What's New In macOS 26.4

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's new in Mac OS 26.4. 

This week Apple released macOS 26.4 alongside other OS updates for all the other devices. It comes with a handful of new features and changes on your Mac. To get it you want to go to System Settings and then you want to go to General and then Software Update. It will check for software updates here. If you already have it you'll see your Mac is up to date. 

So, let's start with a change to Freeform. If you look at the Freeform icon, first of all you'll see that it's been updated. It's now using the icon what was promised to us when Apple released Apple Creator Studio. This is the new icon for Freeform and if you run Freeform it doesn't at first look any different. But the big new change is only really for Apple Creator Studio subscribers. So if you don't subscribe to Apple Creator Studio you still get to use everything that was in Freeform before but Apple Creator Studio users will get extras. 

Like if you click up here you'll see it now gives you the Content Hub. The same Content Hub that it's in Pages, Numbers, and  Keynote. So you'll be able to use some of the ClipArt and Stock Photos that Apple provides. You'll also be able to generate images using AI just from a description. Also if you have your own images in here you can use Generate From Image to change it into, say, an illustration or change the background, for instance, like that. So nothing really new. You could already have done this in Pages, Numbers and Keynote with Apple Creator Studio but now you can do it in Freeform as well. 

If you're not an Apple Creator Studio user you will still have some changes here at the top. You can still get to everything you had before. You just now have this one button here and you won't be able to use the Apple Creator Studio Content Hub and Image Generation stuff but you could still go, for instance, to Shapes here and access all of your shapes. 

In Safari there's an addition as to how Tabs can work. Actually a return to a previous feature. If you go to Safari Settings here and then you go to Tabs you'll see that you can now choose between Tab Layout Separate, which is how I've got it up here, or Compact, which will then put everything in one bar all the way across the top. You still have the separate Tabs but when you're in this mode you would actually edit the address by just using the tab's title rather than having a separate spot above. This was previously available in Safari. It was removed. A lot of users wanted it back so Apple added it back. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 3000 others that support MacMost Through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

Now in Reminders in a previous update we got the ability to set a reminder to Urgent. When you do that you'll get an alarm on your iPhone. So it's setting an alarm. You can do the same thing in Reminders on your iPhone. This is handy when you have an extremely important reminder and you don't just want a notification. You want an alarm. Now that feature isn't new. What is new is they added it to the Menu system, which it wasn't there before. So I could select this item here and go to Edit, and now I've got Mark As Urgent with a keyboard shortcut. So you can do Shift Command U as the default shortcut to make something urgent or not. You'll also notice that you have an Urgent Smart List here that shows you all of the reminders you have that are marked urgent. You can go to View, Show Smart List, and have that turned On or Off. You can also just go to Urgent regardless of whether or not it's listed here in the left sidebar. 

Now a new improvement just for MacBook users is in the battery settings you can now set a Maximum Charge Amount. So instead of having your MacBook charged to 100%, for instance, you can have it charged to 95 to all the way down to 80%. The idea here is it may increase your battery longevity, how many years your battery lasts if you say only charge to 80%. But, of course, if you find yourself running short of battery power at the end of each day because you used it a lot while on the go, then you may want to have a higher number. If you choose 100% it actually asks you if you just want to do that for the next charge, really just for today, or if you want to set that as the charge amount permanently. 

Now there are some new things that are a little harder to trigger or to show here in tutorials. For instance there's a new feature now that if you're using Family Sharing and you're an adult, but you're not the head of the plan, you can now choose your own payment options. So use your own credit card instead of the head of the plan's card.

Another is that MacOS 26.4 is needed for support for the new AirPodsMax 2. So these were just released and are shipping now. I assume they wouldn't work right or maybe just wouldn't show the new options available if you're on something before 26.4.

Another one is Subtitle & Caption settings are easier to find when viewing media with Real Time Preview available directly from the Caption's Icon. I can't seem to demonstrate any of this here inside of the TV App. There's the captions icon just as it was before. If I click on it here I seem to get the same options. It suggests that perhaps there's a way to get to Settings for Close Captioning & Subtitles. But there isn't. You can still get to them by going into Settings and then Accessibility. Then hearing under Captions and you've got all of these options here that you can set and it effect how Subtitles look. But, you can't access them through here as it is kind of suggesting. 

Another change is that if you're still running old Intel Based Apps you're using something on your Mac called Rosetta 2. What this does is it translates the code in the app from the Intel based code to the Apple Silicon code. This works seamlessly. So you may have Intel Apps that you're using that you don't even notice. I checked and I didn't actually have any Intel Apps anymore. After all it is 2026 and Apple started transitioning to its own silicon code in 2020. But if you do have an old app you may see a warning message saying that support will be ending soon. Apple has said it's still gong to support Rosetta 2, not just in macOS 26 but also in macOS 27 coming later this year. But it will only be in macOS28, coming a whole year and a half from now that support for it would be dropped. So still plenty of time for any lagging developers to update their Apps. 

Finally, we have a new set of emoji characters that you can now use in macOS 26.4 and iOS 26.4 and so on. You can use the Emoji & Special Character viewer and search for them using these terms and others. They are all just standard icons, except the ballet dancer where you can choose different skin colors. It's the International Group The Unicode Consortium, that picks new emoji characters and then all the companies, like Microsoft and Samsung and Apple then have to come up with their own artwork for them and put them in the Operating System within a given amount of time. So Apple didn't come up with these as the new set for this year. They are just complying with the organization's list of new emoji. 

So that's what is new. A pretty standard mid-year update for macOS. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.