a few more update cycles, but Mac Catalyst promises to provide Mac versions of apps with many of the same benefits that the iPad realized because of its close relationship to the iPhone.

Mac Catalyst: The Next Wave

LookUp, built with Mac Catalyst.

When I wrote about the latest Mac Catalyst advances in July, I had a sense that they would make a big difference to app developers outside Apple. It’s still early days, but I’ve already seen several apps that have benefited from Optimized for Mac.

Before sharing those apps, though, I want to make a brief detour to address an issue that has grown from an irritant to a full-blown problem with Mac Catalyst: the lack of TestFlight on the Mac. It’s been more than six years now since Apple acquired TestFlight. Apple’s beta testing service and app have been terrific ways for developers to manage large groups of beta testers, ensuring that their apps are vetted before being released to the general public. Yet, despite Mac Catalyst and Apple’s drive to make Mac development more streamlined for developers and rumors, not a word has been said about bringing TestFlight to the Mac.

Of course, there are other ways to beta test Mac apps, but in an environment where Apple is trying to sell developers on the notion that it’s easier than ever to bring an iPad app to the Mac, the lack of TestFlight is a glaring omission. There are also lots of gotchas for developers who want to distribute notarized versions as betas but can’t because features like Sign In with Apple require distribution through the Mac App Store. Having worked with frustrated developers who want to share their Mac Catalyst apps, it’s painfully obvious that this needs to be fixed as soon as possible if Apple hopes to attract more iOS and iPadOS developers to the Mac.

However, despite the ongoing bugginess of Mac Catalyst and the difficulties developers have sharing their betas, I’ve had the chance to try a few Mac Catalyst apps, and my cautious optimism from July has been rewarded. A handful of apps doesn’t establish a trend, but things appear to be headed in the right direction.

MusicHarbor

MusicHarbor on the iPad and Mac bear a very close resemblance to each other.

MusicHarbor is one of my favorite music utilities on the iPhone and iPad. Feed it with the artists in your Apple Music library, and MusicHarbor will track the latest and upcoming releases. It’s become a sort of RSS reader for music releases for me. I browse through the album art of new albums throughout the week, dropping things that look interesting into a playlist in Apple Music that serves as my ‘Listen Later’ service.

Not long ago, I covered the details of the latest iOS and iPadOS release of MusicHarbor, so I won’t go over it all again, but suffice it to say, in the year since its release, the app has become my most-used music utility on the iPhone and iPad. It was the version that was redesigned for iPadOS 14 that set the stage for bringing MusicHarbor to the Mac by adopting the iPad’s new sidebar design and a collection view for its content.

MusicHarbor’s new design works equally well on the Mac. The sidebar is a natural fit for navigating between the app’s sections, and album art smoothly resizes along with the app’s window. MusicHarbor is also a terrific example of the sort of app that I’m glad has made its way to the Mac from the iPhone and iPad. I listen to music all day long as I work, so I’m always looking for something new to try. It’s a small thing, but often that meant grabbing my iPhone to check MusicHarbor, even when I was at my desk working on my Mac. Now, however, I’ve got a quick, familiar option right where I’m already working that syncs the status of what I’ve viewed back to my iPhone and iPad, which I love for its simple efficiency.

lire

The RSS client lire.

Another app I wrote about after iOS and iPadOS 14 were released is lire, which has long been one of my favorite RSS readers. Lire was also one of the first and most advanced apps to offer a Mac Catalyst version.

The latest iteration of lire takes advantage of Optimized for Mac with a familiar three-column layout, which is fully resizable, the use of collapsible sections in the sidebar, and a modern toolbar. Lire also makes greater use of color in the sidebar than most apps, using colorful iconography to highlight certain features. The app also makes use of tabs, allowing you to scan headlines and open multiple stories, which is a feature that I’ve not seen done with many other Mac Catalyst RSS clients. If you’re a fan of lire on the iPhone and iPad, the latest Mac Catalyst version is the best yet and well worth checking out.

GameTrack

GameTrack comes to the Mac.

GameTrack, the videogame tracking app, is another excellent example of an app that I use most often on my iPhone or iPad, but one that I’m glad has made it to the Mac too. Again, it all comes down to context. If I’m on my Mac and looking for a videogame to buy, I shouldn’t have to interrupt my browsing in Safari to look up the games in my ‘Wish List’ queue in GameTrack on my iPhone.

Instead, I can simply launch GameTrack, scan through the games on my Wish List, and make my purchase. My hands never leave the keyboard, and my gaze never strays from my Mac’s display. That may seem trivial, but every context switch is an opportunity to get distracted. If I’m going to be distracted, it should be on my terms and on purpose when I’m ready to unwind and play that game I just bought.

GameTrack is a terrific example of how well the new sidebar design works on both the iPad and Mac.

I reviewed the iPhone and iPad version of GameTrack earlier this year, and it remains the primary way I track the videogames I’m playing and want to play. The app does an excellent job breaking down the games on your lists and offering several ways to discover new ones too. That makes GameTrack a perfect match with the new iPadOS and Mac sidebar, which allows users to collapse sections they aren’t using for a more streamlined experience.

Codye

Codye and its new multicolumn layout.

Codye lets users convert code snippets into high-resolution, beautifully-formatted images for use in presentations, documentation, and other places where legibility is important. The app adopts a three-column layout with the app’s three primary modes in the far left column, settings for each mode in the second column, and an editor/viewer in the far right column. The app includes a long list of themes, syntax highlighting, and export options. The new column layout works particularly well for a utility app like Codye, making it easy to switch between modes and access the app’s many options quickly while benefitting from the immediate feedback available in the viewer.

Apple has tried to revitalize the Mac App Store and jump-start Mac app growth before with things like the store’s redesign. The results have been uneven because there were too many barriers to entry for iOS developers, and the Mac market is small compared to iOS.

Developers and users are right to ask if this time will be different. I’m optimistic based on the scope of changes in Big Sur and Apple’s broader strategy for M1 Macs, but there are still significant hurdles. With the ability to run native iOS and iPadOS apps on M1 Macs, SwiftUI, and Mac Catalyst, both Optimized for Mac and not, there are options that should fit a variety of business models for existing and new apps. There remain obstacles such as the lack of TestFlight for the Mac and framework bugs, but overall, many of the previous business-model and technical issues have been resolved.

