A Preview Of the New Control Center In macOS Big Sur

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take an early look  at the new Control Center feature of macOS Big Sur. 

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 700 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

So it's still really early. All we have is the first beta of macOS Big Sur. But in it we can see the new Control Center feature. This is something that replaces some of the Menu Bar icons that were at the top right corner of your Mac screen. Now things may change during the betas and it may look very different by the time we get to the public release of Big Sur later this year.

So the upper right hand corner of your Mac screen in Big Sur will look different. The first thing you'll notice is that the date and time are now the right most element followed by Siri and then you'll see Control Center. Now click on Control Center and it brings up something that looks a lot like the Control Center on the iPad. It's just this area at the upper right with all these different controls in it. Now this is the default setup here. 

So we'll see controls here for different networking things. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and AirDrop. We'll see a Do Not Disturb button, Keyboard Brightness, and AirPlay. Then you'll see Display Brightness, Volume, and then playback controls for whatever media is currently playing. In this case I have a song in the Music app playing.

Now, as you can expect, you could click on anyone of these to do things. Display and Sound Controls are the most obvious. I can click and move these sliders up and down to adjust Display Brightness and Volume. If I were to click here on the first one, Wi-Fi, it will go to a separate control. So you're basically digging down into the controls. Here I see Wi-Fi. I can turn it On and Off. I can pick from my preferred networks. Look at other networks, or go to Network Preferences. Very similar if I were to click here. In fact pretty much identical if I were to click here on the Wi-Fi control.

Now if we look at something like Bluetooth we can see we can turn it On and Off and select Devices. Very similar to if you had then old Bluetooth control up here. Do Not Disturb you can go into that and you can see some options for turning off Do Not Disturb. The same thing with the other things. Like Keyboard Brightness. Since I'm using a MacBook Pro here its got that setting. AirPlay Display. You can see I can choose AirPlay and can also go to different preferences.

Even Display and Sound. If I click somewhere else here, not the control, like over here by this icon it will take me to a specific set of display controls. I still have the Brightness here at the top but I can also work with Dark Mode or Night Shift here or go to Display Preferences. The same thing with Sound. I go to sound controls here. So with Music controls I have a Play button and a Skip Track button. I can also click here to launch the Music app or click here and it brings me a little Mini Player where I can skip around in the track and go back and see time and more information.

Now you do have the ability to do some drag and drop here. For instance, I can click and drag the display element here and put it up into the Menu Bar. Now I can directly access that there in the Menu Bar. I can hold the Command key down and click and drag away to get rid of it just like before. But you have a much more full set of controls if you go to System Preferences and then go to Dock and Menu Bar.

This set of System Preferences looks different than it did under Catalina. On the left side I've got a sidebar here. I could select Dock and Menu Bar here and I see the controls I'm familiar with. Things like being able to change Dock preferences or Hide the Menu Bar. Under that I've got things for Control Center. Here I see each of the elements in Control Center. It will highlight where it is and give me some options. For the most part the options are Show in Menu Bar. So I could click here and it should place that item in the Menu Bar or remove it. So that's the same thing as if I would bring up Control Center and drag it out there. I can just do it by using checkboxes here instead. 

Now you would think I would be able to rearrange Control Center here but I can't. There are no controls here for moving these things around. The default stuff, the stuff under Control Center like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and AirDrop, etc., that's all set into these specific slots here. Each one of them only has Show in Menu Bar or not. Not the ability to remove it from Control Center. So if you don't like Control Center you could pretty much turn on Show Menu Bar for all of these. Have them all in the Menu Bar and never really use Control Center.

Now you've got another category here. These are things that can be added to the Menu Bar or added and removed from Control Center. So, for instance, for Accessibility Shortcuts I can add it to the Menu Bar like that or I can have it in Control Center as a button and you can see it appears there. So far there's just these three and they all basically just appear as buttons.

Then you have a few things here that don't appear in Control Center. They only appear on the Menu Bar. Like Spotlight or Siri. So you can remove those from the Menu Bar there but there's no option to add them to Control Center. Now I expect to see updates in this. I expect to see some more items appear here. Perhaps even the ability for third party apps to add themselves to these lists. 

If I had to make a prediction I'd say this is pretty much the functionality we're going to get in Big Sur. This fixed Control Center. Then maybe later versions of macOS, after Apple gets a lot of feedback about how people use Control Center and what they want from it, maybe we'll see more options to customize it.