New Things To Check Out In macOS Big Sur 11.1

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you some new things that you should checkout in macOS Big Sur 11.1.

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So the first major update of macOS Big Sur came out on December 14th. If you haven't updated yet you can go to System Preferences and then Software Update and it should come up here. Of course you would already have to have updated to Big Sur to get Big Sur 11.1. There are a lot of bug fixes and minor improvements. But here are some things you may want to checkout as soon as you update. There are no real changes in the News app BUT in the Notification Center you'll find there are new widgets for news. So go to Edit Widgets and you'll see there is News now and you can choose between two different widgets, Today, and Topic. Each one has small, medium, and large views. The Topic widget is customizable. You can specify the topic you want. So, for instance, let's choose the Large one and I can drag that over to my Notification Center. I'll put it here at the top. Then I can click on it and select the topic. So I click here and I can search for a new topic. So for instance say I want to track Apple News. I could search for Apple and I could track Apple News or maybe something more specific. Like let's say I want to see news involving Apple Music here. So I select that, click Done, and now you could see I get just that topic represented there. I could always add another one. So I can have as many of these as I like tracking multiple topics as widgets in Notification Center. 

Now the TV app has some improvements when it comes to searching and other things. But most notably there's now an Apple TV+ tab. So if you're a subscriber to Apple TV+ you can get right to the content on Apple TV+ which is handy because sometimes you hear about a new show or a movie released by Apple TV+ and it's kind of hard to find when mixed in with all the other stuff that you may have going on in the TV app. 

Now this next one is not actually that big of a deal but it's going to be talked about a lot so you should know about it. In the App Store app you can now go to an app and see privacy information about it. So often you'll select an app, like this one, and you'll go down in the listing and you'll see App Privacy. Something like either data not collected or maybe something more specific like data not linked to you. Sometimes though it may look a little scary like data linked to you. You can actually click See Details here to get more detailed information. Some people may see this and freak out about what this app is actually doing. But the app I'm looking at here is actually just Pages. All of this stuff makes sense when you think about it. For instance when you create new documents there's greater information saved in the metadata. That includes things from your contacts. When you use the Sharing function of course it's going to access your user ID and things like that to share a file. Just because it's a list here doesn't mean that app has actually taken that information and is actually using it for something bad. Just because the app has access to this information doesn't mean it's actually going to use it all the time. For instance a game may only access this information if you decide to play against a friend online. Otherwise may not. But it is still going to be listed here. In the coming days and weeks a lot of times you're just going to see this, No Details Provided, because developers haven't yet updated their information there to provide these details. 

In Safari there's just one change but it's an interesting one. If you go to Safari Preferences and then Search you can now choose a new default search engine, Ecosia. Then when you search for something it's usually in the Ecosia search engine. The results you're going to see are actually from Bing but with some modifications made by Ecosia to try to make the results better. But the revenue on the ads you see on Ecosia are actually going to environmental causes. You can read plenty about that at their site. Apple has promoted Ecosia in various ways before. But now it is officially available as a default search engine on both Mac and on iOS. 

Now this last new feature I want to show you is, of course, only available on the new M1 Macs. That's because it involves actually running iOS and iPad OS apps on your Mac which is only available on new Apple silicon Macs. This is much improved window sizing options. Apps tend to look better now. I've seen that already on a few apps. Plus you can click the green button now to go full screen in most iPhone and iPad apps which makes many apps far more usable including some of my own games that look great when brought to full screen on your Mac. 

If you want to see the full list of everything that's new in macOS 11.1 you can go to this webpage. This is the same list you're given when you first update to 11.1. There's one other detail that's easy to overlook in all of this. That's the version number here. It's 11.1 which means all of the updates for macOS Big Sur, macOS version 11, are going to be dot one, dot two, dot three updates. So in next year's macOS will most likely be version 12. So after more than a decade of macOS being macOS version 10 and then 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 each being major annual updates it looks like Apple has now switched to the number being the annual update. So Big Sur is version 11. Next year we'll have version 12, 13, 14. This is now inline with the other operating systems like iOS where the primary number is increased with every new version.