As I concluded in July, what’s exciting about Mac Catalyst is that:

…there’s an opportunity for developers to significantly increase the potential size of the market for their apps without taking much risk. Some of those new Mac Catalyst apps will be subpar, just like there are junky iPhone and iPad apps. I’m not a fan of lousy apps, but I’m still glad that the barrier to entry to the App Store is low. It opens opportunities for newcomers who might otherwise find it too hard to get started.

I expect Mac Catalyst will have the same effect. More developers than ever before have access to the Mac App Store. That will create competition that pushes all developers to make better products for their users, regardless of the underlying technology used to build it. In my book, that is how it should be and the best way to strengthen the Mac as a platform.

With hardware and software experiencing dramatic change at the same time, it’s not surprising that each of the many ways to build Mac apps is being closely scrutinized. However, I expect the moment we’ll know that the latest ways to build Mac apps have been a success is when people no longer think about how the app was created and evaluate it on its own merits instead.

Safari 14

Safari’s new Start Page.

At WWDC, Craig Federighi declared that Big Sur’s Safari 14 update is the biggest since the browser debuted in 2003. That was no exaggeration. There’s a lot going on in Safari. Let’s take a look.

Security and privacy are a substantial part of the Safari story this year, as has been the case in the past for the app and Apple’s products as a whole. Safari generates reports about the trackers running on sites you visit, surfacing new Privacy Reports in Safari’s toolbar and on the start page. Like iOS and iPadOS, Big Sur also alerts users when their passwords have been compromised. Users now have tools to control the data accessed by extensions they install too.

Apple has also extended Safari’s functionality and personalization options. There’s an all-new customizable start page, and tabs have been redesigned. There’s a new translation feature that can translate webpages on the fly into seven languages, and at long last, Safari supports video playback in 4K too.

Big Sur should also provide a boost to extensions. There’s a new dedicated section for them in the Mac App Store, and developers have been given tools to bring their extensions to Safari from other browsers. The new section includes top charts and editorial content to help users discover the best and most popular extensions available.

So much of our computing lives happen in a browser, making updates to it often have as much impact as a new version of the OS itself. Like Apple’s OSes, Safari emphasizes security and privacy and provides sweeteners in the form of new features to attract users of other Mac browsers. This year is no different. Safari balances important security and privacy features with new, practical functionality and a touch of fun.

Security and Privacy

Safari identifies 40 separate trackers on People.com.

Apple has stressed its commitment to security and privacy for years. Both are foundational to all of its apps, but they are especially important when it comes to Safari, which by its very nature connects users to computers across the web. With Big Sur, Apple has elevated privacy to Safari’s toolbar. Click the Privacy Report button and Safari will display a summary report. The view can be expanded to show the names of the trackers on a page. For even more data, there’s an info button that opens a new window with an expanded report covering all of the websites you’ve visited in the past 30 days and the trackers detected on them.

There has been a lot of confusion over what exactly Safari is doing with respect to cross-site trackers on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The confusion stems from the rather broad language of the Privacy Report itself, which some have interpreted as meaning that Safari is blocking tracking resources from loading in the first place, which is incorrect.

Instead, Safari reports the trackers that sites load to the user and prevents the trackers from transmitting cookies and certain other types of data to a third-party site. If you want to learn more on exactly how this works, I recommend stories by Simo Ahava debunking the notion that Safari blocks Google Analytics, and a more general piece on how Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which powers the Privacy Report, works.

Since the early confusion over what Safari was blocking, the Privacy Report language has been tweaked to say “X trackers prevented from profiling you” instead of X trackers prevented,” which is more accurate than the original message. When you view the full Privacy Report, there is also a ‘Show More’ button that reveals short explanations of what cross-site trackers are and what Intelligent Tracking Prevention does. The information requires some additional clicking around to uncover, but I’m glad it’s there for those who are interested, and I applaud Apple for putting more information in the hands of users about what is happening when they visit a website, even if some of the technical nuances are lost in the translation to plain English.

The passwords tab in Safari’s Preferences alerts users to reused, weak, and compromised passwords.

Safari 14 can also detect if your passwords are weak, reused, or have been compromised. Similar features are available in a dedicated password manager app like 1Password, but adding it on a system level makes it available to a far wider audience.

The feature, which is turned on by default, is accessed from the Passwords tab of Safari’s Preferences. Safari flags password issues with a yellow alert icon. When clicked, an explanation of the issue is displayed along with a link to the website you can visit to change your password.

Using a Safari extension for the first time (here, the Blue Canoe dictionary extension) allows you to choose how much access to grant it.

Extensions are an area that poses unique security issues. As code running inside Safari, extensions have the potential to be used to harvest vast amounts of information about your browsing. With Safari 14, Apple said at WWDC that it will give users the option to restrict individual browser extensions, so they only run on a single site or allow them to access all sites. Extensions’ access to data can also be limited to a single day or always-on access.

Another web-based security advance this year is the ability for users on all of Apple’s devices to log into websites using Face ID or Touch ID. None of Apple’s current Macs include Face ID and only some support Touch ID, but for a website that implements the feature, Mac users will be able to log in using Touch ID. The feature is based on Apple’s Web Authentication API, which is compliant with the FIDO2 security specification, and goes beyond auto-filling username and password fields, authenticating and logging in users in what should be one fluid step when sites begin using it.

The New Start Page

The new Big Sur Safari Start Page.

In Catalina, when you open a new tab, you’re presented with Favorites, Frequently Visited sites, and Siri Suggestions, which collect links found in apps like Messages, based on recent searches, or open on other devices. However, the page is a little bland with its grey background, mostly uniform design, and lack of customization.

Big Sur gives the start page a big makeover. Instead of three fixed sections, there are now six sections and a background image option available, any of which can be turned on or off by clicking on the settings icon in the bottom right corner of the start page. The sections available are Favorites, Frequently Visited, Privacy Report, Siri Suggestions, Reading List, iCloud Tabs, and Background Image.

Favorites is largely the same, except that more links are displayed in a single row. The information of the Frequently Visited section has been reduced with fewer sites listed and displayed with webpage previews.

The Privacy Report displays the number of trackers detected for the past seven days. Clicking on the section opens the full Privacy Report that I covered above.

Siri Suggestions are similar to what’s found in Catalina, except each entry is smaller so that more fit on the page, and iCloud tabs have been given their own section now where you can switch among the tabs open on each of your other devices by clicking on the listed device to reveal a drop-down list of other devices. The Reading List section displays a dozen webpages you’ve saved for reading later and can be expanded to show your entire collection of links.

