Intro; Apple have
just released Mac OS Ventura, their 2022 iteration of their annual Mac OS update,
and with it comes a host of performance improvements and fixes, as well as some
brand new features. There’s too much included to possibly cover everything, but what I wanted to
do in this video was showcase the 10 new features and updates that I think will give you the most
bang for your buck. Stick with me until the end of this video, so you don't miss a thing.
OK, let’s get into it.
01 - Stage Manager; By far the most significant change to Mac
OS this year is the inclusion of Stage Manager, a feature that, as far as I’m aware, was built with
the iPad in mind, but is worth knowing about here on the Mac as well. This is a big change,
because it’s essentially bringing about a whole new method of multitasking. It’s also, if I’m
honest, not the most intuitive part of Apple’s new software, so let me show you how it works.
To enable it, head up to this menu in the upper right of the screen and click on
Stage Manager. If you’re doing this for the first time, you’ll also get a prompt asking
you to confirm that you’d like to enable it. Once it’s switched on, it’s not immediately
obvious that anything has changed, but you’ll notice the difference once you start to use it.
So, for the sake of illustration, I’ve currently not got any apps open on my Mac. Let’s open
Safari. Notice that Safari opens with this gap down the left hand side of the screen. Now,
watch what happens if I also open Reminders. See how Reminders opens, with the same dimensions as
Safari did, but notice that Safari has shifted over to the left of the screen,
the apps have kind of swapped? This is known as a thumbnail, and thumbnails exist here on the
left of the display. At it’s most basic level, I can click between open apps by
putting my cursor here, and clicking on the thumbnail to jump between the two open apps.
Let’s open another app. I’ll open News, and again you can see how Stage Manager is functioning. We
now have 2 apps showing as thumbnails to the left of my screen, with our current app showing here
in the centre. Again, at it’s most basic, this is how you can use Stage Manager. But you can
have multiple apps in one thumbnail if you wish. So, let’s jump back to Safari. I’m then going to
click on Reminders, but instead of just clicking on it, I’m going to drag it across to where Safari
is. Now, notice what happens if I click on News. See how Safari and Reminders are showing in their
own thumbnail on the left, and News is on it’s own here. This is another example of
how you can use Stage Manager, by creating almost mini-desktops with a collection of apps that you
want to be using at the same time, and bouncing through them that way. So I could for example,
position Reminders and Safari to take up half the screen each, and then bounce from those two apps,
exactly as I left them back to News, and vice versa. And you can do this with more than 2 apps,
this is just an example, although I’d say you have to keep in mind the size of your display,
I’ve got this running on my 14 inch Macbook Pro, and 2 apps on screen at the same time
is really the most I’d ever use here. It will work on external displays, so if you’re running
something larger, you can obviously make much more use of this. You can of course close windows by
using the red button, or quit apps the usual way, but if you press the yellow button now,
the app will switch over to a thumbnail, rather than the bottom as it would have done before.
And finally, if you want to switch Stage Manager off, simply reverse the steps for switching it on.
Integration; Samsung Before we continue,
a quick word from the sponsor of today’s video, Samsung. This is the T7 Touch, an SSD from their
T7 range, and as the name suggests, it comes with a built-in touch feature, allowing a
convenient and secure way to access your data. The drive comes in a range of storage capacities
and they each come in silver or black. Performance is impressive, its USB 3.2 Gen 2 capability means
that with the right port, you’ll see extremely quick transfer speeds between the T7 Touch and
your device even on larger files, like high-spec video. We’re talking sequential read-write speeds
of up to 1,050 and 1,000 megabytes respectively, and it’s the combination of all these factors that
make the T7 Touch such a compelling SSD offering. Characteristic of the T7s, it’s small but far from
fragile. Backed up by a 3-year limited warranty, Samsung claim this sleek drive can withstand falls
of up to 2 metres, more than covering you for things like your desk, in your pocket or even
the roof of your car, if like me, you bundle stuff on there whilst you look for your keys!
The touch element is extremely user-friendly - it offers you the ultimate shortcut for
maximum privacy. A touch of your fingerprint here will unlock your AES-256 bit secure
password. You’re effectively doubling up on an already super standard of encryption.
So if the power of this palm-sized SSD has got you thinking about the best way to travel with
your data, I’ve included a link for you to find out more, in this video’s description.
