Window tiling
Drag a window towards an edge and macOS offers a tile; hold a modifier and it snaps to halves, quarters or full screen. Built in, at last, after decades of utilities doing it.
At launch
- Announced
- June 10, 2024
- Released
- September 16, 2024
- Follows
- Sonoma (14)
- Followed by
- Tahoe (26)
- Architecture
- Intel & Apple silicon
Overview
The release that put the iPhone itself on the Mac screen.
iPhone Mirroring opened your phone in a window — the actual phone, still locked and still in your bag, driven with the Mac's keyboard and trackpad, notifications and all.
Alongside it came the window tiling Mac users had been installing third-party apps for since the nineties, a Passwords app finally lifted out of Keychain Access, and the first wave of Apple Intelligence, which arrived across the point releases rather than on day one.
iPhone Mirroring
Your phone, in a window, still in your pocket.
The Mac shows the iPhone's screen and sends back keystrokes and clicks. The phone stays locked the whole time, its notifications arrive on the Mac, and clicking one opens the app that sent it.
iPhone Mirroring — the phone's display, driven from the Mac
Features
What shipped.
Some of it on day one, and a good deal of it over the year of point releases that followed.
Passwords
The Keychain's contents became an app of their own — logins, passkeys, Wi-Fi networks and verification codes in one searchable list, syncing across devices.
At launch
Apple Intelligence
Writing tools, notification summaries, image tools and a redesigned Siri, rolling out across the point releases and requiring Apple silicon to run at all.
Added from 15.1
Safari Highlights
Pulls the thing you actually came for — the address, the phone number, the reservation, the summary — to the top of the page.
At launch
Background replacement
System-wide backgrounds in video calls, with a set of gradients and colour fields chosen not to chew the edges of your hair.
At launch
Math Notes
Type an equation into Notes and it solves as you go, remembers your variables, and will plot the graph underneath if you ask.
At launch
iPhone notifications
Notifications from the phone appear in the Mac's own Notification Centre, whether or not that app has ever existed on a Mac.
At launch
Game Porting Toolkit 2
A shorter path from a Windows build to a native Mac one, including tooling for translating shaders rather than rewriting them.
At launch
Presenter preview
A look at exactly what you are about to share, before the screen actually goes out to everyone on the call.
At launch
Apple Intelligence
A release that kept arriving after it shipped.
Sequoia went out in September 2024 without the feature it had been introduced with. Apple Intelligence came in stages — writing tools and summaries in 15.1, image features in 15.2, and a considerably longer wait for the rebuilt Siri.
It also drew a hard line under the hardware. The whole set needs Apple silicon, so an Intel Mac running Sequoia gets every part of the release except this one.
Desktop
Light through the canopy.
Sequoia's wallpaper is a burst of rays from a single point above the frame — warm and low in Light, cool and deep in Dark. Pick one and this page follows it.
Sequoia shipped it as a Dynamic Desktop, rotating the light through the day, with a matching aerial screen saver over the national park it is named after.
Lineage
Where it sits.
Apple has named macOS after California landmarks since Mavericks in 2013. Sequoia took the big trees.
macOS 15 · 2024
Sequoia
iPhone Mirroring, window tiling, Passwords and Apple Intelligence.
macOS 26 · 2025
Tahoe
Liquid Glass, a rebuilt Spotlight, and the jump to year-based numbering.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
Sequoia kept almost all of Sonoma's list, trimming only the 2018 and 2019 MacBook Air. Apple Intelligence, though, needs Apple silicon regardless of what else the Mac can run.
- iMac
- 2019 and later
- iMac Pro
- 2017
- Mac Pro
- 2019 and later
- Mac Studio
- 2022 and later
- Mac mini
- 2018 and later
- MacBook Air
- 2020 and later
- MacBook Pro
- 2018 and later