Detail showing the new Safari start page settings.

Finally, if the Background Image checkbox is selected, horizontally scrolling thumbnails of available start page wallpapers are offered. If you don’t like the default option, there’s also a big plus button to pick an alternative image stored on your Mac. When a background image is not turned on, the start page’s background is a translucent grey.

I like the ability to customize Safari’s start page a lot. I find most of the sections useful, but I’ve turned off the Privacy Report because it’s already available in the toolbar, and Reading List because I use Reeder for webpages I want to read later. For those sections that I am using, I appreciate that they’re distinguished from each other visually and not simply a wall of rounded off square icons. I’m generally happy with the order of the sections, which can’t be changed, but I would like to be able to bump iCloud Tabs up the list because I use it all the time as I move from one device to another while researching.

Tab Redesign

Safari added favicons with Mojave, but they were turned off by default, requiring a trip to the browser’s Preferences. With Big Sur, favicons are on by default and serve a larger role in the redesign of Safari’s tabs. That’s because Big Sur changes the way tabs are displayed, allowing more to be visible at one time.

When you opened multiple tabs in Catalina, eventually tabs on the left side of Safari’s window would begin to overlap, obscuring the favicon and text in the tab. To view overlapped tabs, you could swipe along the tab bar using a trackpad, but as someone who often has many tabs open, I never liked that solution.

When you have a lot of tabs open, you can still identify them by their favicons or hover over a tab to see a thumbnail of its contents.

With Big Sur, tabs simply shrink in size, allowing more to take up the same space. The new tab button has also been moved from the tab bar to the toolbar to save space. If you keep opening tabs, they still eventually scroll off the left side of Safari’s window, where they can be revealed by swiping horizontally. However, before sliding off the left side of the tab bar, the tabs get smaller and smaller, shrinking the favicons in the process, which are still clearly legible. How many tabs will fit in a Safari window depends on factors like the size of your display and the resolution you use, but moving between my Mac mini and MacBook Pro connected to a 27” LG display at a comfortable scaling size, the redesign allows me to view around a dozen more tabs than before.

If all that is visible is a page’s favicon, that doesn’t tell you much about what page you have open. However, Big Sur has a solution for that too. When you hover the pointer above a tab, a preview of the page is displayed as a thumbnail. Reminiscent of the rich previews available on iOS and iPadOS when you save a link to an app like Notes, the thumbnail shows a snapshot of the exact position on the page where you left off, the title, and the top-level URL for the site. For the vast majority of the sites I visit, I’ve found these snapshots are enough to quickly identify each tab’s contents as I scan through a row of favicon-only tabs.

Translation

Translating an article from French to English in Safari.

Safari also adds a new webpage translation feature that Apple labels as a beta. The functionality is accessed from a translation button in Safari’s toolbar that automatically detects and translates sites in seven languages to your Mac’s default language. The languages supported are:

Spanish

Italian

Chinese

French

German

Russian

Brazilian Portuguese

When you visit a site that supports translation, you’ll find a translation icon on the right side of the address bar that uses the same iconography as the Translation app in iOS and iPadOS 14. Clicking the icon reveals a few choices. Selecting ‘Translate’ translates the page into your preferred language. There’s also a ‘Preferred Language’ button that opens System Preferences to that section so you can change your language.

Once translated, the icon in the address bar becomes blue to indicate the feature has been enabled. Clicking on the icon again activates the ‘View Original’ option that is greyed out when you are on a site in its native language. The translation feature is also available from Safari’s View menu.

I don’t visit sites in other languages often, but in my tests, the new translate feature worked reasonably well. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to get a feel for what the author was trying to convey in their native language.

Extensions

Big Sur has taken steps to expand the universe of available browser extensions in a way that doesn’t compromise Safari’s security. I’ve already covered the security aspects of extensions, but along with those restrictions come new ways that Apple is encouraging developers to create extensions and promote them.

On the development side, Apple has provided developers with new tools to make it easier for them to bring extensions developed for other browsers to the Mac. With support for the WebExtension API and tools built into Xcode 12, developers can create browser extensions from scratch in Xcode or convert extensions built for other browsers so they work with Safari.

Extensions like Grammarly have colorful new icons in Safari’s toolbar.

Although the new tools are a significant step toward bringing the richer universe of extensions available for Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers, it’s worth noting that Safari extensions still require Xcode and a paid developer account before they can be built and distributed on the Mac App Store. Those requirements may not be an impediment to big companies like Grammarly or Evernote, but it may prevent smaller developers from bringing their extensions to the Mac.

The Mac App Store has gained a Safari Extensions category.

The second piece of the puzzle unveiled at WWDC is a Mac App Store category dedicated to Safari extensions. It’s still early days, but the Store now has a category for extensions that includes editorial content highlighting certain types of extensions, top charts, and themed lists of extensions. I’m glad to see Apple provide a dedicated space for browser extensions and give them editorial attention. The change should help with discovery and put extensions on equal footing with apps in the minds of users.

4K HDR Video Playback

Playing 8K YouTube footage at 4K in Safari using my 2018 Mac mini.

Safari running on Big Sur finally supports 4K HDR playback for sites like YouTube and Netflix. However, there are limitations imposed by content providers that sometimes limit when 4K video is available. For instance, 4K HDR playback of Netflix content is limited to Macs with T2 security chips, which means only the following Mac models introduced since 2018 will work with the video streaming service:

iMac (2020)

iMac Pro

Mac Pro (2019)

Mac mini (2018)

MacBook Air (2018 or later)

MacBook Pro (2018 or later)

However, other services, like YouTube played 4K video on a broader range of Mac models, including my 2014 Mac mini.

AirPlay 2 now supports streaming 4K HDR video to Macs running Big Sur too.

The transition to 4K playback in Safari was rough during the betas. Although I was able to play a video at any resolution on my 2018 Mac mini, older machines struggled to cope, regularly returning errors preventing playback altogether. Because those issues persisted throughout the late beta stages, it’s not clear whether they have been completely resolved.

Everything Else

Support for Adobe’s Flash player, which was never supported on iOS devices, has ended with Safari 14. The change isn’t a surprise given Adobe’s announcement to end the browser plug-in in July 2017 and its omission from earlier Safari Technology Previews, but it is nonetheless noteable because it marks the end of an era that stretches back to the early 2000s.

