Transcription
At the time this video goes live, Apple will have just released Mac OS 26 to the public. And while it might not seem like a huge update at first glance, it's actually a lot bigger than it appears. There's a complete visual overhaul, some brand new apps, and a range of genuinely useful quality of life features that can make using your Mac a lot better. There is plenty to unpack, and I know most people don't have the time to explore every change in a new operating system the moment they install it. That's exactly the kind of thing that I enjoy doing. So, in this video, I'm going to show you the 10 things that I think you should check out first when you install Mac OS 26 on your Mac. Okay, let's get into it.
Before we get into the video properly, let's take a quick moment to talk about compatibility with Mac OS 26. We run into this every year, but this time it really does feel like Apple is leaving quite a few older Macs behind. If you have a Mac with Apple Silicon, you are good to go. Whether it's the latest M4 Max or one of the original M1 models, Mac OS 26 will run just fine. If you don't have Apple Silicon, the only Intel-based Macs that I could confirm as compatible are the 16-in MacBook Pro from 2019, the 13-in MacBook Pro from 2020 with Thunderbolt 3 ports, the 27in iMac from 2020, and the 2019 Mac Pro. Even then, you may not get access to every new feature in the update. To update, just open system settings, go to general, select software update, and then follow the prompts to move from Mac OS Sequoia to Mac OS 26 Tahoe. With that out of the way, let's move on to the features.
We can't really talk about the new Mac OS without mentioning the visual overhaul Apple has introduced. Apple is calling the new design language liquid glass, and it's been rolled out across all of this year's operating systems. The good news is if you like the new look, you'll enjoy consistent styling across all your devices. The bad news is if you don't like it, you'll still enjoy consistent styling across all your devices. Personally, I think the floating menus, rounded windows, curves, and translucent elements look really good. You'll see the new look across the Mac, but it really stands out in places like control center, which now floats above the rest of the interface. If you're not keen on the transparency, you can tone it down. Open settings, go to accessibility, then display and turn on reduce transparency. Elements like the menu bar, dock, and control center will all become more solid. It won't completely change the look of Mac OS 26. But if the glassiness isn't for you, this is a decent compromise.
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The control center on the Mac is now fully customizable, which is a big improvement for anyone who uses it often. Previously, it was fixed, but now when you click into it, you'll notice it looks completely different. much more like control center on the iPhone. And there's an edit controls button at the bottom. Clicking this opens a new window showing all the different controls that you can add. If you've customized control center on an iPhone or iPad, the layout will feel very familiar. There's a search bar in the top left for quickly finding a specific control or you can scroll through the full list. If you see something that you want to add, click the green plus icon on it, then choose add to control center. Once a control is in your control center, you can right click on it to switch between small, medium, or large sizes. Small is a single circular tile. Medium is a 1x two tile, and large is usually a 2x two tile, although that can vary depending on the control. You can also choose to move controls into the menu bar instead, remove them entirely, or rearrange them by dragging. If you add more controls and the grid can fit, Mac OS will automatically create an extra control center page in your menu bar, so you can switch between them quickly. You can also create an extra page manually by pressing the plus button next to the control center icon in the menu bar. It is a much more flexible system that makes Control Center way more useful on the Mac.
Launchpad is gone in Mac OS 26, and while I know that's going to be a controversial change, I'm personally glad to see it go. I never liked having to stare at a cluttered wall of app tiles, manually create folders, and then find that those folders didn't sync across my other Macs. Apple has replaced it with something much cleaner, simply called apps. It just sits to the right of the Finder icon in the dock. And when you click on it, you'll see a layout that feels a lot like an expanded spotlight search, because that's basically what it is. At the top is a spotlight search bar. So, if you know the name of the app that you're after, you can start typing and press return to open it instantly. If you'd rather browse, you can scroll through every app installed on your Mac, sorted alphabetically and grouped into categories. By default, you'll see all of your apps together, followed by sections like utilities. Click the ellipsus to the right of applications, and you can switch between a grid or list view and choose whether iPhone apps installed on a connected iPhone should also appear here. Just under the search bar, you'll also see a row of categories. Click on any of these to filter your apps so you can only see what's relevant to that category. I know plenty of people enjoyed Launchpad and will miss it. But for me, this new apps view is a way better and more organized way to get to what I need.
