At 1am today, Apple held its WWDC 21 developer conference and announced five new systems: iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, tvOS 15, and macOS 12. Let’s focus on macOS 12.

The new generation of macOS was named Monterey, a Bay city in California.

General control

MacOS 12 adds “Universal Control” to make it easier to collaborate across devices. You can control the Mac and iPad with the same set of buttons, mouse, and trackpad, allowing the mouse pointer to move seamlessly between the Mac and iPad, as well as between the iMac and Mac. It even supports dragging and dropping files across devices. It can be used between up to three devices.

Quick instructions

Shortcuts from iOS have also come to macOS, allowing you to set shortcuts for specific processes to improve efficiency. Auto actions, created earlier on the Mac, can also be imported directly into shortcut commands.

Play from a distance

Videos, music, Keynote and other content on other devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac) can be directly played to the Mac through space. In the past, this was done via a data line or third-party software.

Quick memo

From any page, you can use shortcuts, trigger corners, or control centers to call up quick memos to take notes anytime, anywhere.

translation

Support whole-system translation, select text, right-click and choose “translate”, you can quickly translate. Support to copy the results, change the language, or replace the selected text with the translated result.

The text of live,

Also we often say OCR text recognition, can recognize the text in the photo, can copy and paste the text, search and translation. Direct searches of sites and landmarks are available.

Safari

The TAB bar has been redesigned to make it simpler. Search is integrated into tabs. Click on any TAB to enter and search directly.

The background color varies with the TAB.

Add “Tag Group”, click a tag group, the group contains the TAB page will be displayed. Label groups can also be synchronized between devices.

These are just major updates to macOS, more details will be shared later.

MacOS 12 Supported models

Developer beta for each system will be released today, public beta next month, and official release in the fall. The beta system is buggy and unstable. It is not recommended to take risks and try new things. If you do try new things, remember to do a good backup!

If last year’s Big Sur was “new in interface,” this year’s Monterey is “new in features.” In particular, the addition of “global translation”, “live text”, “universal control” and “airplay” is expected to kill a lot of third-party software.