And I get the impulse: While I mostly use macOS on a 27-inch iMac display, most Mac users are on small laptop displays, and on small widescreen displays, every vertical pixel saved is crucial. I guess we should’ve seen this coming: Apple’s been collapsing window chrome and toolbars for a few years now on the Mac. The new version of Safari collapses the traditional two-row interface at the top of the browser into a single row. I think the changes work fairly well on the iPad, but they’re kind of a mess on the iPhone and, unfortunately, the Mac. And this year, Apple has chosen to make dramatic interface changes to Safari across not just macOS but iOS and iPadOS as well. The thing about platform unification is, if Apple makes a dramatic move to change its software, it now does so across all of its platforms. For those without patience, well, let’s take a look at Apple’s work in progress that will be taking shape this summer. For those with patience, consider this a preview of what your Mac might look like this fall. As always, be warned that they’re not ready for release for a reason, and you should never install beta operating systems on devices that you depend on to do your job day-to-day. With the release of the first public beta versions of macOS Monterey (as well as iOS and iPadOS 15), everyone now has the opportunity to give these new operating systems a try.

Apple wants its platforms to share features, but it also recognizes that each serves a different (albeit overlapping) audience. The good news is, for all the recent fears among Mac users that Apple might be attempting to collapse Mac, iPhone, and iPad into a single amorphous product, macOS Monterey still feels unreservedly like a Mac. The Mac is also getting a boost with older iOS features finally being brought to the other side, most notably Shortcuts, the iOS automation tool that is the first sign of a renaissance of user automation on macOS. And with macOS Monterey, you can see the fruits of all that labor: The big new features of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 are also the big new features of macOS Monterey. This development is most significant for macOS, which tended to lag behind iOS in the 2010s, missing out on some or all of the year’s exciting innovations.Īpple has spent the last few years getting the base technology of iOS and macOS back in sync, removing 32-bit software, adding Mac Catalyst and support for iOS apps on Apple silicon, and introducing new cross-platform development technology via SwiftUI. If there’s a theme of Apple’s operating-system releases in 2021, it’s platform unification.

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