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Spotlight search on the Mac has had a major overhaul in Mac OS 26 and it is long overdue. Apple clearly knew that third party tools like Alfred and Raycast were doing a better job and this update goes a long way towards closing that gap. You still open it the same way, command and spacebar. And at first glance, it looks unchanged. But as soon as you move your cursor into the search field, you'll see four new tabs appear to the right. Apps, files, actions, and clipboard history. You can jump straight to any of these with keyboard shortcuts. Command one for apps, command two for files, command three for actions, and command four for clipboard history. We've already covered apps, so let's focus on the others. Files is essentially a more focused version of Spotlight that only returns results for files and folders. You can use natural language search here, so typing job offer PDF will only bring back PDFs that match. Beneath the results, you'll also find filters for narrowing things down even further. Actions is completely new. This lets you run shortcut style commands directly from Spotlight. You'll see suggestions straight away, like starting a timer or creating a note. And as you scroll down, you'll find options for many of your installed apps. Initially, most of these will be for Apple's own apps, but third party developers can add their own. You can also assign quick keys to actions. For example, searching voice memo, selecting create recording, and setting the quick key mem means that typing mem into spotlight in future will instantly trigger a new recording. Finally, command 4 takes you to clipboard history. This keeps a list of everything that you've copied recently along with a quick copy icon next to each entry. It's perfect if you often need to reuse text or bounce between different snippets without repeatedly switching apps. It's a genuine quality of life upgrade and make Spotlight feel like a much more powerful tool that you'll probably want to use every day.
If you've been using your iPhone through your Mac with continuity over the last few years, you'll be pleased to know that there is now a dedicated phone app on the Mac. To open it, just use Spotlight search, type phone, and launch the app. It looks very similar to the new phone app on the iPhone. There's a filter button at the top of the screen that lets you switch between all calls, missed calls, voicemails, and calls from unknown numbers. At the bottom of this menu, you'll find a manage filtering button. And inside that is a screen unknown callers section. Here you can choose between never, silence, where unknown calls are immediately silenced, or ask reason for calling. If you enable ask reason for calling, your Mac will automatically answer calls from unknown numbers, request their reason for calling, and then pass that information to you so you can decide whether to pick up. Back in the main app view, your favorites sit at the top left. Your recent calls are listed underneath, and any extra information such as voicemail transcriptions appears on the right hand side. There's also a keypad icon next to the search bar, which brings up a numeric keypad, so you can dial numbers directly from your Mac without even picking up your iPhone. It's a genuinely useful addition for anyone who spends a lot of time at their desk and prefers to handle calls directly from their Mac.
So long as you're in a supported region and have a compatible Mac, you now have more translation features than ever. Your Mac can automatically translate text in messages, showing the translated version alongside the original right there in the conversation. In FaceTime and the phone app, you can get live translated captions during FaceTime calls and spoken translations for regular calls in the phone app. These features do require a Mac that supports Apple intelligence, which essentially means any Mac with Apple Silicon. I haven't had the chance to properly test them out yet, so I would be really interested to hear from anyone who has. Does it work well? Is it accurate? Drop me a comment and let me know your experience.
