The majority of Mac users are already familiar with Apple’s newest desktop software, but it does introduce some novel multitasking concepts and a brand-new Settings app. Naturally, it is more integrated with your iPhone than ever.
When In reviewing my macOS Monterey review in preparation for this one, I was surprised to see how many features I had anticipated using but had not yet used.
I considered implementing shortcuts. I could easily switch to Focus. I was certain I would begin tagging my notes. I had anticipated using Portrait Mode constantly. Tab Groups made me think about switching to Safari. It was very tempting to switch to Apple’s navigation app because of the new cards in Maps. Warning: This will reveal that I still use Chrome and Google Maps frequently and have not used any of the aforementioned features since.
This does not imply that I lied in that review or that these features are inherently ineffective. As it turns out, I’ll just keep working in my current manner.
That has me pondering the distinction between “cool” and “essential.” As product lines advance, their devotees create their own methods of usage and grow accustomed to having access to those methods going forward. Even if new features have obvious, intuitive ways to improve workflows, that doesn’t mean those holes are filled by the new features.
Stage Manager
Let’s get this part over with now, okay. Stage Manager is a buggy mess on the iPad. According to what I can tell, Stage Manager on the MacBook is operating as intended. To be clear, I abhor it fundamentally. However, that is my concern. It’s functioning as intended as far as this review is concerned.
For those who don’t know, Stage Manager is a system for organizing windows and apps. It centers the app you’re currently using on your screen and crams your recently used apps into a tiny column to the left (referred to as “piles”) These piles aren’t visible until you hover your cursor over them, at which point they energetically appear. Two or more apps can be “grouped” together so that they open as a single unit and appear in the same pile. Real-time thumbnail updates for the piles go above and beyond what the dock can do. (However, I probably prefer them to be smaller or transparent so they don’t always obscure things.)
Simple enough, but this is where things start to go awry. An icon will expand if you click it and then drag it to the center of your screen. The two apps will then combine if you drag a third app to the center of the screen over the first one. The apps are not grouped, however, if you simply open the second app from the dock rather than dragging it to the center; instead, the first app you had open is returned to its pile, and the second app expands to become a new pile. Oh, and if you ever, at any point, full-screen an app, it essentially exits Stage Manager and just becomes its own separate thing.
I guess the way I should think about this is that a pile serves as its own virtual space. You are free to conduct your business as usual in that area, minimizing and reopening windows as necessary. However, it’s challenging to fully adopt that attitude when launching a new app causes you to navigate away from everything you were viewing and instead launch the app elsewhere on your operating system. I can see why Apple made that choice—having every app you open automatically group with whatever else is currently running could get irksome—but it does seem to highlight how arbitrary the rules are.
Additionally, grouping gives me a headache, primarily because it is more difficult to remove a tab from a group than to add it to one (which I did accidentally from time to time). You’re supposed to drag it back to the piles area to accomplish that. This occasionally worked and occasionally didn’t for the apps I tried it with. Additionally, not even one Chrome tab could be opened (they all just covered the piles). You can’t just reduce them because doing so would only conceal it and leave the rest of their pile in play. They remain structurally a part of that pile.
Look, I would have loved this feature in high school. At that time in my life, I frequently tried to put everything else aside so that I could concentrate on my term paper or other task. At that time, I also wished I could have taken a few minutes to sit down and practice this cool new skill. I no longer have the patience for this new system when my current macOS setup works just fine. I now work in elaborate tab setups referencing multiple documents at once and quickly tabbing in and out of other apps.
Naturally, this does not preclude you from using Stage Manager. You may do so if you wish. It’s not simple to accidentally enable, which is nice and the reason my harrumphing is ultimately just that and not a true criticism of this operating system. You need to embark on a mini-adventure into the Control Center in order to turn it on. Therefore, it is not harming anyone and is performing as intended. When apps were closed and reopened, they were the correct size and position, and nothing crashed or became unresponsive. Go crazy, everybody.
