From the course: macOS Monterey Essential Training

New features in macOS Monterey - macOS Tutorial

From the course: macOS Monterey Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

New features in macOS Monterey

“

- [Instructor] Like every new version of macOS, Monterey comes with some exciting new features. Because this course is designed to help people learn the most essential features of macOS, we're not going to cover all of the features in Monterey. But in this video, I want to give you a quick roundup of the most exciting new features that Apple is adding with macOS Monterey. I want to start by going into system preferences. And privacy is a big priority for Apple. In macOS Monterey and iOS 15, there are two new features that you can use to protect yourself and your data when using the internet, and these features are technically new features in iCloud. So you will need an iCloud account. You can go into your Apple ID settings in system preferences and we can see those settings here. The Hide My Email feature, lets you generate unique email addresses that forward to your normal email address. If you need to give somebody an email address and you're not comfortable sharing your real email address, you can use one of these temporary addresses. It can keep track of who is sending messages to that address and you can delete it later, and you can set that up here in iCloud settings. The other new option is iCloud Private Relay. This is similar to a VPN. When you enable the Private Relay, websites that you visit will not be able to identify your location or other private information, like your IP address. Private relay requires you to upgrade to the additional iCloud+ service. MacOS Monterey replaced the Do Not Disturb mode with a new Focus feature. If we go to the Control Center, we can see the option for Focus here. If you simply turn Focus on, it will work just like Do Not Disturb, blocking all notifications, but there are some advanced settings here where you can set up special rules to allow specific notifications to appear when you have Do Not Disturb enabled. And you can also set up multiple Focus modes for when you're at work or playing a game or reading and you can even set up a Custom mode. Okay, let's go over to the Messages application. If somebody sends you pictures or links to websites or news stories, you have more options because of a feature called Shared With You. Now somebody sent me five pictures here, but they appear as a stack. I can click where it says five photos to see all of them and I can click the back button to take a step back. I can also click this Save button here to save these pictures to my photo library. Then later, if I go to my photo library and I look at one of these pictures, there's a little link here that says that it was sent from John. And if I click on that, it takes me back to messages where I can see the message where those pictures were sent, and links like that will appear for other types of shared content in other applications. Now, while we're here in the photos application, I want to take a look at this picture. This will help us look at one of my favorite new features, Live Text. The Mac can identify text inside of pictures. You can select that text and then you can right click on it and copy and paste it somewhere else, and the computer can also translate text. When we cover Live Text in this course, you'll see how you can work with text inside of pictures that contain phone numbers, email addresses, and street addresses. Just be aware that the Live Text feature only works on new Macs that have the M1 processor chip. Next, let's go to FaceTime. Now, when you're in a FaceTime call or just getting ready for a FaceTime call, you've got some options to adjust your video and your audio, and we can get to those by going to the Control Center up in the menu bar, then you can go to Video Effects. And if you turn on the Portrait mode, it will blur your background. So you can turn that on or off from here. Also, back in the Control Center, we can go to Mic Mode, and the options you see here depend on your computer setup. But if you turn on Voice Isolation, it will block background noises. So if your neighbors are using power tools, it can block that out. The Wide Spectrum mode will include background noises and even accentuate them, and that might be useful if you're teaching a music class or something like that. Also in FaceTime, you can now generate a link for a call and then you can send that to somebody through an email or a message. When they click that link, they can join that meeting. So you can use this to plan calls ahead of time. But also, these links will work for people who are not on a Mac or an iPhone or iPad. They can call into those meetings on a Windows computer or an Android device. Okay, let's close FaceTime and next we'll go into the Maps application. The Maps application has some improved map views, including improved features for transit and driving directions. And if you zoom all the way out on your map, you can look at the map as an entire globe and you can sort of scroll through and find locations that way. All right, next, let's go over to Safari. The Safari web browser has some new design improvements and some features that can help you save and organize multiple tabs. This is a saved tab group, and when I click on it, it instantly reopens several tabs that I was looking at during a previous session. You can navigate through these tabs with the new tab design and these saved tab groups can synchronize between multiple Mac computers, iPhones, and iPads, and we'll see how to set up tab groups in this course. And finally, the Notes application that comes with macOS includes a new Quick Note feature, and we'll actually look at this while Safari is still open. At any time you can place your mouse cursor at the bottom, right corner of the screen, then click on this white box to generate a new note. And since I have a webpage open in safari, I can click this button to add a link to the webpage that I have open and it drops it right here in this note. But that's just the start. You can see even more details about Quick Notes later in this course as well. Now that you have a preview of what's new in Monterey, let's get started.

Contents