MacOS Sonoma includes some great new features and beautiful refinements to the Mac operating system, and if you just downloaded and installed MacOS Sonoma 14 you may be curious about what to explore with the upgraded system software version, or what is new. We’re here to help, covering the seven best new features of MacOS Sonoma.
1: Desktop Widgets
MacOS Sonoma allows you to add widgets directly to your Mac desktop, and they fade away to be more subdued visually when not in focused view.
If you missed Dashboard, the feature that allowed widgets on the Mac for many years, then you’ll be thrilled to experience widgets in Sonoma.
2: 120+ New Screen Savers
MacOS Sonoma includes over 100 new stunning screen savers of gorgeous landscapes, cityscapes, underwater scenes, Earth from space, and more.
These screen savers are genuinely incredible and well worth experiencing for yourself, and you’ll want to show them off. Using the “Shuffle Aerials” feature is immensely enjoyable.
I haven’t enjoyed screen savers this much since After Dark!
3: 121 New Wallpapers & Moving Wallpapers
The 121 new Aerial screen savers are in 4k, and they double as wallpapers!
Furthermore, when you wake up your Mac from a screen saver and log in, the screen saver continues to move for a moment as you login to the Mac and it settles into the desktop wallpaper, offering a really nice moving wallpaper effect.
4: Newly Redesigned Lock Screen
The redesigned Lock Screen of MacOS Sonoma looks a bit more like something on an iPad or iPhone, and shows off the beautiful aerial screensavers or your wallpaper of choice.
Plus, when you login with the new Lock Screen, the wallpaper continues to move for a moment, and it’s a really nice touch.
5: Safari Profiles
Now you can create Profiles in Safari, for things like “Work”, “School”, “Personal”, “Play”, or whatever else.
Each profile can have a separate set of windows and tabs associated with it, support for different cookies, history, and extensions, and makes it much easier to keep your Safari browser experience separate for things like work and personal life.
6: Add Your Favorite Webpages to Dock as Web Apps
You can turn your favorite websites into web apps, and place them directly in the Dock!
For example, if you open a new Safari browser window to the best Apple website in the world (osxdaily.com obviously), then go to the File menu > and choose “Add to Dock”, an icon for OSXDaily will appear in your Dock. When clicked, the OSXDaily.com will launch as a separate web app (or any other website you choose to use this feature with).
7: Game Mode
Game Mode activates automatically on any Apple Silicon Mac running MacOS Sonoma whenever a game is ran in full screen mode, and it aims to improve game performance by prioritizing games for CPU and GPU usage. Open a game in full screen and soon see a little game controller icon in the menu bar, and from there you can turn off Game Mode, but you can’t turn it on because it’s already on.
If you’re wondering how to enable and turn on Game Mode in MacOS Sonoma, it’s handled automatically.
And if you search for “Game Mode” in the Help menu of MacOS Sonoma to try and get more information or help about the feature of MacOS, you won’t find anything there either. Mysterious!
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What do you think of these new MacOS Sonoma features? Do you have any other favorite features in MacOS Sonoma? Are you still waiting to update, or perhaps preparing for the software update? Let us know your thoughts and experiences with macOS Sonoma!