Continuity Camera
The newest MacBooks available today have good webcams, but older Macs that people will be using to run Ventura might still have noticeably poor ones. As long as you have an iPhone XR or newer, you can use the new Continuity Camera to turn your iPhone into a webcam for your MacBook. As long as your phone is close to your MacBook and has the most recent version of iOS, the two should automatically connect. On the phone, a pop-up appears, and you select “yes.”
Continuity Camera works like any other external webcam once it is connected. In applications that use cameras, like FaceTime and Photo Booth, you can choose it. It has support for Center Stage, Portrait, and Studio Lighting. Center Stage pans to keep you in frame as you move around and is pretty effective. Portrait blurs your background, but not quite as completely as Zoom’s own tools do. There is also a “Desk View” feature, but because of how my laptop is positioned on my desk, it mostly ended up showing my, er, crotch area. So, exercise caution outside.
A mount made by Belkin fastens a phone to the screen of your MacBook in a horizontal position. We have a separate review of that, but I was very pleased with how it performed on my test laptop (an M2 MacBook Air). Contrary to my fears, it hasn’t made the lid too top-heavy. Make sure you have a place to put it if it’s not going to live on your phone because it is small and monochromatic enough to be a little easy to lose if you’re someone who loses things like me.
Overall, the feature of this OS that I’m most likely to use going forward is Continuity Camera (though I also may not end up wanting to bother with the extra setup it takes). Although it seems like overkill for every meeting, it might be useful for crucial calls. This is the pinnacle of the Apple ecosystem, the most extravagantly imagined manifestation of the company’s continuity conceit. It simply works right away, which is uncommon in life.
FaceTime
Another upscale feature for FaceTime will be introduced in relation to video calls. You can easily transfer FaceTime calls between your MacBook and a nearby iPhone or iPad using a feature called Handoff. When you bring an iPhone close to your computer while you’re on a call, a notification will appear asking you if you want to switch. When you click that, the call will transfer from your MacBook to your phone. The switch over is fairly quick and seamless, taking only a fraction of a second.
If I ever used FaceTime, which I don’t, I’m sure I would use this frequently. I frequently have to decide between carrying my computer with me or briefly leaving a Zoom or Teams call when I need to go answer the door or do something else. I would much rather just transfer those calls to my phone without any interruptions. If this feature worked elsewhere besides FaceTime, it would significantly improve my workflow and be one of the most important additions to a recent macOS update from the perspective of my daily routine. FaceTime is useless to me because neither my friends nor coworkers use it.
People who aren’t like me, however, might also find it interesting to know that you can now begin a FaceTime call directly from Safari with everyone who is taking part in a shared Tab Group or from a collaborative file with others who are working on it. You’ll be able to begin a session from FaceTime once Freeform, Apple’s new whiteboard app, is released.
Let’s talk about Settings
As a result, the System Preferences app was revamped and is now called System Settings. Early beta versions of the app had a fixed column in the center of the screen that you couldn’t move or resize at all. The fact that you can now scroll down to the keyboard and trackpad settings on the bottom is definitely a step up from before, but you are still unable to resize it horizontally. The latter would give you space to possibly see the hierarchy of categories you are navigating through more clearly (like you can in Finder’s file structure).
System Settings is now structured very similarly to the iOS Settings app compared to the previous interface. I’m of the Google generation, so I just search for the settings I need, so this hasn’t really been a problem for me. And there’s undoubtedly a case to be made for organizing the user interface so that it makes sense to new users who are accustomed to the iPhone. However, it still has a layout that, in some ways, makes a phone seem more appropriate than a computer.
For instance, you now have to scroll past every setting in the book to find the keyboard, trackpad, and printer settings. This includes a ton of other options that don’t seem like they should be given top priority on a computer that people use for work, like Wallet and Apple Pay, Screen Time, and Game Center. Screen Saver, which was logically grouped with Desktop in the past, is no longer there; it and Wallpaper are now each their own things. Menu Bar settings, which were formerly grouped with Dock, are now hidden in a “Desktop & Dock” panel. Extensions, which used to be their own thing as well, are now extremely far down in the Privacy & Security section (under things like HomeKit and Contacts, neither of which I think I will ever click on).
