What’s New In macOS Sequoia 15.2

NOTE: macOS Sequoia will most likely come out Monday, December 9. I’m releasing this video then. If 15.2 isn’t out yet when you first view this, consider this a preview of what is to come very soon…
Once you update to macOS Sequoia 15.2 you'll get new Apple Intelligence writing tools, ChatGPT integration, Image Playground, and more.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's new in macOS 
Sequoia 15.2. 
So, macOS Sequoia15.2 is a pretty minor change in most respects except we get some new features. Most importantly some Apple Intelligence features. So previously you could select some text, like this, and you could bring up the writing tools a number of different ways. I'm going to use Control Click and then Writing Tools. Now, here you've got the writing tools like before and you can make Friendly, Professional, or Concise. But you can do more than that. So let's go to Show Writing Tools and bring up the more comprehensive interface and notice at the top there's now a prompt. So you don't have to stick with these three options here. You can actually type something, anything you want, and it will attempt to rewrite the selected text.
So, for instance, I can just simply type As A Poem. Press Return and it's going to take that text and try to create a poem from it. You can see it does that. You can do a variety of different things. But not everything will work. So, for instance, if I were to try to type Like As Hemingway, then I press Return you can see it is not going to do that for me. But if I were to do something more reasonable, like say With Shorter Sentences, then it will give me a result for that. It certainly extends things further and gets the Apple Intelligence writing tools more in-line with what you can already do in tools like ChatGPT. 
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Now another thing that you can do, is you can compose text from scratch. I'm going to bring up the writing tools like before but now without any text selected. I'll go here. I can show Writing Tools but there is also a Compose option here. Either way you can get to it and you can type a Prompt, notice the ChatGPT logo there. This is going to use ChatGPT for this. I can type something I want here. So say I needed to have a paragraph about, you know, about how LED screens work. I could simply type that. It will call into ChatGPT. It will give me some text as a result and I could insert that or copy it. There are a variety of different ways you can use that. You can use it to generate Lists. Anything you might normally use a Chat AI for you can just do there just to compose some quick text. 
Now that last feature does point out how now ChatGPT is integrated with Apple Intelligence. In fact if you go to System Settings and then you look at Apple Intelligence  & Siri you will see down here ChatGPT under Extensions, hinting that we may have more extensions here in the future. ChatGPT is just the first. You can also sign into your account. Now you also have this little checkbox here for confirm ChatGPT Requests. This is because ChatGPT is also integrated with Siri. So let's give that a try with Siri here. In this case we're going to get a result that doesn't use ChatGPT. So you can see it just gives you the result and a source there. 
So, you have got to get more complex to trigger ChatGPT. So here's an example that should work. So you can see there it says, Working with ChatGPT. So this did trigger it and here I get a list. This is, indeed, from ChatGPT. It even shows on the bottom that it is. I'm sure this is going to be refined over time. But I was able to, in testing, get answers for just about any question I asked. A lot of them it just gave me an Apple Intelligence. It looks like that has definitely improved over the last month or so. But also sometimes it did go to ChatGPT and give me a list like this. 
Now let's go right to the next big Apple Intelligence feature that was added. That is Image Playground. Image Playground is an app. So you launch it just like a regular app, like Pages or Keynote, or something like that. It comes up like this and it asks you to describe an image and it will try to generate the image for you. So very similar to other AI Image Generation Tools. One of the things it does that is different though is that it is really tied into your Photos. So you can barely see what is here at the bottom. The window for Image Playground is a little bit bigger than what I normally use to record at. But you get the idea here. You've got a Prompt. You've got some suggestions. Then you've got this key thing here. Person. If I click on that it is going to go to my Photos and it is going to see what people it recognizes there. So it is a people part of your photos. In my demo account here I've just me. So I'll select Me and it is going to put me there. Then I need to actually choose some other things. I will choose, say, Starry Night and I will choose a Beret. It is going to combine those concepts and Produce an image of me wearing a beret with a starry night behind. 
Notice there are Dots underneath. It's generating multiple versions of this. I can flip through them and see these. I can click outside here and come back to these. Let me take away the beret and instead put a beanie and then it is going to regenerate based on those. I can also generate some things based on my own text down here. So I could add Moon to this. It should add, kind of, the moon. Now once you've got this you can click on the three dots here and you can Copy this image. You can Share it. There are also other things you can do. For a person you can also choose Appearance and then rate a person from a description here. You can also just type a prompt there and not include a person at all. So, I'm going to do a road into the mountains at sunset. Press Return and I'm not going to take any of these other suggestions but I'm going to get an image like this. Notice I can also change the style. I can go between animation or illustration. This is good example of something you can generate and then use that, say, in a Keynote presentation or as an image in a Pages document. That kind of thing.
So I can find something nice to use in that situation. 
Now let's look into some other changes. We go into Safari there is a couple of changes you should note. One of them is if you go to File and then note the Import and Export options now get a lot more complex. There's a bit more of a description of what is going on here for importing. What you can Import. Also for Exporting. If I go to Export I actually get this whole little dialogue here. I can choose what I want. So if I just want to export, say, just Bookmarks. I can do that here. I can choose which profile this is coming from and I can download them. So this is an interesting new dialogue. 
Another thing you've got is when you're on the Start Page, like here, Bookmarks show Start Page, there's  the Edit Button here and there are some new backgrounds here that you can apply to the Start Page, right here. 
In the News App, if you're a subscriber to Apple News, you've got under Puzzles a new puzzle type. Now you've also got Sudoku. So there is a daily Sudoku puzzle and it works really well. Allows you to add notes. It has all the features you would expect for a Sudoku puzzle. You get a new one to play everyday. So Apple continues to build its collection of puzzles here for Apple News Plus Subscribers. 
Now a tiny new feature that is going to get a lot of attention is the ability to put the Weather in the Menu Bar. So this is something, of course, that has been available on other operating systems forever and you can do it automatically with third party apps. But now you can actually go into System Settings and in System Settings under the Control Center the last item down here is, Under Menu Bar Only. Weather. You can choose to Show in Menu Bar. When you do that you get a little Weather Icon and the temperature. If you click on it you get all the details. It is going to correspond to the location you've got in the Weather App. So your local area weather and then a forecast here. Then other locations you've got are going to be listed here. A link to open the Weather App. You can also click on these things here and it will take you to the Weather App as well. 
Another improvement is in AirPlay. When you go to AirPlay now, and I'm going to demonstrate using displays and I'm going to Add a Display and it is going to be an AirPlay Display. So this is a TV that accepts AirPlay. What will happen here is it will come up with a new dialogue that asks you if you want to mirror your whole display or a window or app. So you can choose that before you start using AirPlay. So that is a really handy feature to have there. 
Now another big feature for those that are NOT in the USA, but in the other English speaking countries of Australia, the UK, Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand is that support has been added for the Apple Intelligence features introduced in macOS Sequoia 15.1. When 15.1 came out it only worked if you were in the USA using US English. But now they are available in those other countries as well. So for people living there you've got not only these new features but a lot of the new features that the US users have had for a month or so. 
I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 13 Responses to “What’s New In macOS Sequoia 15.2”

