FaceTime, Shortcuts, and AirPlay get big boosts this fall in Apple’s macOS Monterey, the successor to Big Sur.
MacOS Monterey has arrived and is ready to download to almost any Mac released in the last six years. We always advise caution with new releases, even one as impressively solid as Monterey, but if you install it now, you’ll get some terrific new features. If you wait a few more weeks until Apple releases a more full-featured point update, you’ll get even more. Monterey doesn’t change the overall look of your Mac the way last year’s Big Sur did, but it makes your desktop or laptop computer more efficient and more fun to use. Here are some of the best of the new features, starting with eight that are available now and ending with two due out in the coming weeks.1. AirPlay to Mac You can now open a video, presentation, or anything else on your phone and play it on your Mac’s hardware in the same way you can already use AirPlay to send content from a Mac or iOS device to an Apple TV or AirPlay-compatible TV. Until now, this feature required third-party apps that were complicated to set up. In the first Monterey release, we found that it took a while for our test iPhone to give us the option to stream a video to a MacBook Pro, and if we stopped playback on the Mac, the phone wouldn’t give us the option to start it up again. These hiccups are typical first-release glitches that Apple will sort out sooner or later. 2. Shortcuts Last year, Apple introduced a visually-oriented automation app called Shortcuts to iOS. No one should be surprised to now find it in macOS Monterey. Shortcuts comes with a selection of prebuilt workflows that can perform anything from simple feats, like texting your most recent photos to a colleague, to complex ones that perform multiple actions when a trigger occurs, such as an email arriving from a friend. You can access Shortcuts from anywhere in the OS, including the menu bar, Finder, and Siri. For advanced users, Shortcuts can incorporate existing Mac automation techniques like Automator, AppleScripts, and shell scripts.
