Speaker 1: I’ve been using the new Macs public beta for a while now, Montey. Here’s how it’s changed how I use my Mac.
Speaker 1: So if you’re a fan of beta versions of operating systems, this has been a pretty good summer for you. You’ve got the new Macs beta, you’ve got windows 11 in a public death beta. You can of course install these on a lot of the machines you already own. I always say, though, you probably shouldn’t, especially if it’s on a machine [00:00:30] that you would call mission critical, the one that you need for work or for school, or frankly, the only one you have, that’s it go do what you want. I’m not the laptop police I actually, and the laptop police, but don’t tell an a body I’m undercover. So for every big operating system update again, whether it’s Macs or whether it’s windows or iOS or I iPad OS, there are always a ton of new features. I’m convinced most of them you’ll never find and never use that said there are a handful of them that are actually really interesting and different and change how your machine [00:01:00] looks and how it works here in Monterey the new version of Mac OS.
Speaker 1: And again, you can get the public data. Now, come back later, this fall for the official release, I have found a handful of things that are really useful and really make me say this is worth updating to, there are a whole bunch of audio and video changes coming to FaceTime, including how you know, micro work and how you can arrange people and grid on your screen and your backgrounds. But to me, the single most important thing was you can now [00:01:30] use FaceTime in your web browser. So if you have a FaceTime meeting you want to have, but your friend or your colleague doesn’t have an apple device, no iPhone, no MacBook, nothing. You can actually start a FaceTime meeting, basically very much like a zoom meeting and send them the link. And they’re able to jump in right from the browser. I’ve tried this on Mac browsers.
Speaker 1: I’ve tried this on, uh, PC browsers. Uh, it so far, the browser performance feel is a little bit choppy to me, but it actually works. And that makes face time much more, I guess, zoom, like if [00:02:00] you’re thinking about using it for a work meeting, because not everyone on an apple device, there are also a whole lot of changes coming to safari. The built-in web browser on your Mac. Now I like to use Chrome a lot of the time because it gives me the ability to carry my work over pretty simply from a windows machine to a Mac machine. And I do that a lot that said using the native browser built into your device, like let’s safari Mac usually gives you better performance and better battery life. Now, if you suffer from tab fatigue, which I [00:02:30] know a lot of people do, you have too many tabs open they’re in different windows.
Speaker 1: Maybe you don’t have ’em grouped together. It can be a little overwhelming. I really like what Safari’s done with tab grouping. Uh, and again, it’s not something super revolutionary. Other browsers have similar things, but you can open up your sidebar and pull all your tabs in there and group them. I can call this the news group or the, you know, entertainment group or the shopping group, and then just flick between them and in the same browser window, I get just those tabs and all the other tabs [00:03:00] are hidden. I would’ve had one full browser window open with work tabs and one full browser window open with gaming tabs. The look for me, those are usually work tabs too, but there’s also a really cool visual upgrade. And that is the actual tabs on top of your browser window. Now get pulled back into the page design, thanks to safari.
Speaker 1: It actually changes the whole background of the browser window itself to match the color of the page. And that includes the little tabs sticking up on top. And if you click through a bunch of different websites with different color [00:03:30] schemes to them, you’ll see this in action. It’s one of the more visually appealing upgrades to browsers, which frankly have not changed that much in many years that I’ve seen in a while. And now I just see a big UIE tab in some other browser. And I go, why don’t you just, why don’t you just fade away into the background, color match, like a chameleon. The other thing about Macco west, I really like is playing a little bit of catch up. It’s not something that is brand new, other devices and other operating systems have again, had similar tricks before, but apple calls it [00:04:00] live text.
Speaker 1: And that’s when you take a photo that includes an image of some text or some numbers, and you open it up either in photos or in preview, when that happens without doing anything else special, you can now reach in and grab, highlight that text and those numbers and do things with them. I can write some text, uh, I can use some handwriting here and take a picture of it and grab it and just paste it into a text file or my web browser or a reward processor. Uh, I can find a phone number on a package and I can either call that number, [00:04:30] save it to my contacts, or look it up. And of course, if you see a website URL, you can actually open that right up or even get a little mini, uh, preview view of it. This is very much the, like what Google lens does.
Speaker 1: So it’s not something that’s revolutionary and changing the world, but having it built right into the Macs that you use with your MacBook, that makes it very useful for people because it has to be on a device that you use in front of you every day. Now that’s a lot of what is jumped out to me immediately is really useful. And the Macs Monterey [00:05:00] public beta, there are other features like universal control, which submit to use your keyboard and mouse, both on your Mac and on an iPad next to it. Those are not in the current data they’re coming soon. I bet that’ll be really interesting, but again, most of these OS changes are really under the hood or very small things. You’re not likely to see. I find it more interesting to go in and find the stuff that you’re just gonna run into in your everyday use and make you go, you know what? I feel like I actually have an updated computer here because I took my OS and I updated it. All [00:05:30] right. That’s it.
