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Apple officially announced macOS 15 at its Worldwide Developers Conference. The new version, codenamed Sequoia, brings a host of iOS 18 features and some Mac-specific goodies to the devices it supports.
Users who split their time between Windows and macOS will be most excited to see that Apple has finally implemented a form of automatic window tiling in macOS. This makes it easy to automatically arrange windows on your screen without dragging and manually resizing each window individually or switching to full screen mode.
Another feature called iPhone Mirroring sends your iPhone’s screen to your Mac, so you can use apps directly on your phone while handling them using your Mac’s keyboard and trackpad. iPhone audio is also streamed to your Mac. For privacy, your phone’s screen remains locked while apps stream to your Mac, and your Mac can also receive your iPhone notifications alongside your Mac notifications (no information on how operating systems handle duplicate notifications from Messages, Calendar, or apps others that get the same updates on both platforms).
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For gamers, Apple announced the second version of the Game Porting Toolkit, which makes it easier to bring Windows games to macOS and macOS games to iOS and iPadOS.
Some of the changes also mirror those Apple announced in the iOS and iPadOS portions of the presentation, including RCS support and expanded Tapback interactions in Messages, a redesigned Calculator app that mirrors the app presented on iPad, and a Math Notes feature for writing equations in the Notes app. All Apple platforms, as well as Windows, are also getting a new passwords app which should be able to replace many standalone password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden.
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All Apple operating systems will also benefit from some of Apple’s new AI-based capabilities, including image creation and an updated Siri that is based on a large language model (LLM). In Apple’s demo, Siri was aware of the contents of your screen and could directly engage with apps, understanding the context of previous requests while processing follow-up requests. The entire operating system will also get support for the “summarize” typed text feature, allowing users to highlight parts of an email or note and let the operating system summarize them. Voice Memos and the Phone app will also gain new transcription and summarization capabilities, and Image Playground will let you create custom images and emojis in Messages, Notes, and other apps.
Apple Intelligence features will generally require a Mac with an Apple M1 chip or later, though we’ll need more details on where Apple draws the lines between locally processed and cloud-processed AI features.
The developer beta of macOS Sequoia will be released today, followed by more thorough public betas in July. As usual, the full release will be available this fall.
