Apple has released the first public beta version of macOS 15 Sequoia, its latest laptop and desktop operating system. Sequoia is a major upgrade for Macs, featuring Apple Intelligence—Apple’s version of the AI features that every PC vendor now builds into almost everything—though you won’t find it in the first public beta. But Sequoia also offers a notable new convenience feature that gives you almost full control of your iPhone directly from your Mac, plus a one-stop Passwords app, new window-management features, and much more. The company's highly touted Apple Intelligence will gradually start appearing in later beta releases, and is scheduled to get further updates even after the official release in the fall. Meanwhile, Sequoia’s other standout features are available to check out right now.
You can upgrade your current macOS Sonoma system to the Sequoia public beta today, but you almost certainly shouldn’t, especially if your current macOS system is your daily driver for work and/or play. Apple’s early betas are typically mostly smooth and usable, but they inevitably have bumpy patches that you don’t discover until you trip over them. Even the first official release of a new macOS version tends to cause problems on some systems, so we always recommend that you hold off on upgrading to a OS version until the first “point release” drops a few weeks after the first general release.
If you follow my advice below, you can easily install the Sequoia beta alongside your current system and switch between them in order to confirm that the new version won’t cause any problems and you’re ready to upgrade. If you use only Apple’s built-in software like Mail, Contacts, and Safari you’ll likely have no trouble with the public beta, but I found a few minor glitches with third-party software. Apple’s strict security seems to have gotten in the way of some apps that ran perfectly under Sonoma. Read on to see what I found.
What's New in macOS: Sequoia Design, Features, and More
Sequoia’s default wallpaper is an odd orange and blue animation, but the final release will presumably add some gorgeous panoramas. Meanwhile, you can go retro with a “Macintosh” wallpaper based on icons and UI elements from the 1980s version of the OS.
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Apple’s PR touts Apple Intelligence as the biggest new feature not only in Sequoia but throughout the Apple ecosystem, and if it lives up to its promises, it will let you power through tasks that now require a lot of complex maneuvering. For example, Apple says that you’ll be able to tell Siri, either by voice or type commands, to perform almost any action that you could do by hand, saving you the time and trouble of searching for and selecting information. So, for example, you should be able to tell Siri to show you your hotel reservation for your next trip–without making you open the Mail app and searching for it. Apple Intelligence in Safari should provide summaries and outline navigation in web pages, and information on people, places, and things named on the page. Right now, though, we have no way of knowing how well these automated features will work in practice, or how it will compare with Microsoft’s rival Copilot features.
A Whole New Meaning for Hands-Free: Fully Control Your iPhone With Your Mac
Meanwhile, you don’t have to wait to start using Sequoia’s iPhone Mirroring, a spectacularly useful feature that goes beyond anything I had hoped for from the new OS. The obvious advantage: You can interact with your phone when it’s in another room, and the less obvious advantage that you can type far more quickly and accurately into your phone from your Mac’s keyboard than by using your thumbs on the phone’s keyboard. Apple already lets you answer a phone call on your Mac, reply to Messages, and display many (not all) iPhone widgets on your macOS desktop, but iPhone Mirroring gives you almost complete remote control over the phone. The only exceptions I found in testing were a banking app that wouldn't run because it thought I had screen-sharing turned on, and another app that refused to unlock itself because it required a biometric sensor like Face ID, and my Mac’s Touch ID wasn’t enough for it. Other apps, however, accepted my Mac’s Touch ID as a biometric credential. Third-party vendors will need to decide how much they want to cooperate with iPhone Mirroring in situations like these.
iPhone Mirroring also includes the ability to drag an image or video from your Mac into an iPhone app, but I couldn’t make it work in the beta. Instead of swiping up to browse through your apps, a tiny icon above the phone image performs the same function, and another icon returns from an app to the home screen. Security precautions seem solid: For example, your phone is locked during Mirroring so no one else can use it—and if you have StandBy displaying a clock or widgets on the phone itself, you can still run apps on the phone from the mirror image on your Mac. Not all iPhone Mirroring features are built into the first public beta, so you’ll have to wait a few weeks or months before you can click on a phone widget on your Mac desktop and open iPhone Mirroring with the corresponding iPhone app already launched.