Sheldoon

1 week ago

Thanks bunches

Jak G

Thanks for that summary, from an Australian viewer.

Arsène Poirot

I love your work!

Elizabeth Jordan

Very good overview! So much new learning to be done!
Will be depending on your vids!

Clinton Hayes

Was looking for Image Playground and discovered it's only available on iPhone 15 and above. I have a 14 Pro and was wondering why I couldn't find it.

Stephane Dresler

Hi Gary,
Is Image Playground available for a Mac (I have a Mac mini) or only for iPad and iPhone like it is indicated in the App Store. It looked you were demonstrating on a Mac.

Gary Rosenzweig

Stephane: It is for Mac too. I'm showing it here on a Mac. I have a new video all done on a Mac. It comes with macOS if you get 15.2 and you have an M1 Mac or newer, and meet the language requirements. Sounds like you are looking in the iOS/iPadOS App Store, not the Mac App Store.

Thanks Gary. I got it. I had skipped the Apple Intelligence set up. Works well.

Paul

Just got started on Image Playground and put off at the same time! Apparently, it has to download a load of something first thing. I don't know what it is doing (if anything) because there is absolutely no progress information on screen etc. The screen just has "Downloading Support for Image Playground on it ..." on it. Is this normal? I have an abdominally slow Internet connection at maybe 5M.

Paul: Yes, normal. It is downloading the model for generating images. Remember, it does it on your Mac, which makes it different than all of the online image generators.

4 days ago

I'm now using Sequoia 15.2 and noticed that I still can't find a way to create Stickers and must use iOS and the sharing functionality. Am I missing something, because Image Playground would be more than fun for creating Stickers, and I'm anticipating what the merging of Pixelmater Pro will do to MacOS image apps.

Paul: Yes, you still can only create stickers on iPhone/iPad.

3 days ago

Classic Apple! You did a video on Stickers in 2017! 🤣 ( https://macmost.com/sending-stickers-with-ios-messages.html ). Thanks, Gary!

What’s New In macOS Sequoia 15.2

Comments: 13 Responses to “What’s New In macOS Sequoia 15.2”

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