Shortcuts
The automation app crossed over from iPhone and iPad, and it could run the Automator workflows it inherited. A shortcut could live in the menu bar, the Dock, or a Spotlight search.
At launch
- Announced
- June 7, 2021
- Released
- October 25, 2021
- Follows
- Big Sur (11)
- Followed by
- Ventura (13)
- Architecture
- Intel & Apple silicon
Overview
The release that stopped treating the Mac as a separate island.
Monterey arrived a year into the Apple silicon transition, and its best ideas were all about the space between devices — a cursor that walks onto your iPad, a screen your iPhone can borrow, a note you can pull out of any corner of the desktop.
It landed the same day as the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro, and it was the version that finally brought Shortcuts to the Mac. Two years of point releases later it handed off to Ventura, but it kept picking up security updates well into 2024 — one of the longest tails any modern macOS has had.
Universal Control
One keyboard. One cursor. Every screen on the desk.
Push the pointer past the edge of the Mac and it keeps going — onto the iPad sitting next to it. No setup, no cables, no mode to switch into. Drag a file across the gap and it lands on the other machine.
MacBook Pro
iPad Pro
Pointer and file crossing between machines
Features
What shipped.
Some of it arrived on day one; some of it landed over the following year of point releases.
Focus
One switch that decided which notifications were allowed through — and it followed you. Set Focus on the Mac and your iPhone went quiet in the same breath.
At launch
AirPlay to Mac
The Mac stopped being only a sender. Throw a video, a slide deck, or just audio from an iPhone or iPad and the Mac became the screen and the speakers.
At launch
Quick Note
Flick the pointer into the bottom-right corner and a note slid out, already knowing what app or website you were looking at, and linking itself back to it.
At launch
Live Text
Text inside a photograph became just text. Select it, copy it, look it up — a whiteboard, a receipt, a street sign, a page of a book photographed on a table.
At launch
Safari Tab Groups
Named, saved sets of tabs that synced across devices — plus a redesigned, heavily debated tab bar that Apple softened again before the release shipped.
At launch
iCloud Private Relay
Browsing in Safari left through two separate hops, so no single party — Apple included — could see both who you were and what you were loading.
At launch, in beta
Low Power Mode
A single checkbox that traded a little performance for a noticeably longer afternoon away from the charger — the idea borrowed straight from iPhone.
Added in 12.2
Erase All Content and Settings
Wiping a Mac before selling it stopped meaning a full reinstall. One command returned it to factory state, exactly the way an iPhone always had.
At launch
FaceTime
Voices placed in the room.
Spatial audio spread everyone's voice out to where their tile sat on screen. Voice Isolation cut the leaf blower outside; Wide Spectrum let all of it back in for the times you wanted the room. Portrait mode blurred the laundry pile behind you.
And FaceTime links finally opened the door — a URL anyone could join from a browser, including from Windows and Android.
Desktop
Two moods of the same ridge.
Monterey's wallpaper is a set of soft layered ridges — a canyon at dawn in Light, the same shapes at dusk in Dark. Pick one and this whole page follows it, the way the desktop does.
Monterey shipped these as a Dynamic Desktop — one wallpaper that drifted from the light version to the dark one as the day went on, following your Mac's clock and location.
Lineage
Where it sits.
Apple has named macOS after California landmarks since Mavericks in 2013. Monterey took the bay.
macOS 12 · 2021
Monterey
The connective release. Universal Control, AirPlay to Mac, Shortcuts, Focus.
macOS 13 · 2022
Ventura
Stage Manager, Continuity Camera, and System Preferences rebuilt as System Settings.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
Monterey drew the line a year later than Big Sur did, retiring the 2013 and 2014 notebooks. For a good number of those Macs, it was the last version of macOS they ever officially received.
- iMac
- Late 2015 and later
- iMac Pro
- 2017
- Mac Pro
- Late 2013 and later
- Mac mini
- Late 2014 and later
- Mac Studio
- 2022 — shipped with Monterey
- MacBook
- Early 2016 and later
- MacBook Air
- Early 2015 and later
- MacBook Pro
- Early 2015 and later