It’s worth noting too that Safari 14 is available as a standalone download from the Software Update section of System Preferences, regardless of whether you have updated to Big Sur. However, the standalone version does not support website translation or 4K video playback, both of which require Big Sur.

Safari’s Find UI has been updated to make it more discoverable.

The functionality of Safari’s Find feature, which searches the contents of a page based on a user-provided search query, isn’t new, but it has been redesigned to surface alternate ways of composing a search better. Previously, after typing ⌘F or the Find command in Safari’s Edit menu, you could click on the search icon to pick between searches that contained or began with your search term. That same functionality is available in Big Sur, but it has been elevated visually, so the type of search currently selected is visible and can be switched using the feature’s drop-down menu. It’s a small change, but I expect it will lead to the feature being discovered by far more users.

Safari can import passwords from Google Chrome now too.

A Note on Performance

Apple says that Safari 14 running on Big Sur can load pages 50% faster for commonly visited sites than Chrome can. The company also says that Safari can stream video for up to three hours longer than Chrome or Firefox, and users can spend up to one hour more browsing the web than on those competing browsers. What Apple hasn’t defined is what constitutes a commonly-visited site, which makes independent testing of those claims difficult. Also, battery performance during betas is often poor, which is to be expected as the operating system is fine-tuned. As a result, I’m not in a position to comment on Safari’s performance at launch.

Apple’s Other System Apps

As with any update to macOS, Big Sur includes updates big and small to other system apps too. Some of the changes are primarily cosmetic to align apps with Big Sur’s new design, but even some of Apple’s more mature system apps received significant improvements to functionality. That’s not universally true, however, so let’s take a look at what has changed.

Reminders

Reminders in Big Sur.

On the surface, Reminders doesn’t look like it has changed much in Big Sur, but it has. The design changes are small. The iconography has evolved with the introduction of SF Symbols 2, and buttons have shed their outlines, but the rest of the app’s main window is the same. What’s changed is that Apple has added several improvements to the app’s functionality that makes it an excellent task management choice for many users.

I spent most of 2019 and part of 2020 using a combination of Reminders and GoodTask, which builds on the Reminders database of tasks, as my task management solution. One of the things that frustrated me the most about Reminders in Catalina is that task lists could be shared but not assigned. For example, that meant that if I kept a shared list with Federico for MacStories projects we work on together, there was no clear separation of who was responsible for each task.

Shared lists are good for things like grocery lists that either of two people can complete. When coupled with iCloud sync, shared lists eliminate the need to constantly coordinate who has done what on a list. However, if you’ve decided in advance who is going to do something, it’s preferable to be able to assign the task.

Reminders has added an Assigned to Me Smart List and labels assigned tasks with your initials.

With Big Sur, Reminders has gained assigned tasks, which are labeled with the initials with the person to whom an item is assigned. I’m glad that shared lists are still the default for things like my grocery list, but assigned tasks are far more useful for my day-to-day work.

Assigning a task.

Reminders lets you assign a task in a shared list to yourself or a person with whom you share the list, which can be accomplished at the time you create a task as depicted in the screenshot above, or by clicking the info button next to any task in a shared list. Also, it’s turned off by default, but Reminders includes a new ‘Assigned to Me’ Smart List that can be displayed in the top section of the app’s sidebar, collecting your assignments.

Another nice touch added to Reminders is the ability to reorder the Smart Lists at the top of the sidebar by dragging them to the position that suits you. People use Reminders in all sorts of different ways, so it makes perfect sense to allow greater customization of the app’s UI. In addition to reordering Smart Lists, they can be hidden by right-clicking on the one you want to hide or going to the View menu.

Reminders has added a number of keyboard shortcuts too. The View menu includes commands to jump to any of the Smart Lists using the keyboard shortcuts ⌘1 - ⌘5. Unfortunately, when you reorder the Smart Lists, the numbered keyboard shortcuts don’t update, meaning if you move ‘Assigned to Me’ from the bottom of the list (position 5) to the top (position 1), the keyboard shortcut for the list remains ⌘5.

Reminders’ search functionality has added results based on notes, locations, and people.

There are a number of other features that make Reminders more versatile too. Search has been improved to return results for people and locations as well as the content inside notes attached to tasks. Similarly, Reminders uses your past tasks to help create new ones, suggesting locations, dates, and times based on similar tasks you’ve completed. Siri suggests tasks that can be added to Reminders from inside Mail now too, which should be a handy way to add tasks without leaving Mail, although I haven’t seen suggestions in my usage of Mail yet.

You can bulk edit due dates now too. Reminders’ Edit and right-click menus include a ‘Mark Due Date as’ command that lets you set the date of a single or group of selected tasks as today, tomorrow, or next weekend. Each command also has an associated keyboard shortcut for rearranging due dates quickly.

Lists can be customized with new SF Symbols and emoji.

Reminders gives you more options for customizing your lists now too. The app already had a color picker and a fairly extensive set of SF Symbols to use when labeling lists, but now, you can use emoji along with 11 new SF Symbols too.

Reminders has evolved from a very basic list maker to a solid task manager. You won’t find some of the highly customizable advanced functionality of apps like OmniFocus and Todoist, but unless you are managing complex projects involving lots of people with multiple stages and dependencies, I always suggest trying Reminders first.

There are lots of terrific third-party task managers available, but the risk of using a task manager that’s more than you need is that you might fall into the trap of spending too much time setting up your app instead of completing tasks. With Reminders, that risk is minimized because the app does such a nice job of keeping its more advanced features out of sight unless you need them, making for an elegant, streamlined experience.

Notes

Notes has added a ‘Top Hits’ section to its search results.

I use Notes a lot. I don’t have a hard and fast system for what goes in Notes instead of another app, but I usually use Notes for research, reference materials, and shared project notes.

Notes is functionally simple and mature, so there aren’t major holes that needed filling. As a result, the changes this year are modest. Search has been enhanced with an on-device, machine-learning-driven ‘Top Hits’ section that sits atop search results. As best I can determine, the app seems to be using a combination of how often and recently the notes are accessed, edited, and the frequency of the search terms in the note to determine what a Top Hit is.

Notes has added buttons to apply bold, italics, underlining, and strikethrough to the ‘Aa’ button in the app’s toolbar.

