The Mac is definitely starting to look like the iPhone

The general trend of macOS releases over the years is that it’s getting closer to the look and feel of iOS. The icons have become iOS icons, and their sizes have become iOS sizes, and you can now use your iPhone as a Mac’s webcam, etc etc. It sometimes comes at the expense of other functionality (ask me how I feel about the new Settings menu), but it’s the direction Apple has clearly (arguably) been going since Big Sur. Is. From time to time, other cool features are announced (Stage Manager, Universal Control, Quick Notes) that I write a lot about and then never use.

So, good news for continuity fans: that’s basically what’s happening with Sonoma. The Ventura looks a lot like the iOS, and the Sonoma looks similar too More like ios. I turned on my office Mac Studio after installing the developer beta and thought for a second that maybe I was confusing my iPhone’s lockscreen. This is remarkably reminiscent.

But if that wasn’t enough of an iPhone vibe for you, Other The big update with this public beta is that you can now place widgets on your desktop. Widgets! They color intelligently based on the color of your desktop, and they’re available for various Apple apps, including Safari, Contacts, and Podcasts.

Now, that’s neat. This strikes me as one of those iOS carryovers that doesn’t mean much on a computer. Personally, I think the advantage of widgets on the iPhone is largely that you glance at them when you’re grocery shopping or waiting for the bus or whatever and you have There is no time to open the actual app. The use case for placing them on the computer desktop isn’t as obvious to me – I almost never have the opportunity to quickly glance at my computer’s blank desktop while doing something else normally. I suspect that the primary effect of having widgets on the desktop is that it makes your Mac look more like your iPhone. I hope third-party developers can find fun and exciting use cases for desktop widgets until Sonoma is fully released (but let’s be honest, you never really know about that).

Once we get past the Continuity stuff, we usually get to the part of macOS where Apple’s services are desperate to compete with their third-party competitors. Video conferencing is huge this year; New video conferencing features come with Sonoma. These aren’t just for FaceTime – they seem to work in Zoom too, at least. The one I find most ridiculous is called Presenter Overlay, which is exactly what you’d expect from the title. For example, if you’re giving a PowerPoint presentation to coworkers and sharing your screen, the presenter overlay can overlay your video feed as you talk over the presentation. It can either drop your whole face and body right there or — and this is 100 percent what I’ll be doing on every video call from now on — just stick your face in a little bubble that you can move around the screen in real time. Can rotate.

New 3D reactions are also available, including hearts, balloons, and my favorite, the thumbs-down. Sorry folks, but I’ll thumbs-down you all in 3D at some point.

Another kind of cool thing: Safari now has profiles. With this feature, the browser continues to keep pace with the features Chrome has had for centuries. Like Chrome, different profiles can have different bookmarks, history, tab groups, cookies, and favorites, and they sync across devices. However, unlike Chrome, you can label Safari profiles specifically for use cases like Work and Personal. And while I mostly see the primary use case of browser profiles as different sets of bookmarks, I’m also intrigued by the fact that you can add a specific focus to different profiles. If I used focus (I don’t), I would probably do the same.

There are other things. A new game mode, which we’ll fully test once it’s finalized, will make the game more playable on macOS. There are new search filters in Messages, the Screen Sharing app has got a high-performance mode, and AutoCorrect has a new language model. But after using Sonoma for a few days, the primary difference in experience is that it feels a lot like iOS, even in areas where it doesn’t seem to make much sense. The journey of sustainability continues. Download the Sonoma Public Beta to be a part of it.