The Magnifier app, a long-standing accessibility tool on the iPhone, is now available on the Mac. And when paired with an iPhone, it becomes an incredibly powerful tool. You can open it by using Spotlight search and typing magnifier. By default, it will use whichever camera your Mac is set to. So, on a MacBook, that will be the built-in front camera. Or if you have a connected webcam, it will default to that. But if you've got continuity camera set up with your iPhone, you can switch to the iPhone's camera for a much clearer, more powerful image. To do that, position your iPhone so it can see what you want to magnify. Then go to the camera menu at the top of the screen and select your iPhone from the list. You can then use the onscreen slider to zoom in or out for a better view. There's also a reader button in the top right corner which will detect text in the view and present it in a clean high contrast reader mode. Apple's example for this is a student with limited vision using it to clearly read text on a presentation board during a lecture. And that's exactly the sort of real world scenario where I think this feature will shine. It's definitely worth spending a few minutes exploring the Photos app on your Mac because Apple has made some really big changes that blend the best parts of last year's redesign with fixes to address some of the common complaints. Almost all navigation now happens in the sidebar on the left. The biggest change is that the app is split into two sections, library and collections. Library is your full photo library, just like before. Collections is where you'll find photo memories, pinned collections, albums, shared albums, people and pets, and more. In the collections view, there's an ellipsus menu at the top right. Clicking this and choosing customize lets you use drag bars to reorder your collections, so the ones that you use the most appear at the top, and the least important ones sync to the bottom. You still can't remove items entirely from the collections view, but you can collapse them by clicking the arrow next to each collection to keep them out of sight. You can also now pin items to the sidebar so they appear in a dedicated pin section at the top. For example, to pin your videos, go to media types in the sidebar, rightclick videos, and choose pin. That adds it to the pin section, and you can drag it up or down to arrange it however you like. This works for albums and shared albums, too, which is handy if there are specific ones that you access often. Other than these changes, the Photos app still functions much like it always has. It's just way easier now to organize and navigate your library the way that you want.
The Journal app is now available on the Mac, and I'm really pleased to see it. I thought it was a great idea when Apple first announced it on the iPhone a couple of years ago, but my biggest issue was that it was only available there, not on the Mac or iPad. I'm not a big fan of typing long passages on my iPhone, and journaling is something I would much rather do sat down at my Mac. So, it's great to finally have it here. You can open Spotlight search, type journal, and it will appear like any other app on your Mac. If you already have a journal going on your iPhone, iCloud sync will bring everything over automatically. If you're starting fresh, straightforward to set up. On the left hand side is the sidebar. And about halfway down, you'll see a journal section with a plus button. This is where you can create multiple journals. You might have one for work, one for personal reflections, one for family life, however many you need. Once you've selected a journal, click the plus button at the top to create a new entry. It works a lot like creating a note in the notes app, but the layout is designed to help you focus more on what you're writing. You can also add more than just text. There are options to insert photos or videos from your library, capture something new using your Mac's camera or continuity camera with your iPhone, add a location from the map, or record audio that then gets transcribed automatically. Text formatting tools are over on the right. And when you're finished, you just click the plus button to save your entry. Like any journal, this is a tool that will become more valuable the more that you use it over time. And now with it being available not just on the iPhone, but also on the Mac and the iPad, you got plenty of ways to add entries no matter which devices you're using.
The Mac now has its own dedicated games app, which you can find by opening Spotlight search and typing games. When you launch it, you'll see it carries the same liquid glass design as the rest of Mac OS. The app acts as a central hub for all the games that you play on your Mac, whether they're from Apple Arcade or downloaded from the App Store. And with Apple's recent push to bring more AAA titles to the Mac, the library is bigger than ever, especially if you're using a newer Mac with Apple Silicon. The home section highlights games that you might want to try, but you can also browse categories via the magnifying glass icon or use the search bar in the top right to find a specific title. The play together tab shows friends that you've connected with so you can play multiplayer games and the library tab lists the games that you're currently playing. Beyond the app itself, Apple has introduced the Metal 4 graphics API which enables advanced rendering techniques on Apple Silicon Max to improve visuals. There's also a new game mode that dynamically prioritizes CPU and GPU resources for gaming, reducing background activity and helping maintain higher, more stable frame rates. It is clear that Apple is continuing to make steady progress towards positioning the Mac as a way more serious gaming platform, and it'll be really interesting to see which new titles appear in the catalog over the coming year.
So, there you go. Those are the 10 features that I think you should check out first when you install Mac OS 26 on your Mac. Of course, there are plenty of other additions. This isn't a full review, but these are the ones that I think most people will get the most out of right away. What about you? Any features that you think I should have included, but didn't? Drop me a comment and let me know. And if you have more than one Apple device, make sure that you check out my other OS 26 videos. I've released several today and will be releasing more over the next few days covering all aspects of all the operating systems. And as ever, if you found this video useful, please consider leaving me a like and subscribing to the channel for more content like this in the future. See you on the next video.