MAJOR UPDATE

What’s new in macOS Sonoma

Desktop widgets, Game Mode and much more!

With macOS Sonoma, work and play on your Mac are even more powerful. Here’s a look at a few of the standout features, along with apps and games to get the most out of them – hand-picked by our editors.

Widgets on the desktop

By letting you see key info from your favourite apps at a glance, widgets make checking the weather, upcoming appointments, urgent tasks and more incredibly quick. And in macOS Sonoma, widgets are even more powerful.

You can now put widgets right on your Mac desktop, and they can be interactive. Mark a task as complete, play a song, turn on a light – all directly from a widget. No need to open an app!

And with Continuity, you can use widgets for your favourite iPhone apps on your Mac.

When you’re working in other apps, desktop widgets intelligently adapt to your wallpaper so you can stay focused.

Try these Mac apps that offer outstanding widgets:

Game Mode

There’s never been a better time to game on Mac – and not just because of the incredible power of Apple silicon. With Game Mode in macOS Sonoma, playing the latest titles is a richer, more immersive experience.

On Mac with Apple silicon, Game Mode provides smoother gameplay and more consistent frame rates by ensuring games get the highest CPU and GPU priority, while lowering usage for background tasks. Game Mode also gives game controllers and AirPods better responsiveness by dramatically reducing latency.

Game Mode works with every game and activates automatically whenever you play a game.

Try it out with these incredible Mac games, and follow new releases and updates in “The Latest Must-Play Mac Games” on the Discover tab of the Mac App Store:

Safari Profiles

The Profiles feature in Safari makes it easy to separate your browsing activity – including bookmarks, history, Tab Groups, website data and which extensions are active – for personal, work and school use. After you set up a profile, it syncs across all your devices, and it can turn on automatically when you switch to a specific Focus.

The latest Safari also gets a more secure Private Browsing feature and lets you create a web app from any website and add it to the Dock.

Try out Profiles with some of our favourite Safari extensions:

And much more...

Don’t miss these other features and improvements that make macOS Sonoma an amazing update.

Video conferencing

Make presentations more engaging by putting your camera video over whatever content you’re sharing. Reactions let you respond with balloons, hearts and other effects – and trigger those effects with a hand gesture. A new screen-sharing picker, a dedicated Video menu and new ways to choose which window to share make it easier than ever to share content.

It’s simpler to screen-share with a new screen-sharing picker, a dedicated Video menu bar item and new ways to select which window to share.

Use new camera options and reactions with any video-conferencing app.

Screen savers

Fill your login screen and Lock Screen with slow-motion videos filmed in Yosemite National Park, Monument Valley and other gorgeous locations.

Screen Sharing

When you have a fast connection, the Screen Sharing app’s new high-performance mode improves frame rates and audio latency, making even remote editing in Final Cut Pro possible.

Accessibility

Made for iPhone hearing devices can now be paired directly to newer Mac computers, and the Personal Voice feature lets people at risk of speech loss create a synthesised voice that sounds like them for use with Live Speech.

Messages

Swipe right on any text bubble to reply inline. Find a specific message using multiple search filters. And use the new sticker drawer to access in one place all your stickers (including Live Stickers you created on iPhone and iPad), emoji and Memoji.

Your desktop and login screen have never looked so good.

Passwords

Now when you share passwords and passkeys with friends and family, changes sync seamlessly to everyone’s devices.

Privacy and security

Communication Safety, a tool that warns children if they receive or attempt to send photos that may contain nudity, now works with videos and photos in Messages, the systemwide photo picker and third-party apps; and it can blur sensitive videos and photos before children view them. And Lockdown Mode, which protects against highly sophisticated cyberattacks, is even more secure in Sonoma.

Notes

Store and browse multiple PDFs right in a note, link related notes from within other notes and easily convert a note into a Pages document.

Autocorrect

Autocorrect is now more accurate – and a new design makes correcting mistakes easier than ever. The new predictive-text feature can help you quickly finish sentences, while Dictation is more accurate and is more convenient to use with your keyboard.

PDF support

The enhanced AutoFill feature can quickly fill PDF forms using saved contact info.

Music

Collaborative playlists let friends add, reorder and remove songs. And you can now use emoji to react to others’ tracks on the Now Playing screen.

Get to know macOS Sonoma

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