iPhone widgets
Through Continuity, widgets from apps installed only on your iPhone appeared on the Mac desktop and worked from there. Nothing to download, nothing to sign into twice.
At launch
- Announced
- June 5, 2023
- Released
- September 26, 2023
- Follows
- Ventura (13)
- Followed by
- Sequoia (15)
- Architecture
- Intel & Apple silicon
Overview
The release that finally let the desktop do something.
For years the desktop was where files went to be forgotten. Sonoma put widgets on it — including widgets from apps that only existed on your iPhone, running on the Mac without being installed there.
It also turned the screen saver into the desktop: slow aerial footage that keeps playing while you log in and then settles onto a single frame. And it gave games a mode of their own, which the Mac had been asking for since roughly forever.
Desktop widgets
Widgets, out of the drawer and onto the desk.
Drag a widget anywhere on the desktop and it stays there. Focus an app and the widgets fade back into the wallpaper's colours, so they never compete with what you are actually doing.
Widgets resting on the desktop, tinted to the wallpaper
Features
What shipped.
A desktop that does something, a screen saver worth watching, and video calls with tricks in them.
Aerial screen savers
Slow drone footage of coastlines, vineyards and cities that keeps playing straight through the login screen and comes to rest as your desktop picture.
At launch
Game Mode
Gives the running game first call on the CPU and GPU, and doubles the Bluetooth sampling rate so controllers and AirPods answer faster.
At launch
Web apps
Add to Dock turned any site into a windowless app with its own icon, its own notifications and its own login, kept separate from Safari.
At launch
Safari profiles
Separate sets of history, cookies, extensions and tab groups in the same browser — work in one, everything else in the other.
At launch
Presenter Overlay
Puts you in front of the screen you are sharing, either in a small movable bubble or cut out and standing over your own slides.
At launch
Reactions
Hand gestures in front of the camera fired confetti, hearts, balloons and fireworks across the video call, to the delight or horror of the meeting.
At launch
Password sharing
A shared Keychain group that everyone in a household could add to, with changes syncing to all of them and no messaging screenshots involved.
At launch
New lock screen
The iPad's large clock came to the Mac, with the wallpaper sliding in behind it as the desktop appears.
At launch
Slow television
The screen saver that becomes the wallpaper.
Sonoma's aerials are long drone shots — Sonoma County vineyards, the Bay, Patagonia, Hong Kong at night — that begin the moment the Mac goes idle and are still running while you type your password.
When the desktop appears the footage decelerates and freezes on one frame, and that frame becomes your wallpaper. There is no cut anywhere in it, so the whole thing reads as a single continuous shot from screen saver to desk.
Desktop
Hills at two times of day.
Sonoma's wallpaper is a run of rolling green ridges under a wide sky — full daylight with a coral band in Light, and the same hills gone deep in Dark. Pick one and this page follows it.
Sonoma shipped it as a Dynamic Desktop that drifts between these two through the day, and as an aerial screen saver that comes to rest on this exact frame.
Lineage
Where it sits.
Apple has named macOS after California landmarks since Mavericks in 2013. Sonoma took the wine country.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
Sonoma dropped the 2017 machines Ventura had kept, including the last 12-inch MacBook and the 2017 MacBook Pro.
- iMac
- 2019 and later
- iMac Pro
- 2017
- Mac Pro
- 2019 and later
- Mac Studio
- 2022 and later
- Mac mini
- 2018 and later
- MacBook Air
- 2018 and later
- MacBook Pro
- 2018 and later