Keyboard shortcut users will be happy to learn that shortcuts have been added for bulleted lists, dashed lists, and numbered lists. Apple also says that it has enhanced the scans taken with an iPhone or iPad using macOS’s Continuity Camera functionality with sharper scans and improved auto-cropping. Another nice touch is the addition of buttons to add bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough styling to the text of a note, which are accessed by clicking the ‘Aa’ button in Notes’ toolbar. The biggest disappointment with Notes is the inability to collapse lists of pinned notes, which was introduced on iOS and iPadOS this year, but isn’t available on the Mac.

Music

Music includes a new Listen Now section, plus Big Sur’s signature sidebar and toolbar design.

Last year, I was disappointed that Music didn’t become a Mac Catalyst app. The reason I had hoped for the transition was primarily based on the assumption that it would require Apple to jettison a lot of legacy code, which I believe is the source of a lot of bugs in the app. Although that didn’t happen with Catalina, Music has been behaving better for me under Big Sur. Troubles I had connecting to my office HomePod, freeze-ups, and other odd behavior I saw on Catalina have been greatly reduced. It’s still too early to say Big Sur’s iteration of Music is rock solid, but it’s off to a good start.

Music’s sidebar icons match the app’s icon, and instead of a Show/Hide button, the displayed sections of the sidebar are managed by Big Sur’s collapsible outline controls.

Like Apple’s other apps, Music has been redesigned to match Big Sur’s new look. Music already featured a sidebar that ran the length of the app’s window and a title bar-free toolbar. The arrangement of the toolbar has changed a little, but by far, the most noticeable change is the new app icon, which abandons Music’s multi-color branding for a uniform coral color. The same color is mirrored in the app’s UI, with the icons of the Apple Music and Library sections and other controls and iconography taking on the same color.

The Listen Now section has been reorganized and has added new elements that span the width of the content area, like this promotion for a YUNGBLUD interview.

The ‘For You’ section has been renamed ‘Listen Now’ and reorganized to feature a mix of vertically-oriented, card-like elements that suggest music. The top section of Listen Now is Top Picks, a mixture of Apple Music radio stations, playlists, and other content based on your prior listening habits. The remaining sections have been reorganized somewhat too, with ‘Friends Are Listening To’ being elevated to a higher position just before ‘Recently Played,’ for instance. The algorithmically-generated ‘Made For You’ playlists have a new look, too, with animated, abstract backgrounds. Apple has also added sections promoting parts of the Apple Music service that span the width of Music’s content area and surfacing your annual Replay playlists. The Browse section is identical to the Catalina version, but there have been some minor layout changes to Radio that echo the card-like UI elements of Listen Now.

Music’s uninspired and bland search UI in Catalina (top) and Big Sur’s substantial improvement (bottom).

Like iOS and iPadOS, Search has been embellished with a collection of genre-based browse categories. These categories are similar to the categories of music that can be viewed from the bottom of the Browse section, but not identical. The browse categories listed in Search are more limited and appear to be listed by popularity instead of alphabetically. Search has also been enhanced with images that make it easier to pick out the artist or album you’re looking for. A new emphasis on album results is a welcome addition too.

Music on Big Sur is nearly identical to the iPad version. One disappointing omission, though, is the lack of the autoplay feature found in Music on iOS and iPadOS 14. If you’re listening to an album or playlist on an iPhone or iPad, turning on autoplay keeps the music going continuously, playing similar artists after the album or playlist is finished. It’s a small thing, but a feature I’ve enjoyed a lot on iOS and iPadOS. I can’t help but wonder if it’s the sort of feature that would have been more likely to get picked up if Music had transitioned to Mac Catalyst like Messages and Maps.

Music adds the option to show album art back to the app’s Songs view.

Apple has continued to add back features that some users missed from iTunes too. With Big Sur, that’s the ability to display album artwork in the Song list view of your library. The reintroduction of artwork in what is otherwise a spartan database-like view is a nice addition that adds a visual cue to identify albums.

The trouble with the Songs UI, though, is that it feels out of place with the rest of Music. Early betas of Catalina were a bigger departure from iTunes’ spreadsheet-like layout, but in a somewhat un-Apple-like way, the company has walked many of those decisions back, adding back the complexity of iTunes that was the result of having started life as an app for purchased and ripped music. The direction Music’s design has taken clearly favors music streaming, but for better or worse, that’s a future that appears likely to live side-by-side with locally-managed music files, which necessitates a more Finder-like UI for a long time to come.

Photos

Photos has added sliders to precisely control the app’s filters.

Photos has been updated to match features found in iOS and iPadOS. Filters, which were an all or nothing proposition in Catalina, can be dialed in more precisely now with sliders that apply the effect on a scale from 0 to 100. There’s also a new slider for adjusting the intensity of Portrait photo effects at the top of the editing sidebar and a new Vibrance control under the color section. Like iOS and iPadOS, videos now enjoy the same set of editing tools on the Mac as they do on iPhones and iPads. Also, descriptions that could be added by clicking on an image’s info button remain but are now called Captions.

Photos has added a Vibrance control too.

Apple says its retouching tool has been enhanced with machine learning and that Photos generates more relevant Memories slideshows with a wider selection of music and enhanced video stabilization. I don’t spend much time using these features on my Mac, so I don’t have a good point of reference to judge the extent to which they’ve been improved.

This year’s changes to Photos are minor compared to the substantial feature and UI changes made as part of the last couple of macOS updates. It’s nice to see the app settling down. The ability to more precisely control filters and the addition of features debuted on iOS and iPadOS are welcome too. I spend more time browsing photos on my iPhone and iPad, but for large editing jobs and bulk photo management, Photos for Mac remains an important app that I’m glad to see continually refined.

Home

Home’s status section is far more useful than in the past.

My favorite change to the Home app is the redesign of the status section at the top of the home and room views. Previously, only the home view included the status of devices that had been triggered or were unresponsive. That status summary, a truncated text list that acted like a button opening a separate window of active accessories when clicked, wasn’t very useful.

The status section of Home is far more useful than before.

With Big Sur, the status section of your home and room views contains a series of circular buttons and text labels that provide a better overview of which devices are turned on or triggered. For example, if I click on Basement in the sidebar of Home, I can see that five lights are currently turned on. Instead of clicking on a scene to turn them off or clicking on the lights individually from the Accessories section, I can simply click the lightbulb button to turn them all off at once.