Where they once had their own sections, Software Update, Time Machine, Startup Disk, and Date & Time are now all buried in General. It’s not that I believe these controls are inherently of the utmost importance; rather, I fail to understand the justification for burying them in favor of, say, giving Wallpaper, Lock Screen, and Screen Saver their own sections or giving Game Center its own section, which seem to me to be much more important for phones than laptops.
Look, I’m glad to see System Preferences getting a refresh after being around for a million years. Simply put, I’m not sure that bringing over the iOS menu made sense in this situation.
There’s a bunch of other stuff, too
Then there are the minor adjustments here and there, some of which are catching up with Google and some of which are catching up with iOS. For instance, the Mail app now has features like Scheduled Send, Undo Send (within 10 seconds), and follow-up prompts for messages that haven’t received a response, all of which I was mostly surprised to learn Mail didn’t already have. (Gmail has all of these features since forever.) The search function in the Mail app has also been enhanced, and it is now more useful. The suggestions bar now prompts you to focus your search on terms like “Subject Contains” or “Attachment Contains” and provides some context for each of its results.
Messages also received iOS-like updates. Any message you send can now be edited 15 minutes after you send it, but the recipient’s actual view depends on the operating system of their device, which can produce some amusing results. Things can be marked as unread (another not uncommon feature of competing messaging apps). Theoretically, SharePlay can now be launched directly from a Messages thread, but I haven’t yet been able to make it work. The restriction there is that anyone in the chat who wants to participate in the SharePlay must be a subscriber to the service it is hosted on. Keep conversations brief if possible.
iCloud shared libraries are now a thing on the photo front. They can have up to six collaborators, and they can work on things like photo edits, favorite tags, captions, and keywords. You can have iCloud curate your libraries based on specific dates or topics (so if you wanted all photos of your daughter in a shared library, it could do that automatically). Anything it doesn’t get, you can manually move.
The big news regarding Safari is passkeys. (Although technically not a part of Ventura 13, Safari always comes out at the same time.) With Passkeys, a new password-free sign-in standard, your keys are stored on your iCloud Keychain rather than in locations that could be subject to data breaches. It may not be quite ready for prime time, though. I was able to set up a passkey for my Best Buy account, but when I tried to sign in using it, I received an error message.
Even though they are supposed to support the standard, a few other websites never let me set up a passkey or appeared to have the option in the Settings. Guess that means we are still waiting on this.
Oh, and you can now share Tab Groups in Safari, which I suppose would be useful for a team of researchers or collaborators. You can see what tab other people are currently viewing in real time.
Should you upgrade?
Sure. I don’t think it will damage your gadget. It has now been in beta since July, which feels like a long time. At this point, macOS updates are consistently boring and consistently reliable.
Hey, at least this year’s good stuff is actually available. I’ll take that over Monterey’s significant question mark at the time of release. However, Continuity Camera is the only item on this list that seems like something I might actually use frequently; even so, it’s still kind of a maybe.
The remaining material seems unimportant but not at all intrusive. The fact that Ventura enables you to make better use of your phone is one of the strongest justifications for upgrading. Given that Ventura will run on a completely different device, I wonder if Apple has reached its breaking point with regard to significant developments that have a significant impact on the macOS experience at home (on macOS).
But the fact that this update bores me isn’t, ultimately, a massive knock against it in itself. Apple didn’t move heaven and earth because it didn’t need to. People like me have our workloads already, and there wasn’t all that much that needed fixing. It’s clear that macOS has already largely found its footing — and this is all just some extra stuff.
Here are the machines that can install Ventura
- MacBook Pro (2017 and later)
- MacBook Air (2018 and later)
- MacBook (2017)
- iMac Pro (2017)
- iMac (2017 and later)
- Mac Mini (2018 and later)
- Mac Studio (2022)
- Mac Pro (2019)