Mirroring requires the iOS 18 beta installed on your iPhone. I used a spare phone to test the iOS 18 beta because, similarly as above, some of my banking and other high-security apps refuse to run under beta iOS versions. If you upgrade to the iOS 18 beta, make sure you have a full backup that you can restore if you need to go back to the current iOS 17 release.
Capable, One-Stop Password Management
The Passwords app in Sequoia is a bid to give macOS users the same kind of integrated password controls provided by thirty-party apps like 1Password. The interface is iOS-style, easy to navigate, and, in my view, more elegant and usable than any dedicated party password manager. It also automatically stores all the Wi-Fi passwords you’ve used in macOS or iOS, something that no other app seems to be able to do. Apple promises a Windows version called iCloud Passwords, and when this becomes available, the new Passwords app will likely become the first choice for password management for many.
Borrowing features from Zoom, WebEx, and other apps, a new Presenter Preview is built in to the OS, and works in FaceTime as well as other conferencing apps. When you start sharing your screen, a preview window appears where you can choose which app you want to share, so that notifications and windows from other apps don’t get shared along with it. As you can see from the screenshot below, you need to look carefully to find the dialog boxes to click in order to share specific windows.
You can also select a background image, and macOS seems to do a better job than other apps of making you look as if you’re really in a room with that background, without distracting artifacts around your face and body.
Other enhancements include hiking trails in Maps, and a Maps feature that lets you save “places” under any names you choose.
Making Messaging More Fun With Animation
Apple’s Messages similarly takes a cue from various third-party apps by supporting bold and italic type in messages, and sending tapbacks, and letting you schedule a message to send later. Messages also gets stickers and animated effects like balloons and flying hearts. You still get only two minutes to unsend a message, unlike Facebook Messenger which lets you unsend a message at any time—a feature that’s only useful, of course, if the recipient hasn’t yet read the message.
Windows users have long been either grateful for—or annoyed by—Windows’ default behavior of making an app window fill the screen when you drag the window to the top. (I’m annoyed by it, and always turn it off.) With Sequoia, macOS gets a similar but much better-implemented version of the same feature. By default, as in earlier macOS versions, if you drag an app to the edge of the screen, nothing special happens. But if you hold down the Option key while dragging, an outline opens and you can drop your app into it. By default, the first outline will fill one half the screen. When you Option-drag another app to the other side of the screen, an outline appears and you can drop the app inside. Further options, available from the green button on the toolbar or the Window menu on the top-line menu let you divide the screen into quarters or choose other options. In the beta, this feature isn’t as smooth as it should be, and the screen only divides accurately if you hide the dock. With the dock visible, the quarters slightly overlap.
Sequoia Brings Even-Stronger Apple App Integration
As always with a new version, macOS gives its apps more ways to interact with each other. You can create and edit Reminders in the Calendar app. Notes includes live transcriptions like the automatic voice-message transcripts in iOS. The Notes app also includes other worthwhile enhancements like collapsible sections, text scanned from PDFs, and the ability to solve math equations by writing the formula or calculation inside a note, much as you already can in a Spotlight search box or by asking Siri.
I haven’t tested the enhanced gaming features that promise to bring spatial audio to AirPods, but you can expect a full report on gaming in Sequoia after the OS is released in the fall.
Every new macOS version quietly tightens security, and Sequoia is no exception. If you run a third-party app that hasn’t been “notarized” and marked as safe by Apple, macOS will pop up a warming message saying that the app is broken and should be sent to the trash. This message is often misleading since there’s nothing wrong with the app except that it hasn’t been “notarized” by Apple’s testing routine, which is available only to programmers who pay $99 per year for a developer account. In Sonoma and earlier macOS versions, after reading the first warning pop-up, you could ctrl-click on the app, read another warning and choose to open it anyway from the pop-up menu, and then the app would open. Sequoia changes this option, so the first time you try to open a non-notarized app, you’ll have to grant permission for the app in the System Settings app’s Security tab. After you do this for one non-notarized app, you’ll be able to use the ctrl-click menu to open other non-notarized apps, as in Sonoma, though you’ll have to enter your password the first time you run any such app. Advanced users will likely find this pesky, but Apple has chosen security over convenience here.