The other big improvement to the Home app is the addition of the new sidebar. From here, you can access your full home view, Automations, and any of the rooms you’ve created in the app.

Home’s design in Catalina (top) and Big Sur (bottom).

Previously, Home featured a segmented control for switching between Home, Rooms, and Automation. However, if you wanted to jump between rooms, you had to use a drop-down menu from the Home icon in the toolbar or swipe between rooms using a trackpad. Now, the sidebar and View menu are the only ways to navigate between rooms, which is fine because your rooms are always one click away in the sidebar. The Home button in the toolbar is only used to access home and room settings in Big Sur.

Home has also added new features for cameras that support HomeKit Secure Video. As on iOS and iPadOS, Home now supports facial recognition using the faces saved and named in the Photos app. That way, when a friend or family member arrives at your door, the Home app can tell you who’s there. Users can also define activity zones for cameras to limit video recording and notifications to when motion is detected in the defined zones. Apple announced support for Adaptive Lighting at WWDC too, which will allow users to have the color temperature of their lights change automatically throughout the day, but none of the devices I own support it yet.

Defining an activity zone.

Facial recognition.

I have Logitech Circle 2 cameras in my home. For whatever reason, it wasn’t until very late in the beta period that facial recognition and activity zones showed up in the Home app on my Mac. However, in the limited time I’ve had to test the features, both have worked well, allowing me to assign people to faces my camera recognizes and define activity zones. I’m particularly happy with activity zones because the camera over my front door picks up the sidewalk and part of the street. I don’t want to be notified every time someone drives down the street or walks down the sidewalk, so activity zones have been a big plus.

Overall, I’m happy with the changes to Home. I’ve never been a fan of the chunky tile interface Home uses, but it’s less of an issue on the Mac and iPad now that both use a sidebar. I also appreciate the new status area and sidebar support added to Home with Big Sur. Both make navigating the app and managing devices easier than in the past. Face recognition and activity zones make HomeKit Secure Video far more competitive with services offered by camera makers, too, putting users in more precise control of how they use their cameras.

Mac App Store

The Mac App Store has been a sleepy place since it was announced a decade ago. There are a lot of reasons the Mac App Store hasn’t seen the same sort of success as the iOS and iPadOS App Store. Restrictions on developers who want to distribute apps through the Mac App Store are partially to blame, although those have been loosened somewhat in recent years. The smaller Mac user base and the fact that apps can be purchased outside the Mac App Store contribute to the situation too.

In recent years, Apple has taken steps to breathe new life into the Mac App Store, including adding editorial content and other features similar to the redesign the App Store got on iOS and iPadOS. Still, even a modestly successful app can quickly move up the Mac App Store charts because the traffic flowing through it is so small compared to the iOS Store.

At WWDC Apple announced modest refinements to the Mac App Store that support changes to Safari and Game Center as well as Apple’s privacy initiatives and changes to Family Sharing. As I’ve already mentioned, Safari extensions have been given a separate category to help promote them to users.

Game Center is getting a makeover in Big Sur.

As part of our Summer OS Preview series, I wrote about Apple’s efforts to revitalize Game Center. One aspect of that effort is better integration between Game Center and Apple’s App Stores. Although the feature wasn’t part of the Big Sur betas, the changes will incorporate achievements into the listings for the games that support them, allowing users to continue a game from the point at which they left off, and adding a new category that lists all Arcade titles chronologically. The Store will also add game recommendations based on what your friends are playing.

Beyond games, Apple announced at WWDC that it will be adding better disclosure of developers’ self-reported privacy policies in the Mac App Store, which the company now says is coming on December 8, 2020. The company also noted that developers can opt into Family Sharing for In-App Purchases and subscriptions.

What Apple didn’t reveal until this week’s Mac event was how it would present iOS and iPadOS apps to users who purchase the company’s new M1 Macs. As I covered yesterday, the Mac App Store will include iPhone and iPad apps in app listings and search results that are clearly marked as such and indicate if they have been verified for macOS. We’ll have more on iOS and iPadOS apps coming to M1 Macs after we’ve had a chance to test one. Until then, you can read our coverage of what was announced on MacStories.

Voice Memos

Voice Memos includes pre-populated smart sections alongside user-created folders.

Voice Memos has received a surprising amount of attention in Big Sur. The app for making quick audio recordings has gained a sidebar with three pre-populated smart sections as well as user-created folders for recordings. The top of the sidebar includes a section of All Recordings, Favorites, Watch Recordings made with an Apple Watch, and Recently Deleted recordings. The Watch Recordings, Favorites, and Recently Deleted sections only appear once you’ve made a Watch recording, marked a recording as a favorite, or deleted a recording.

Voice Memos adds an Enhance Audio button in Big Sur that’s visible in the toolbar when you’re in editing mode.

Like iOS and iPadOS, Voice Memos includes an Enhance Audio feature, which is available from the Edit menu or the magic wand toolbar button in the app’s editing view. Enhance Audio seems to reduce background noise and eliminate reverberations to make spoken recordings made in less than ideal conditions easier to understand. The app’s toolbar also adds options to mark recordings as favorites, delete them, and collapse the sidebar. Marking recordings as favorites and moving them to folders is available by swiping across a recording now too. Previously, recordings could only be deleted this way.

Voice Memos isn’t an app that I use regularly, but I feel like perhaps I should start. There are plenty of environments where typing is inconvenient compared to speaking a quick note. Although I don’t expect that I’d use the Mac app to record very often because I’ve got a keyboard readily available for typing in that context, the ability to manage recordings from the Mac app is handy. What I’d love, though, is for Apple to add the ability to transcribe recordings into text to bridge the gap between spoken and written notes.

Podcasts

Podcasts’ Listen Now section has been revamped.

The Listen Now section of the Podcasts app has been updated with new sections. Up Next starts with the next episodes of the shows you’re listening to. That’s followed by a Latest Episodes section, so you always have access to the most recent episode available. To help users discover new podcasts, there are ‘Episodes You Might Like’ and ‘Shows You Might Like’ sections too, which recommend episodes and shows based on your past listening habits.

What’s Missing?

Very little has changed in Books, which is a shame for an app that is so nice on iOS and iPadOS.

