macOS Sonoma includes a number of new features and improvements, mainly focused on productivity and creativity: • Widgets have been revamped. They are no longer constrained to the
Notification Center—instead they can be placed anywhere on the desktop, and the widget picker has been redesigned to resemble the
iOS and
iPadOS versions of it. • The lock screen has been redesigned to include a date and time similar to iOS and iPadOS. The power buttons have become a context menu. •
Video-conferencing apps can overlay the presenter's
webcam video on top of screen sharing. • App icons have been made more rounded. • The Spotlight search bar has been made more rounded, and its width has been decreased. •
Safari changes: • Browsing profiles enable separate sets of
bookmarks,
extensions, and
cookies, which can be used to separate, for example, a personal setup from a work one. • Password sharing lets multiple people have access to the same collection of website passwords, and update them as needed, with changes syncing across all enrolled devices. • Safari web apps let the user add any website to the
Dock and open it in a simplified Safari interface, in a way that is similar to both web apps introduced in iPhone OS 1.1.3 and Google Chrome. This feature is slightly different from
progressive web apps since it does not require additional work from website developers. •
Messages changes: • More precise search filters: for example, the contact name can be combined with a search term to look for the term within a specific conversation. • Catch-up lets the user quickly jump to the first unread message in a conversation. • Tapback now appears as multiple icons instead of being a context menu. •
iMessage stickers have a new selection interface. •
Apple TV now has a sidebar instead of a top bar. • Game mode optimizes gaming performance by prioritizing gaming tasks and allocating more
GPU and
CPU capacity to the game. It provides smoother frame rates for game play and reduced latency for
Bluetooth peripherals, such as wireless game controllers and
AirPods. • New slow-motion
screensavers of different locations worldwide. When logged in, they gradually slow down and become the desktop wallpaper. • Smoother animations for several areas such as the notification panel, the lock screen, and the show desktop gesture. The notifications now slide in with an ease-out motion, the lock screen now zooms in and out when unlocking and locking, the show desktop gesture has a new spring back animation. • Users can react with their hands and animations will pop up based on the
hand gesture. •
AV1 hardware decoding has been introduced on devices with AV1 hardware decoding support, such as Macs with SoCs from the
Apple M3 family. • Print Center, a utility application returning from
Mac OS X Tiger, was reintroduced for managing print jobs, viewing different printer queues, and pausing or deleting print jobs. • The text cursor now looks more like its iOS counterpart. It is bolder, has a smooth blinking motion, and its color follows the current app's accent color. It also briefly displays an indicator that shows the current input language when the user switches keyboard languages. This indicator can also signal helpful input details like when Caps Lock is on. • Videos now encode faster in
Final Cut Pro, Compressor, and third-party video applications on Mac computers using M1 Ultra or M2 Ultra. • The startup screen is now slightly different, with the loading bar at the bottom being lowered to the bottom of the screen instead of immediately under the Apple logo. • The Screen Sharing app adds a new high performance mode providing low-latency audio, high frame rates,
HDR, and supports up to two virtual displays. A DigitalFoundry review of the first beta of Game Porting Toolkit found it "impressive", with few graphical glitches and full support for console controllers instead of the keyboard, though they found that frame rates were around half of what they would be on Windows, and that many games were not supported. During the Sonoma beta, updates to the Game Porting Toolkit brought support for
32-bit games and around 20% better performance. Writing for AppleInsider and iMore, reporter Peter Cohen said that Game Mode and the Game Porting Toolkit are improvements but do not indicate the kind of "sea change" in Apple's priorities and culture that are needed to build a true Mac gaming ecosystem. Cohen says that the problem with Mac gaming is not in the ability to port games, but in a lack of a "business case" for game publishers to do so, due to the Mac's low
market share, the cost of supporting a port, and uncertain demand for Mac games when many Mac users also own consoles or gaming PCs.
YouTuber Snazzy Labs issued similar criticisms, which journalist John Siracusa agreed with.
New Unicode Characters Font Support macOS 14.0 • Tagalog Letter Ra (U+170D) (14.0) • Tagalog Sign Pamudpod (U+1715) (14.0) • Tagalog Letter Archaic Ra (U+171F) (14.0)
Removed features • Support for legacy
Mail plug-ins has been removed. • System API support for converting
PostScript and
Encapsulated PostScript files to PDF format has been removed, following previous changes in macOS Ventura that removed support for viewing and converting PostScript and Encapsulated PostScript files within
Preview. == Supported hardware ==