What's Still Missing in macOS 15 Sequoia?
I posted a macOS 15 wish list a few days before Apple announced Sequoia at WWDC, and the only one that came true was the ask for better iPhone integration—and, with iPhone mirroring, I got more than I even hoped for. A long-standing annoyance that still isn’t fixed is the menu bar, which lets icons disappear behind the notch so that you don’t even know they’re there. Third-party software like Bartender 5 becomes essential if you use a laptop screen and clutter your menu bar as I do. You still can’t print directly from the screenshot preview screen, but you have to let the OS save the image to your desktop so you can print it from there. There’s still no integrated way to store your clipboard history. And you still can’t change the blinking blue color used by default for folders. Maybe next year?
One standard question about every new OS version is: Can my Mac even run it? If you can run macOS Sonoma on your Mac, you can upgrade to Sequoia, with two exceptions: You can’t run then ew OS on the 2018 or 2019 MacBook Air. Otherwise, you can use any MacBook Air from 2020 or later, any MacBook Pro from 2018 or later, similarly for any iMac from 2019, iMac Pro from 2017, Mac mini from 2018, Mac Studio from 2022, or Mac Pro from 2019. I installed the beta on my 2020 Intel MacBook Pro and was impressed to see how quick and responsive it was on that aging machine. iPhone mirroring requires either an Apple Silicon Mac or an Intel Mac with a T2 security chip; it worked seamlessly on my 2020 Intel machine. I upgraded a five-year old iPhone 11 with the iOS 18 beta, and had no trouble using it with iPhone Mirroring. For more on iPhone compatibility, read How to Get iOS 18 and if you need a new Mac, we've tested and reviewed all of them. Here's what to get.
How to Install macOS 15 Sequoia Safely
Here's how to run the beta without disturbing your existing setup: I recommend starting with at least 50GB of free disk space, though you might be able to manage with less. First open Disk Utility in macOS. On the toolbar, click on the plus sign above the word Volume and create a new volume with a name like “Beta” or “Sequoia.” When it’s done, close Disk Utility. Next go to the App Store, search for macOS Sonoma, click Get, and wait while Software Update downloads the installer. If the installer opens, agree to install Sonoma but make absolutely certain to click the little button that says “Show All Disks...” so that you can install Sonoma into your new “Beta” or “Sequoia” volume. Continue the installation.
When your Mac restarts in your new Sonoma setup, open System Settings, go to Software Update, click on the Beta Updates dropdown and select “macOS Sequoia Public Beta.” Then click check for updates, and let your Mac install Sequoia in this new partition. When it’s done, you can use the Startup Disk option in System Settings to return to your current Sonoma system or stay in Sequoia to experiment.
Do You Really Need to Upgrade to macOS 15 Sequoia?
Sequoia is definitely worth checking out, if not now, then in the fall when the OS is officially released, and integrates Apple Intelligence features. I won’t weigh in on the ancient question of Windows versus macOS, because, honestly, no one’s going to switch operating systems on a reviewer’s say-so, even if I've been doing this for many, many, many years. I use both macOS and Windows and admire both, but I use Windows for heavy-duty work, mostly because the keyboard interface in Windows itself and most major Windows apps is so much easier to use than anything in macOS. But I reach for the Mac for almost anything else, and only carry Apple laptops when I travel. One reason I can depend on a Mac is that Parallels Desktop lets me run a full Windows system at top speed on my Apple Silicon MacBook Air. Parallels on an Apple Silicon Mac supports the ARM version of Windows, which runs as fast or faster on my Air as it does on my Intel-based Windows desktop. You can’t run macOS legally or efficiently under Windows, but Windows under macOS is fully supported by Microsoft and is impressively fast. It's the best of both worlds.
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