Functional Not Flashy: The Top 6 New Features in MacOS Sonoma

It wasn't a big year for macOS at WWDC, with Apple focused on the much higher-profile Apple Vision Pro announcement, not to mention impressive new Mac computers and laptops.

But what the company did announce for its OS is sure to please certain types of users, including business pros, gamers, and web app fans (like me). Apple Vision Pro may have grabbed the headlines, but many more folks will use macOS Sonoma than visionOS, at least during this decade.

A macOS Sonoma public beta is expected sometime in July, and the full release should come out in September, as per Apple's customary annual schedule. Notable for its absence is any mention of generative AI, which Microsoft is building into Windows with Copilot. Nevertheless, here are the standout new features of Apple's upcoming desktop OS update (if you have a post-2018 Mac(Opens in a new window).)

In previous macOS versions, widgets were relegated to the notification sidebar on the right side of the desktop. With Sonoma, you can place them anywhere on the desktop. So as not to be distracting, widgets on the desktop go transparent and tint to match your wallpaper when you open an app window. If you use widgets on an iPhone, you can put them on your Mac desktop, too. Some have likened these "anywhere widgets" to the desktop widgets introduced by Microsoft in Windows Vista back in 2006, though widgets reappeared in Windows 11, where they’re (for now) relegated to their own panel. What goes around comes around.

Apple has never been the first choice for playing PC games, but the company is hoping to change that with a new Gaming mode for Macs with Apple Silicon processors. The company even trotted out game developer legend Hideo Kojima at WWDC 2023 to announce that a director's cut of his company's 2019 game Death Stranding is coming to the Mac. The new macOS Game mode, similar to Windows’ Game Mode, will free up system resources from background tasks so the game can take advantage of them. The mode is also intended to reduce latency for Xbox and PlayStation game controllers.

Business users, among others, frequently have to participate in video conferences, and Apple has introduced some features that elevate this experience, whether you’re using Zoom, Teams, or Webex. The Presenter Overlay feature lets users display a thumbnail or cutout image of themselves over a shared desktop. Also new are reaction videos, which add balloons and streamers to your own video feed.

With many websites resembling applications more and more, web browser developers have come up with progressive web apps (PWAs), which let you use a website the way you would an app, putting an entry in the Taskbar or Dock and removing distracting browser frame elements. With Sonoma, these come to macOS.

Sonoma also enhances privacy in Safari's Private Browsing mode with more fingerprinting protection. And similar to Firefox's Containers, Safari profiles will let you keep separate instances for different web accounts, so you could have two different Gmail accounts logged in at the same time, for example.

Apple pitches high-performance screen sharing as a feature for video content creators, saying that the Screen Sharing app gets a performance mode that reduces latency and increases bitrates while editors work on the same project. It's intended to work with Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve for video editing, or with Maya for animating complex 3D assets.

At WWDC 2023, Apple announced several new iOS and iPadOS features, which will also come to macOS Sonoma. They include new custom stickers in Messages; secure password sharing between family members; automatic form filling in PDFs and PDFs linked to Notes; and no longer needing to say "hey" to invoke Siri by voice (just say "Siri" the way you say "Alexa"). Apple also says autocorrect, Reminders, and AirDrop privacy have been improved.

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