In a year of dramatic change on the Mac, it’s not surprising that some apps got left behind, although it’s still disappointing. Chief among those is Books. A standout on the iPhone and iPad, Books hasn’t kept up on the Mac. Last year, the only change was that audiobooks, which used to be part of iTunes, got tacked onto the app. This year, Books remains a lackluster option compared to the iPhone and iPad versions, with only minor tweaks to the app’s toolbar buttons. I suspect fewer people use Books on a Mac, but I still find it handy for reference materials when I’m working, and suspect others do too. In 2021, I hope Books is at the top of Apple’s list of apps that are ported to Mac Catalyst.

What’s Next?

Source: Steve Troughton-Smith.

The one app that I’d still like to see make the transition from iPhone and iPad to the Mac is Shortcuts. I expect there’s a good chance we’ll see it next year. The Home app’s automations are already built on top of Shortcuts, and that code has been part of macOS since Catalina.

The trouble until now has been that aside from Home’s automations, nothing on macOS supports Shortcuts – yet. Soon, Apple will ship the first M1 Macs, which will run iOS and iPadOS apps natively. Suddenly, new Macs will exist that can run apps that are already built to work with Shortcuts. By WWDC next summer, it’s not hard to imagine that Apple will introduce Shortcuts to the Mac, enabling those iPhone and iPad apps, along with other Mac apps, to take advantage of it. Shortcuts on iOS and iPadOS greatly improved its infrastructure this year with the addition of features like folders, satisfying a long-held request from users and hopefully laying the groundwork for integration with macOS too.

Apple’s built-in system apps tell an important part of a broader strategic story. Messages and Maps have been completely rewritten as Mac Catalyst apps. That sends an important message about the company’s commitment to Mac Catalyst to third-party developers and promises to help keep those apps in lockstep with their iOS and iPadOS counterparts in the future – that’s the promise, at least. Whether Mac Catalyst makes it easier to keep the feature set of Messages and Maps on par with the versions running on iPhone and iPad remains to be seen. Still, the introduction of Mac Catalyst versions of two of Apple’s most important apps, complete with traditional Mac-like UIs, is a major step forward for development across Apple’s main computing platforms.

In a browser market increasingly dominated by Chrome, I’m glad to see Apple investing the time and effort into making Safari a competitive, privacy-first alternative. Safari’s extension ecosystem is tiny compared to Chrome and Firefox, and it remains to be seen if developers will be willing to port their extensions to Safari, but it’s heartening to see Apple take steps to improve the situation and promote extensions in the Mac App Store.

With new Macs on the horizon and a top-to-bottom redesign of macOS, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the changes to Apple’s system apps this year is the extent of the updates. With very few exceptions, every app received thoughtful attention to the sort of quality-of-life updates that solidify each app’s position as a solid default solution to satisfy the needs of most users.

System Preferences and Other System Features

System Preferences includes a new set of icons to match Big Sur’s redesign.

I’ve already touched on some of the most noteworthy changes to System Preferences throughout different sections of this review. Notifications, widgets, Control Center, and accent colors can all be adjusted in System Preferences. Like any update to macOS, though, there are many other changes big and small sprinkled throughout System Preferences, which not only has gained new and updated functionality, but also new icons consistent with Big Sur’s overall design direction.

New Desktop Pictures

As with any update to macOS, this one includes new desktop picture options. There six Dynamic Desktops, including an aerial view of the Big Sur, California coastline that changes throughout the day with the time, six Light and Dark Desktop graphics that switch between light and dark versions depending on your light and dark mode settings, plus a series of static photograph wallpapers of Big Sur, California that also include static versions of the Dynamic Desktop and Light and Dark Desktop images.

Apple has also introduced nine images that can be set as your Safari start page backgrounds, including three abstract nature images, three abstract diagonal line patterns, and three patterns with a dominant color and themed with animals, junk food, and beach themes.

You can use one of Big Sur’s nine built-in Safari backgrounds or pick one of your own.

Automatic Audio Routing

AirPods and Beats headphones that use the H1 chip automatically switch between devices as you use them. First introduced with the debut of iOS and iPadOS 14 and watchOS 7, the feature feels like magic. Automatic switching works with the Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, and Mac, allowing you to switch between devices as long as you’re signed into them using the same iCloud account.

A banner is displayed when the audio source switches, providing an additional visual cue of where the audio is coming from, which I like. If you spend a lot of time with AirPods in your ears using multiple devices, this new feature will save a lot of pairing headaches. I’ve seen it get confused at times, but more often than not, the audio was routed from the correct source seamlessly.

Battery

Big Sur’s battery usage history.

Apple added battery health management to macOS Catalina 10.15.5 earlier this year. The feature learns your charging habits and, in some circumstances, reduces your battery’s maximum charge to prolong its life. With Big Sur, Apple has taken battery management to a new level.

Optimized Battery Charging maintains an 80% charge when your battery is plugged in for long periods of time to extend its life. Learning from your usage pattern, the feature will top off your battery just before it expects you to unplug. I don’t have a regular schedule when it comes to plugging and unplugging my MacBook Pro, so I haven’t noticed its battery being managed, but if, for example, you plugged in your laptop before going to bed each night and then unplugged as you left for work or school in the morning, I can imagine Optimized Battery Charging could make a meaningful difference in the longevity of your laptop’s battery.

My MacBook Pro’s battery has seen better days.

Apple has also added a battery usage history similar to what’s found on iOS and iPadOS. You can view both your battery level and Screen On Usage over the past 24 hours or ten days. A separate Battery section alerts you if your battery’s capacity is significantly reduced with a link to how to get it serviced.

According to the Battery section of System Preferences, my battery needs servicing. I’m not surprised that my 2016 MacBook Pro’s battery isn’t what it used to be, or that its battery has drained rapidly on Big Sur while running open and using it to drive a second 4K external display.

Software Updates and Backups

macOS Mojave moved updates to the OS out of the Mac App Store and back to System Preferences where they lived until Lion. With Big Sur, Apple is making the update process faster by beginning update downloads in the background, a trick that videogame consoles have used for big downloads for years. The system volume is now cryptographically signed too to prevent tampering, which also allows those background downloads to begin updating your system.

Also, if you’ve been waiting for Time Machine to be able to back up using APFS-formatted drives, with Big Sur they can.

Security and Privacy

The Security and Privacy section of System Preferences has added a Media and Apple Music section to grant third-party apps permission to access services.