02 - Mail; The mail app has
seen huge changes in iOS recently, but until now those changes were only available on the iPhone,
leaving the Mac playing catchup. Thankfully, those same improvements have now been brought
to the Mac. There are 4 main changes. First up, when you send an email,
you now have the option of unsending it, visible down in the bottom left of the screen. By default,
this will show for 10 seconds after you hit send, although you can change this
duration by going to your Mail Settings, then choosing Composing, and changing it here. You
can either switch it off, or you can change it to 10 seconds, 20 seconds or 30 seconds.
You can also delay the sending of an email, specifying when you’d like to send it. To do this,
instead of hitting the Send button, press the arrow next to it, and choose from the
available options. Send Later will allow you to specify both a date and a time to send the email,
which is great if you want to be more granular than the stock options allow.
There’s now a FollowUp function, although you may have to include it in your Mailboxes, I don’t
think it shows by default, and to do this, press this little Plus icon up here in your Favourites,
and then choose the Follow Up option from the list. Follow Up is any emails that you send,
where your Mac recognises that you’d be expecting a reply back from the recipient, those emails will
show in here. It’s a handy tool for allowing you to keep track of your correspondence, although if
you feel that an email shouldn’t be in here, you can right-click on it and choose Ignore Follow Up.
Another mailbox addition is Remind Me, you would add it to your Mailbox the same way that we just
added Follow Up. When reviewing an email, you can right-click on it and choose Remind Me,
and then specify exactly when you’d like to be reminded about that email. This is really handy,
I’ve wanted a function like this for such a long time, I often get work related emails
on my phone when I’m out and away from my desk, and I don’t want to interrupt
my personal time by responding to the email, but then I often forget to reply to it later.
This allows me to choose exactly when to be reminded of the email.
Oh, one last improvement worth mentioning in Mail. Now, if you type something like
“please see attached”, or anything that implies that you’ve attached something,
but then hit the send button without actually attaching anything, Mail will prompt you to
double-check if you need to attach something, before sending, which is a nice little addition.
03 - System Settings; Right, let’s talk System Settings,
because I think it’s obvious that this has had a major facelift. It’s worth pointing out that,
as far as I know, everything you could previously access via Settings remains here,
it’s just a different method of navigating around now. Everything related to your Apple
ID sits up at the top, clicking there will show you things like your password and security,
your payment methods, purchases, devices, all that good stuff.
Below that you’ve got a section where you can manage your Family account,
if you’ve got one setup.
You then have all of your Settings underneath that, broken down and
grouped into logical sections. You’ve got network related settings grouped together,
and as you scroll down the list, you can see all of the different options available to you.
If you’re after something specific, use the search box up in the top left to find it.
04 - Spotlight Improvements; I’m a massive fan of Spotlight Search,
and it’s even better now in the latest Mac OS. As a reminder, tap Command and the Spacebar to
access Spotlight search, and type in whatever you’re looking for. For example, you can now
use the Space bar to preview an item directly from Spotlight search, rather than having to
click on it to open it fully, which is useful if you’re working through a number of search results,
looking for one thing in particular. Just search, use your arrow keys to move down
the results, and press the space bar to preview something like a PDF, an image or a document.
05 - Continuity Camera; This one has the potential
to be an absolute game-changer for a lot of people. A couple of key reasons why webcams
aren’t as good as the cameras you get on your phone is cost, and form factor, with the latter
being of particular importance. Essentially, it’s borderline impossible to fit the optics
needed for a good webcam into a laptop display that’s paper thin. Contrast that with the camera
array on the rear of your iPhone for example, and you can see why your phone’s camera looks great,
but your laptops’ camera doesn’t. Well, if you have a Mac and a compatible iPhone, and that’s any
iPhone from a XR or later, you can now combine them to create the best of both worlds. When
you’re running Ventura on your laptop and have a compatible iPhone associated with your Apple ID,
next time you access something like FaceTime on your laptop, you’ll be given the option
to use Continuity Camera. Your computer connects wirelessly to your phone, using it’s camera and,
optionally, it’s microphone also, and as you can see if I demo the difference
between my 2021 M1 Pro Macbook Pro’s built in webcam, versus the camera on my iPhone 14 Pro,
the difference is staggering. Belkin have just launched a Magsafe attachment to allow you to
clip your phone to the top of your Macbook screen, I’ve not got one yet, but you can use any method
you like of propping your phone up. So, next time you’re travelling, and you want a webcam
setup that’s almost as good as setting up a professional setup at home, give this a go!
