What’s New In macOS Sequoia 15.1

macOS Sequoia 15.1 introduces new Apple Intelligence features like summaries, writing tools, a new focus mode and Photo Clean Up. We also get iPhone Mirroring drag and drop and a few hidden features.

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Video Transcript: This is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's new in macOS Sequoia 15.1.
When macOS Sequoia initially came out it was missing a lot of features. Most notably a lot of Apple Intelligence features. So let's go through what's new once you've upgraded to version 15.1. Note, a lot of these features are specific to the U.S. In other countries Apple isn't releasing a lot of new features having to do with Apple Intelligence and iPhone Mirroring sometimes due to regulations and laws. Other times because they haven't made new languages available for these features yet. 
First let's start by talking about what's new in iPhone Mirroring. So you could already use iPhone Mirroring in macOS Sequoia 15.0 and you can even Copy & Paste between your Mac and your iPhone. But what you can do now is you can click and drag from your iPhone to your Mac. So you can see I just dragged an image there. You can do it the other way as well. Here I am in Mail composing a message and I can take a file from my Mac in the Finder and Drag & Drop it into the Mail App on the iPhone. 
An interesting new feature can be found if you go into The App Store. Then once in The App Store you go to Settings and then you'll find a new setting here, Download and Install Large Apps to a Separate Disk. So what this allows you to do is if you've got really big apps, most typically there are games, you can choose another Drive, an external drive, and those apps will be installed there. Of course, speed might be an issue because it is not going to be as fast, probably, as your internal drive and it will be throttled through a Thunderbolt or USB connection which may be slowing it down as well. But at least this is an option if you just can't fit on your internal drive. 
Another interesting feature for MacBook users is the ability to turn On low power mode right from the Menu Bar. So you would click here. You would typically not see the ability to turn on low power mode. That's how it worked before. But now you can add it to this. So if you go to System Settings and you go to Control Center, then look for Battery. You can show Energy Mode always. Now with that On notice I can see that I'm not in Low Power Mode. But I can switch to it if I want. So before you would have had to go into System Settings, Battery Settings, and switch it on there. This allows you to do it a little quicker to react to your situation. 
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A big new change is Apple Intelligence. Of course your Mac has to support it and you have to be in the right region and set to the right language. Providing you have all that you can go into System Settings and you're going to find a new area here for Apple Intelligence and Siri. It is mostly just the Siri settings here. You'll notice that Siri looks different here in the Menu Bar and it works a little differently too. So when you bring up Siri now you can certainly talk to Siri. You've got the microphone there. But you can type to Siri. You could do that before but this is now the main way that it works. So it kind of feels a little bit more like using a tool like ChatGPT. You can ask Siri questions like before but you get a little bit more verbose if you want. Still keep it pretty simple. So I can just ask, for instance, for the weather here and you can see the results. Now one change, in addition to this looking differently, is you can also drag this around and place it where you want. Siri is not yet connected to things like ChatGPT but you can ask some questions and get answers right in here. You should be able to ask questions about your Mac as well, kind of using Siri as Mac help. So you can see the answer for that actually came from the macOS User Guide. 
In my test in the beta this didn't work as well as I would like. Most of the time when I came up with sample questions it couldn't find an answer or gave me web links as answers. But hopefully this will get better over time. 
Apple Intelligence does have a variety of summarizing tools. You can pretty much summarize any texts you want. So you can select text in some app, I'll use Notes here, and you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click to bring up the Context Menu. You should see in there the Writing Tools section. These are all parts of Apple Intelligence. So, for instance, I can summarize, create key points, make a list or make a table. Let's choose Summarize. We get this little window here that shows me a summary of the text that was selected. This could be text in Safari. It can be text in Pages. It could be text in a book. All sorts of different places where you can select text this should work. You could select the text, copy portions of it, copy the whole thing, or even if you're editing text, like I am here in Notes, you can replace the selected text with the summary. 
Another place you'll find Summaries is in Mail. The first place you'll probably see them is when you look at the list of messages coming in. Instead of the first couple of lines of the text you should find a summary of the whole message, that is if the message is long enough that a decent summary can be  created. Another place you'll find it is if you look at the message itself and scroll down a bit you'll see Summarize right here. You can click that and get a summary here at the top. 
While we're in Mail you'll also see that sometimes messages are identified as being very important. Having urgency to them. This is done with AI, not with anything that the sender has indicated. You'll see those here indicated at the top. It's picked up this new message right here as being such. So when you go to reply to a message when you do it you should see suggested replies here. So it is going to suggest two things. It just shows you the beginning of them. So you get the idea. You can click on one of those and then it will write the suggested reply there. You can continue just editing it if you want or you can modify it. So, let's say, today like that and it will change the suggestion right there. You can revert to something you had before if you had already typed or you just click in here, click Done, and then edit the message anyway you want. It is just text that is kind of pasted in there. Notice also when you select text you get this little Apple Intelligence indicator here. You can click it like that and bring up all the same summary tools that we saw when we used the Context Menu before. 
In addition to Summary Tools we also have Proof Writing Tools. So you can select text, like this. You'll see the little Apple Intelligence icon here or you can use the Context Menu if you want. In addition to summarize and all of that you've got the ability to proofread, rewrite the text, or rewrite it in a specific fashion, like Friendly, Professional, or Concise. You can also click Show Writing Tools and it brings it up in this kind of window here. So, I can make this more friendly by clicking that and it will change it. Of course also change anything I've written could be much longer than this and it can make that more friendly or more concise or just proofread it for me. This works in a variety of different apps, pretty much anywhere you can type text. 
Another place for things to summarize are Notifications. Notifications will be summarized if they are pretty long but also if you go into System Settings and you look under Focus Modes you'll see there's a new Focus Mode called Reduce Interruptions. This will attempt to reduce the number of notifications you get based on AI. So instead of being never show notifications from this app or in this situation and it is a set rule, this will look at each notification and try to reduce the number you get based on how important they seem. You can still select to allow people and apps to pass through this. Just everything else is what will be handled by Reduce Interruptions.
Here's one more Apple Intelligence feature that has been added in 15.1 and it's in the Photos App. So in the Photos App if you go to a photo and you go to Edit it, you'll notice there's an entire new tool here at the top. You've got Clean Up. The first thing it will do is it will highlight items, you can see this one right here, that it thinks you may want to remove. If you want to remove that you can just click and it will get rid of it. You can continue to click on items to get rid of them and you can also highlight your own. So, for instance, get rid of this I can just click and drag over it and it figures it out from there. 
So there's a look at what's new. Remember if something isn't working for you it probably comes down to your region and language settings. But also a lot of these features, of course, are going to require an M1 processor or newer on Macs to work.  Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “What’s New In macOS Sequoia 15.1”

Bart

5 months ago

Sequoia 15.1 changed my login settings to require a password and removed the option to login automatically without a password. Finally discovered under "0Users and Options" click on user name, then "Automatically log in as..." and finally got it to work as it had in °5.0.1 and earlier.

David

I'm not seeing the AI icon when selecting text in a mail message (@ about 6 min). Any suggestions?

Gary Rosenzweig

David: Just access it from the toolbar or the context menu then.

JOHN SENISE

3 months ago

How can I print out the contents of what's new in macOS 15.1

John: Not sure what you mean. Contents of this video? There's a transcript above if you want to use that.