In addition to the other security and privacy features that I’ve touched on in the discussion of Safari and elsewhere, Big Sur adds new options to the Security and Privacy section of System Preferences. Under the Privacy tab of that section, there are now entries for Apple Advertising, Bluetooth, HomeKit, and Media and Apple Music.

Privacy also has a new Bluetooth section for apps that control Bluetooth devices like mice and keyboards.

The Apple Advertising section of Privacy explains the information Apple collects in connection with the advertising on its platforms and provides a checkbox to opt-out of personalized ads. The Bluetooth section gives users control over which apps on their Macs can access Bluetooth wireless functionality. Here you’ll find apps for things like mice, keyboards, trackpads, and other accessories that connect to your Mac via Bluetooth. For example, this is where I found Logitech’s keyboard and mouse setup app Logi Options, which connects wirelessly to those accessories to adjust their settings. Likewise, if you have any apps that connect to devices in your home using HomeKit, you’ll find them in the HomeKit section. Finally, Media and Apple Music gives you the option to grant or deny access by apps to your Apple Music library and other media.

Accessibility

This year saw more accessibility features added to iOS and iPadOS than Big Sur. However, macOS added a new feature that recognizes when someone is using sign language during a Group FaceTime call and automatically makes them more prominent, so it’s easier to see them signing. Certain accessibility settings shortcuts can also be added to Control Center, as I discussed in the Design section above.

Conclusion

The Mac’s future is bright.

There are plenty of things in the world to worry about in 2020. The future of the Mac isn’t one of them.

Until recently, the Mac stood at a crossroads. The path the Mac was on had served it well, but the computing world has changed a lot over the past decade-plus.

As I said at the top of the review, a big part of the difference is the emergence of the iPhone and iPad. Both platforms sprung from OS X roots, but their OSes diverged as the years passed.

Simultaneously, Intel’s processors, which had served the Mac well since 2006, became a roadblock to progress. Chips were delayed, hampering Mac advances. Meanwhile, Apple was developing chipsets of its own that were meeting and exceeding the performance of Intel’s chips in some cases. In addition to raw computing power, Apple’s low-powered ARM SoCs have also allowed it to introduce new functionality in iPhones and iPads that it couldn’t achieve with Intel’s processors.

The combination of circumstances left the Mac in a precarious posture. The Mac wasn’t exactly in crisis, but it was stuck on a separate, slower trajectory from Apple’s other products with a cloudy future. Faced with this dilemma, Apple could have chosen to remain on the path it was on or set off in another direction. With Catalina last year, it was clear that the company had chosen a new destination.

It would be going too far to say that the Mac hasn’t benefitted from the popularity of the iPhone, but there are still too few of the best iOS apps on the Mac. That isn’t a concern for existing Mac users who have found a set of apps that work for them, but it is a problem for new users, as are the subtly different ways the OSes work. Together, the issues create friction that restricts Mac adoption.

Apple has embarked on a multifaceted campaign to reimagine the Mac.

Instead of letting the Mac continue on its own uncertain trajectory, Apple has embarked on a multifaceted campaign to reimagine the Mac and integrate it better into its product lineup. The entire blueprint for the Mac’s future has yet to be revealed, but it’s clearly an ambitious plan that necessitates hardware and software changes that will affect every Mac user and developer.

Apple’s switch to its own chips will allow the company to build Macs that take advantage of things like the Neural Engine, high-performance and high-efficiency CPU cores, and other features of the company’s iPhone and iPad SoCs that are tuned specifically to the hardware they power. The new SoCs should enable Apple to take the Mac in new design directions in the future too.

Big Sur is a significant departure from its predecessors. The OS takes aim at several different goals, but the most important for the Mac’s future are Big Sur’s design, its commitment to Mac Catalyst, and the conspicuous use of SwiftUI.

It’s fair to wonder why Apple felt the need to roll out a top-to-bottom redesign of macOS’s UI at the same time it’s transitioning to a new hardware architecture. Part of it is to send a visual message that the Mac is entering a new era, but it’s a practical change too.

Apple hasn’t unified its OSes, creating a one-size-fits-all OS that spans all of its products, but Big Sur does meet its closest neighbor, the iPad, partway with its new design. It’s a careful balancing act. Apple has clearly stated that its goal with the redesign was to create something familiar to Mac users. Left unstated, though, is that the design is meant to be familiar and welcoming to iPad users, too, and dovetails neatly with the tablet’s Mac-like design elements such as its new sidebar. The result brings the Mac and iPad closer together while helping iPadOS assert independence from iOS. Although it takes some getting used to, on balance, I think Big Sur’s new design succeeds.

Design is just part of the story, though. Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI are equally important parts of the story for developers and, ultimately, users. Apple reaffirmed its commitment to Mac Catalyst by significantly improving it with Optimized for Mac and moving Messages and Maps to it. The company has also sent an important message to developers about SwiftUI by using it to bring widgets to the Mac. There are still rough edges, but the role of each underlying development technology is much more clear with the release of Big Sur than it was with Catalina.

Where WWDC 2019 left developers confused about the roles SwiftUI, Mac Catalyst, and AppKit would play going forward, WWDC 2020 told a much more compelling story that’s embodied in Big Sur. It’s a complex story, to be sure, but so is the app ecosystem. By creating different paths for developers to bring their apps to the Mac, Apple has taken a pragmatic approach that maximizes the chance that developers in all sorts of circumstances will find developing for the Mac attractive.

Whether the trajectory that Apple has set for the Mac is successful remains to be seen. That will ultimately be judged by users. Still, even before knowing much about M1 Macs, I’m excited. Big Sur isn’t perfect, and its design will surely continue to evolve as it has over the course of its betas. Despite some rough edges, though, I think macOS 11 strikes an appropriate balance between where the Mac has been and where it’s going.

In the final analysis, I go back to what I said about the Mac in my Catalina review:

There’s no greater threat to the Mac than resistance to change that exists not because the change is worse, but because it’s different.

‘Different’ requires that users make adjustments, and invariably, some aspects of Big Sur will catch on more than others, requiring adjustments by Apple too. That’s part of the iterative process of software development. However, when I peer in the direction of the path that’s been chosen for the Mac, I’m heartened. Even though that path is fraught with risk and the destination isn’t clear, the lengths Apple has gone to realign its product lineup and improve the Mac’s position within it demonstrate that the Mac remains as important to Apple as it does to its users.