06 - Photos Improvements; The Photos app has seen a
few major changes. Firstly, in-line with iOS, your Recently Deleted and Hidden albums are
now locked by default, and you’d use your computer password or biometrics to unlock
them. I think it’s pretty obvious why this is helpful, but at least you now know that,
even if someone gains access to your computer, your, erm, special photos can remain hidden from
view. Both albums show here on the left, and the lock icon shows you that the albums are locked.
Another key change is the ability to copy the subject of a photo,
and then paste that into another app. This works better with some photos than with others,
and it will work in lots of different parts of Mac OS, including Photos,
but also including things like Safari. Here on the Mac, to perform this action, right-click
and if you see Copy Subject, click there, and you can then paste into whatever app you like.
Speaking of Copying and Pasting, if you make changes to a photo,
and you have a bunch of very similar photos where it would make sense to simply copy and
paste the edits to the other images, you can head to Image on the photo that you Edited, and
choose Copy Edits. You would then head to another photo, click on Image, and choose Paste Edits.
And finally in Photos, the app will now help you to identify and merge
duplicates. Click on the Duplicates option in the menu on the left,
then review the photos and merge any that you would like to merge. Note that Photos will
always choose the higher resolution file with the most metadata to save, so when you lose an image,
it should always be the image that you’d be less likely to want in the long-run.
The Proper Weekly; By the way, if you’re
enjoying the content, why not consider signing up for my newsletter, The Proper
Weekly? I include some tech news, a behind the scenes of what’s happening here on the channel,
as well as a tip for a product in the Apple ecosystem. The newsletter goes out each Friday,
it’s free to sign up, and I’ll include the sign up link in the description of this video.
07 - Messages changes Again, there are more
changes to Messages to bring the Mac version in-line with the iOS version, but you can now
Edit and Unsend messages that you send via the Messages app. Now, this will only work with
messages being sent to other iMessage users, not SMS messages, so both you and the recipient will
need to have an Apple device running the latest operating system for this to work.
Essentially, once you’ve sent a message, you can right click on the message and choose Undo Send
to undo the sending of the message, or Edit to allow you to edit the message that’s been sent.
08 - 2 New Apps; I guess it’s up to you if you think these are
useful or not, but Apple have brought a couple of long-time iPhone only apps to the Mac, and they’re
actually both pretty good. You now have a dedicated Clock app, and a dedicated Weather app.
Looking first at the Clock, it’s broken down into the same 4 options you get on your iPhone, with
a World Clock, an Alarm function, a Stopwatch and a Timer function. I particularly like the daytime
and nighttime illustration that you can see on the World Clock, if you’re someone who operates
with people on lots of different timezones, this is definitely going to come in handy.
The second app is Weather, and if you’re a weather nerd, you’re going to have a lot of
fun here. Everything can be clicked on, and there’s an almost overwhelming amount of data
available to you, so it’s definitely worth having a play around on both of these apps in my opinion.
09 - Add Stops in Maps; Again, and I think you can
probably see a theme with this Mac OS update, this is another function that’s come to iOS,
that’s being rolled out here, you can now add stops in Maps. When you’re creating a route
in Map, input your start location and your end location, then choose Add Stop. Choose
the location that you’d like as your stop, and then use the app to move the stop into
whatever position in your route you’d like it to be. You can do this for up to 15 locations,
so if you’re planning even a major roadtrip, this should be useful for you. Remember that,
once you’ve got a route planned, you can then choose File, and Send to Device,
to send the route that you just planned to your Phone, ready for you to go in your car.
10 - Security Responses; The final tip isn’t exactly an exciting one,
but it’s an important one. Typically, if Apple release a security update for Mac OS,
it requires them to release a full Mac OS update. Moving forward, that won’t be the case,
and Apple will be able to release security updates as much smaller, and therefore faster
to deploy updates. Head to System Settings, then General, then Software Update. Ensure that you’ve
got Automatic Updates toggled on, but then if you’d like to specify that this only happens
for security updates only, and not full Mac OS updates where you might want a bit more control,
you can do that by clicking on the Info button, and making your choices.
End; So there you go, those are the 10
changes that I think are most significant in the latest version of Mac OS Ventura. There are other
changes of course, but I think those are the ones that most people will get the most use of. What
about you, any changes in the latest Mac OS that you’re really appreciating? Or, any changes that
you think should have made their way but didn’t? Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.