All The Best New Features in macOS Sonoma

MacOS Sonoma might not be getting the same buzz as iOS 17

but there are a lot of exciting new features you can try once you update your Mac. And I'm going to show you all of them

Let's start with the Arial ScreenSaver. This is the best feature of the Apple TV

and now it's finally on the Mac. You can configure which aerial screens

you have active in system settings. Now with the default settings, your display will probably turn off

before the screensaver has a chance to run. So click Lock Screen Settings to make the adjustment

Make sure that turn display off runs longer than start screen saver

Now go back to screen saver, scroll all the way down, and I like to click Shuffle All

Or you can pick a specific set or just a specific scene that you want to see

It'll keep downloading new ones to keep afresh. Now here's where it gets really cool

If you check, show as wallpaper. Then when you type in your password and unlock your Mac

it'll slowly come to a stop and become your new background, wherever it is

And when you turn your screensaver on again, it'll pick up, right where it left off. You got to be careful though because you will find yourself just staring

at your Mac. Widgets. You can now put widgets anywhere on the desktop. You just right-click

click edit widgets, and you'll see this little drawer pull-up. Just like on iOS, you can scroll through

all of the available widgets you have. You can swipe through the different sizes and styles

Then you can just click and drag and drop it on the desktop. All of the icons that you have

will shuffle out of the way. You can freely place the widgets anywhere. but when you put two of them next to each other, they'll snap into place and perfectly line up

And they don't clutter up your desktop too much when any other app is in the foreground

They'll fade into the background, blending in with your wallpaper. Now, some of these widgets are from apps that actually don't have a corresponding Mac app

They're actually beamed over from your iPhone when it's nearby. So you can still have all of the same widgets, all the same information

and all the same interactivity that you're used to on your iPhone. Next up there are new effects you can apply when you using your camera whether it the camera built into your MacBook your studio display or an iPhone connected over a continuity camera You access these using the camera item in the menu bar

There are these full-screen reactions that are triggered when you do certain gestures with

your hands, like if you give a double thumbs up, you'll see those fireworks

Wonderful. You can give heart hands. Isn't that lovely? You can turn these off by toggling the green button next to the word reactions

or you can click this disclosure arrow to see even more. There's thumbs up, thumbs down, balloons for celebration

confetti for celebration, stormy rain for celebration, and my personal favorite, Lasers

There are a few more practical effects you can apply as well

Portrait, for example, will intelligently blur your background, and you can turn the effect up, or you can turn it down or, you know

leave it somewhere in the middle. This will work a little better than the feature is built into Google Meet

Zoom, and Skype because it's leveraging the power of Apple Silicon and processing the video straight as it comes out of the camera

So as you can see, it works really fast and pretty well, uncropping my hand

but, of course, it still messes up like the loose strands of hair on my head here and there

If you want to keep your background a little tastefully blurred, this is a much nicer way to do it

In a similar vein, you can turn on Studio Light. This will brighten your face and sort of dim the background behind you if you're in a room with bad lighting conditions

If you're using a studio display or an iPhone connected by continuity camera, you can also turn on Center Stage

This will intelligently zoom into my face as I back away from the camera

and zoom back in when I get closer. Now this gets even more extreme if you set it to ultra wide

Using the ultra wide camera it can track me pretty much no matter where I go in the room If I go over here this is great if you have multiple people in the shot

because it will always keep them perfectly centered. It's like having a camera operator on your Mac

And you can always re-center yourself by turning it back off again. Next up are some new features coming to Safari

You can now create different browsing profiles. So before you could create tab groups

and tab groups have their own tabs that, sync across devices. This is great for organizing different personal projects. But of course

even different tab groups all access to the same pool of saved passwords, browsing data

logged in accounts, cookies. Well, a different profile will have its own set of all that data

It'll even have its own set of tab groups. That way you don't have to constantly switch

between your personal Google account and your work one or your school one. They'll be completely

separated from each other. You can turn any website you visit into an app that lives on the dock

so you can separate things like Gmail, Spotify, the stuff you keep open 24-7, from all the other tabs

that you just use for browsing. When you unlock your computer, any private browsing tabs are

protected behind your passcode or touch ID. You can hold the shift key down to select multiple

tabs at once if you want to drag them in bulk into a different window or into a different tab group

Moving along to some other apps, photos will now detect pictures of pets as well as people

You can still assign them a name and it'll collect all of their pictures in one place. In my testing, it works with dogs, cats, and raccoons, but not birds

You can convert a list in reminders into a groceries list. Right click on its name in the sidebar, click Showlist Info, and set list type to groceries

It'll automatically sort the items into categories like meat, produce, frozen foods, etc

If you pay for Apple News Plus or the Apple One bundle, you will now get crosswords in Apple News

Every day you get a new full-size crossword and a new mini crossword. They get progressively harder through the week, and they are a lot of fun

In weather you can now see what the temperature and conditions were yesterday If you just click on any of these widgets you can see yesterday data in addition to the forecast You will also see a new

widget that shows you highly detailed information about the phase of the moon. You have a full

calendar, you have a scrubbable timeline that tells you down to the hour what the moon will look like

Cool. The keyboard now has smarter autocorrect that will learn how you type over time and give

you better predictive text. If you see it auto-completing a sentence, you just hit the space bar

to fill it in. In system settings and passwords, you cannot create a group of shared passwords

that sync with somebody else over iCloud. And this is perfect for sharing streaming services

login information, bank accounts with your family. Game mode comes on automatically when you put

a game in full screen mode on your Mac. It'll give it more system resources and graphics power

for higher frame rates and supposedly better connectivity with wireless. game controllers and AirPods, according to Apple

I personally didn't notice a difference, but I also have the latest M2 Pro Mac Mini

You might notice a difference if you have an older M1 model or a display with a higher refresh rate

There are some great little convenience features too. Auto-fill codes now work with email, not just text messages

And you can have the emails automatically deleted from your inbox after it auto-fills

I definitely turn that on. If you open up a PDF form in Notesmail or preview, you have this new button that will make it super easy

to fill out. It'll select all of the text boxes and give you text fields that you can just

type in, you can check the check boxes, and just drop a signature on a signature line. In a future

update, it'll even auto-fill this information, just like in Safari. Last and certainly not least

you have a little floating bubble that tells you when you've left caps lock on. So be sure to update

to Maco a Sonoma on September 26, try out some of these features. If you'll learn something

in this video, be sure to like and subscribe. I'm Deaconne Jones. with Cult of Mac