What to Know About macOS Monterey

The bells are ringing, the carollers are singing, and rosy-cheeked cherubs bedeck the hallways. What could it mean? Yep, that’s right folks, macOS is due a major version update.

Apple generally releases a new major version of macOS once a year, bringing with it a slate of performance improvements, bug fixes, and new features to tempt you into installing. This year’s release, macOS Monterey, is around the corner.

So what does that mean for you, a humble Mac user? Do you need to prepare your device for the upgrade somehow? Back up your important files? Perform some kind of sacred dance?

And what does macOS Monterey have to offer you anyway?

Let’s find out!

Prepare for Launch

First things first, what does such a big upgrade entail and what do you have to do to prep for it?

Well, nothing really.

Yep, sorry for the anticlimax, but Apple have gotten pretty good at this ‘upgrading your Mac’ game by now. When macOS Monterey hits your device, you’ll probably only notice a few aesthetic differences and the cool new features. Your documents, files, downloads, apps, and whatever else you can think of will be as you left them, where you left them.

You don’t even necessarily have to do anything to get the update going. By default, your Mac phones home to check for updates once a week. After the new Mac operating system hits, your Mac will start downloading it after one of those automatic checks and install it when you’re not using your machine.

Of course, if you’re too excited to wait, you can always make your Mac check for updates manually by going to the Apple Menu > About This Mac > Software Update.

But let’s be honest, what you want to know is: what new toys am I getting?

Universal Control

A huge new addition to macOS Monterey is a system that makes the Apple ecosystem more seamless than ever, and it’s called universal control.

It basically lets you use the trackpad (or mouse) and keyboard of a single Mac across multiple separate Apple systems.

Imagine this: you’re an artist who makes digital illustrations on their iPad, but you communicate with your clients via email on your Mac. Rather than constantly switching between devices, it would be so much easier to be able to slip your Mac cursor over to your iPad, click your artwork, and drag it over into the email you’re writing on your Mac.

Well, universal control lets you do that.

You don’t have to be a highfalutin digital artist to take advantage of it, either. The possibilities are endless, and it’s all thanks to Apple’s tight, vertical control over the development of all their devices. Neat, huh? Check out https://setapp.com/how-to/universal-control-on-macos-monterey for more on the potential of universal control.

Private Relay

A big reason so many people use Apple computers is their oft-repeated commitment to user privacy. Apple makes hardware and sells it to you (and boy are they good at that!), they don’t need to monetize your data to make a profit, because their growth comes from their great hardware.

MacOS Monterey builds on that reputation for privacy with the new ‘private relay’ feature built into Safari. It works a bit like a VPN (but, as Apple will be quick to point out, is not a VPN in and of itself) in that it helps protect your browsing data from snooping third parties.

It works like this, normally, when you to Google.com, you send a request to a server for that website with your IP address attached. Anyone looking, be they Google, your ISP, or whoever, can see both the website you’re looking for and the IP address you were using when you asked for it.

Private relay works like this: both the website you request and your IP are sent to Apple, encrypted. Apple decrypts your IP and assigns you a spoof one, then sends that to a second (non-Apple) server, which decrypts the website address you asked for and sends it back. This way, Apple knows who you are but not what you asked for, and the non-Apple server knows what you asked for but not who you are.

And like that, your traffic gets a whole lot more private.

MacOS Monterey’s FaceTime Improvements

For some reason, video conferencing has taken off over the past year and a half. Maybe it was the global pandemic, maybe we all got sick of each other. Who can say?

But Apple is responding to that upswing in video-chat usage with a suite of FaceTime updates in the new Mac operating system. From audio to video, FaceTime got a whole lot more powerful.

For one thing, Apple is finally bringing the spatial audio capabilities that debuted so well on Apple Music to FaceTime. Users in a FaceTime chat will now sound as though they are coming from the part of the screen they’re on, thanks to Apple’s audio wizardry.

There’s also voice isolation, which will use machine learning to try to make people’s voices more distinct even among the clamor of background noises.

But the most notable update is that FaceTime is no longer Apple-only. That’s right, Steve Jobs’ old promise to make FaceTime an open standard has (sort of) come true. Apple users can now open FaceTime calls and send links to people on non-Apple systems that will let them connect via web browser on their devices.

Pretty cool!

We’re All Off to Monterey

These are a few of the many cool upgrades and enhancements that macOS Monterey is set to bring to our Apple computers when it launches in the fall. Whether you’re big on privacy, have a bevy of Apple systems to control, or want to be able to hear grandma better on FaceTime, there’s something there for you.

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