Hands on With macOS Monterey: Improvements Abound

WHAT'S NEW NOW/APPLE

- EDWARD MENDELSON

The public beta of macOS Monterey, released by Apple in early July, doesn’t look surprisingly new. Exceptions include Safari, which gets a dynamically resizing tab bar and other conveniences, and FaceTime, which gets a background-blurring portrait mode and screen-sharing features. As you get more familiar with Monterey, however, you’ll find improvements and conveniences everywhere and may wonder how you managed without them.

This is because Apple’s annual updates to the Mac operating system tend to have a regular rhythm. Massive updates arrive on even-numbered years: Big Sur, for example, the 2020 update to macOS that was also the first version that ran on Apple Silicon hardware. Updates in odd-numbered years, such as Monterey, look more or less like the previous version but come with under-the-hood improvements that may do more for you than dazzling interface changes. By contrast, Microsoft has released few major updates to Windows 10 over the past couple years—though Windows 11, which also recently entered public beta, breaks with that pattern in a major way.

As always with beta versions of operating systems, and especially with early betas, you shouldn’t install the Monterey beta on the Mac you use for work. Either install it on a Mac that you don’t absolutely need or don’t install it at all, because things will always go wrong—and Apple makes it extremely hard to downgrade to a previous version, especially on an Apple Silicon Mac. Expert users may want to create a separate volume on their hard disk and install Monterey into it while continuing to use Big Sur on an existing volume, but I strongly recommend against trying this, at least until a later release of the public beta.