

Maps looks better and gives you Guides from brands you trust, and it also lets you create custom guides of your favorite places. Inline replies are now a thing inside group messages, as is sending a message to an individual in a group conversation by simply typing their name.


You can add effects to your messages, like balloons and confetti, as well as create Memoji on the Mac and get automatically generated Memoji stickers. Messages lets you pin conversations to the top, and the revamped search engine lets you quickly find links, photos, and matching terms. Privacy Report gives you a quick snapshot of trackers, while data breach password monitoring tells you if your passwords have been compromised, without ever revealing your information to Apple. The start page is customizable, and translation of web pages is supported from seven languages. Safari now finally supports both YouTube and Netflix in 4K HDR, while tab switching is faster and more efficient with page previews upon hovering over tabs, and displaying favicons by default. On Macs with M1, it's 1.5x speedier at running JavaScript and "nearly 2x more responsive" (again, whatever that means). The company says this newest version loads "frequently visited sites" (whatever that means) an average of 50% faster than Chrome. The new Control Center lets you quickly access settings related to DND mode, displays, keyboard, and brightness, while the revamped Notification Center shows you more info at a glance with interactive notifications and new widgets.Īpple is also claiming Big Sur comes with the biggest update to Safari since its original launch in 2003. It also makes dark icons more consistent with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, while inside apps buttons and controls appear when needed and recede when they are not, reducing visual complexity and allowing you to focus on the content. Design-wise, it still looks familiar, but employs more use of white space for easier navigation. It brings with it a fresh new design, as well as multiple enhancements to Safari, Messages, Maps, and privacy. This is the first iteration of the OS that is optimized for Apple's new M1 chip, which is powering the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac mini.īig Sur also works on Intel-based machines as well, of course. As expected, today Apple has officially released the latest version of macOS, called Big Sur.
