Everything That's New In macOS Big Sur

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a quick look at everything that's new in macOS Big Sur. 

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So let's dive right in! First let's take a look at App Icons. You can see them here in the Dock or in Launch Pad. All the Apple apps are now these rounded rectangles with a whole new design. Notice how the Dock now floats above the bottom of the screen and has these rounded corners as well. Now if we take a look at Toolbars like here in the Finder we can see there's been a big change. Title Bars and Toolbars are now merged. So you can see here the title of this window is merged in with the buttons. Plus if you look at the symbols here in the Toolbars and the symbols in the Sidebars as well you can see they are more consistent now across different apps using a very specific Apple icon language that they have created. Looking here at the Sidebars you'll find a lot of Sidebars now stretch all the way up to the top of the window including often the Red, Yellow, and Green buttons.

MacOS Big Sur introduces the new Control Center here which brings up a variety of controls in one icon here in the Menu Bar and you can customize this in System Preferences. The Notification Center is new as well. It's now just one big list instead of a Notification Center and a Today view. The Notifications are at the top and the Widgets are at the bottom. Notifications are enhanced. Notice how they are grouped now. So I've got two messages in Notifications and they are grouped together. You also have more controls for these. Notice, for instance, how you have an Options button here for this reminder and I can select an action. For the Widgets there's a new Widgets editor here. You can search, you can look by category, you can look at all these different widgets and there are different sizes for the widgets as well. So for instance here for the Weather widget we can choose a small, medium, or large one. Drag it over here. The Weather widget is also improved. It will show hourly precipitation if it was raining and also give you weather alerts. Yes, third party apps will have the ability to add widgets. So you'll see this list of potential widgets grow as app developers add widget functionality to the apps that you have.

Spotlight search has some improvements. It's faster but also it's more streamlined. So when you search for something you'll see that you don't get the previews over here on the right. However anything that has an arrow next to it can have a preview. All you need to do is arrow down to it and then hit Return and then you'll get the Quick Look window here on the right. There's more international support in Big Sur. For instance in the Dictionary app there are some more bilingual dictionaries that have been added. Also in general there's better support for predictive text for Chinese and Japanese language users as well as Indian fonts. The Podcast app has been updated with a special Listen Now page that will show you what you've been listening to and suggestions of what to listen to next. There's also a Listen Now section in the Music app for Apple Music users.

In System Preferences under Sound there are two big changes. One is you can decide whether or not you want the Mac Startup sounds. You also have a full new collection of Alert sounds replacing the previous ones. The Messages app has a ton of new features. You've got the ability to send Memoji stickers and also create new Memoji right here on your Mac. Group chats can now be assigned an image so you can Control click here, for instance. Go to Details and you can change the group name and photo. You can also reply to somebody in a group chat directly. You can also mention people in a group chat by just typing their name. You can see how it changed color there. There's a new Photo picker as well.

The App Store is going to give you more privacy information about Mac apps, although that doesn't seem to be turned on yet. But we do now have a specific category in the App Store for Safari extensions which will make those easier to find. Also there are enhancements to Apple Arcade. You can now get recommendations for games based on what your friends are playing. You'll be able to see your progress in games thanks to Game Center and also compare that to your friends. You'll also have the ability, for some apps, that when you have a subscription in the app you'll be able to share that with your family through Family Sharing. Under Notes app scans from your iPhone are supposed to be better. You also have a new Control up here. You can select text and use this Quick Format button to access all sorts of formatting controls. In the Reminders app when you have a shared list now you can assign individual items to a specific person. You can also customize a list here not just with one of the many icons that are provided but also using an emoji. You have more options to organize these smart lists that are here at the top, dragging them around and hiding them.

There are a bunch of new things in the Photos App. You now under Color have the ability to adjust Vibrance. The Retouch tool has been improved. Zooming in and out of a big library has been optimized to be smoother and the Memories feature has more options like more music and settings and things like that. A big new change is that all of the editing tools are now available for videos. You can see now I've got the Adjustment tools with all of the different adjustments here. I can also go and use Filters and Crop and Rotate and do that for videos as well as images. 

The Maps app has a ton of new features too. You now have Look Around which allows you to drop down to Street View for a virtual look and move through a city. You also have Look Inside which allows you to go indoor areas like shopping malls and airports and things like that. You have Cycling directions. You've got Routing for electric vehicles. You've got Guided Tours as well. Now the biggest thing I haven't mentioned yet is the new default background and there are other backgrounds as well. You go into System Preferences, into Desktop and Screen Saver and then Desktop. There are a variety of new backgrounds including an actual photo of Big Sur and a whole bunch of beautiful illustrations that you can as dynamic desktops as well.

Another change is how Open and Save dialogues look. Look what happens when I go to Save this TextEdit document with Command S. It dims everything around behind it. Printing as well does the same thing. Notice how it dims everything around. Now Safari isn't technically new because Apple also released this version of Safari for Catalina and Mojave. You've got the new Start page here. You've got the new way Tabs work especially when you've got a lot of them it just goes down to the icons. When you're not on that page but you move your cursor over it you'll see how it gives you a little preview of the tab. Safari will also translate pages for you. You'll see this little icon appear here and you can click it to get a translation. There's also, of course, the Privacy Report, and it supports a lot of extra video stuff like 4K viewing on sites like Netflix and it looks like on YouTube as well.

In System Preferences and Accessibility under Display there's a new setting for Menu Bar size. Also down in Voice Control there's a setting for Overlay and for Showing Hints. Also in System Preferences under Battery, if you're using a MacBook, you're going to get a new Usage history here with a graph showing your power usage and charging history. Going back into System Preferences, General, there's Accent Color. There's a new option there that you can choose a multi-colored choice there. What happens then is each app gets to choose its own color. You see yellow there for Notes and blue for Contacts. But then I can set it to be a specific color for all apps or allow it to be multi-colored so each app gets to choose. You can also set the highlight color to either match that accent color or be its own thing. 

I know some people will love this change to Mail. You can now go to View and use Column Layout. The columns are like normal columns now. You can adjust the widths of the columns and you can Control click on them to Add or Remove columns and also click on them to change the Sort Order.

There's even stuff that's not easy to show. For instance the Home app has some new features like the ability to use Adaptive Lighting and to use Face Recognition for cameras that support it. Time Machine will finally allow you to backup to hard drives formatted to the modern APFS format. This will make your Time Machine backups faster and more efficient as well. The system is even more protected that it is in Catalina. It's going to be cryptographically signed. So any changes that some sort of malware tries to make to your system will be discovered. Now there's going to be faster software updates starting with Big Sur. The update can begin before you actually have to Restart your machine. So you'll spend less time waiting for the update to install. Of courser the biggest feature by far on macOS Big Sur is the fact that it's an operating system that works both on Intel processors and Apple's new chips that will be in the new Macs moving forward. In that new hardware it will allow you to run iOS apps. So many of your favorite iOS apps from the iPhone or iPad will suddenly become available to you on your Mac.

So that's virtually all the new features in macOS Big Sur. I'll be looking more in-depth at a lot of these in videos over the next days and weeks.