What’s New in macOS Monterey 12.1

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's new in macOS Monterey 12.1.

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So yesterday macOS 12.1 arrived with some new features and some bug fixes. Share Play is a feature already available on the iPhone and now it comes to Mac. It allows you to share your screen or media, such as the Music or TV app, with someone that you're FaceTiming with so that they can see exactly the same thing you're seeing. Let's take a quick look at it. I'll start a new FaceTime here and then after starting the call then we can share with that other person. To do that you can click here and then click the Share button. Then you can go and share the window or the screen. So if I share the screen I can click on the screen here and then the other person will be able to see it even if they are not on a Mac. If they are on an iPhone or iPad that's fine. I could stop here. They could do the same. They could share their screen with me even if it's an iPhone screen. 

Now watch what happens when you go to share a window. Say, for instance, that you want to show somebody your photos. So you go into the Photos App here and then let's start the Sharing. I'm going to click there. I'm going to say Window, Share This Window. Notice here the red, yellow, and green buttons change to this. The other person sees this window. So now maybe you could show them your photos, for instance. Then you can click here and you can stop sharing, change the window, or go to share the entire screen.  Also if you're in the TV App and you click to start watching something. If you have FaceTime going with somebody else it will prompt you to start it for just you or to Share Play with them so they'll see the video the same time you will. You can watch it together. The same thing in the Music App. When you go to Play it will come up here and allow you to start for just you or to Share Play. This works with Apply Music.

Now since we're here in the Photos App let's take a look at Memories. Memories had a bit of a change here. So when you go to Play a memory it seems to be about the same but you could see there's this new interface here at the bottom. I don't use Memories much but I think it looks a little different here with splitting the different parts of the screen. You could click here to get an overview of everything. Here you could go to do things like edit the title or set the length of the memory. 

Back in the TV App there's a change that's really welcome because now at the top instead of dividing Movies and TV Shows and it's kind of really confusing as to where to go to watch something, you've got Watch Now, which is the stuff you are currently watching. You've got stuff that's Apple TV+ so if you subscribe to that. Then you have Library which is your own things and Store which is both movies and TV shows. So it better matches what you see in the Music App where everything you could buy is in the store. It was kind of weird before separating movies and TV shows into different things. Here you can not only buy movies but you could also rent them, of course. 

There's a change to the new tagging feature in Notes and Reminders. It works the same as before except now you have extra functionality. If you right click, two-finger click on a trackpad or Control click you now have the ability to rename or delete tags. So deleting them would get rid of them in all of the notes that they are in. Renaming them would change it in all the notes that they are in. You have the same functionality in the Reminders App as well. So I can go in here and I could say Rename this tag like that. 

So Hide My Email was new in the initial release of macOS Monterey. It's available only if you have iCloud Plus. So it's any paid iCloud subscription. You can get to it in System Preferences. You go to Options for Hide My Email to see your email addresses here. That works just as before. What's new is you can actually use it right here in composing a new message in the Mail App. So you fill out everything in the email and then you select here under From, usually you would see a list of all the email addresses for all of your accounts. But in addition now you'll see Hide My Email at the bottom. It will fill in an email account from Hide My Email. 

A small change comes to the Stocks App. You can now go into View and Show Currency to see the currency for each stock. In addition to that, you can go into a stock, like this, and one of the options now at the top is Year-To-Date. 

There's also a big bug fix here and that has to do with the Screen Savers. Anybody that uses Screen Savers knows that with the initial release of Monterey the Screen Savers that use Photos really didn't work. It was a pretty major bug. But now you can go in and choose one of these photo screen savers and they'll work just like before. 

Another bug fix is for owners of the new MacBook Pros and with the notch there at the top on the initial release of Monterey sometimes the buttons here would actually go underneath where the notch was. But now that's fixed so they will go around it. 

Now there are three other changes that are kind of hard to show. One is the compatibility with something called Apple Music Voice. So this is a half price Apple Music Plan. You just use Siri to request basically any song. So if you go with that plan you can now use it on your Mac with Monterey 12.1. 

Another feature is in the Messages App and it only works if you actually have iCloud accounts that are setup for children. In those cases there's an option there that if images come across in their Messages account and it shows nudity there will be a warning. You can read all about it and see examples here at apple.com/child-safety. It's something that happens locally on the device. So the device itself is looking at the images not any kind of Cloud or server service and you could turn it off if you want. 

There's also support for the iCloud digital legacy feature. You can find out more about that at digital-legacy.Apple.com. That's primarily something that you do here on this site. You can set this up so a descendent can take control of your iCloud Account after you're gone.

So there's a look at what's new in macOS Monterey 12.1. If you're still waiting for the update go to System Preferences and in Software Update and you should see it appear there. One thing still missing from macOS Monterey is Universal Control. This is a feature that allows you to use one keyboard and trackpad with multiple Macs. That feature was left out of the original Monterey release and pushed back until Fall. Now it's been pushed back again until the Spring. That's a feature mostly for people that have two Macs on their desk. Say an iMac and a MacBook Pro. You wouldn't actually have to use two keyboards and two mice or trackpads to control both computers. So it's a relatively small audience for that but it's still a highly anticipated feature yet to come.