Continuity Camera
Your iPhone became a Mac webcam the moment you mounted it — with Centre Stage keeping you framed, Studio Light lifting your face out of a dim room, and no cable or pairing step at all.
At launch
- Announced
- June 6, 2022
- Released
- October 24, 2022
- Follows
- Monterey (12)
- Followed by
- Sonoma (14)
- Architecture
- Intel & Apple silicon
Overview
The release that rearranged the windows — and the settings.
Ventura went after two things everyone on a Mac did constantly: juggling windows, and hunting through System Preferences. Stage Manager took the first. System Settings replaced the second.
It also turned the iPhone in your pocket into the best webcam your Mac had ever had, and quietly retired a control panel that had been sitting in the Apple menu since Mac OS X shipped in 2001.
Stage Manager
One window in front. The rest, waiting at the edge.
The app you are using takes the centre of the screen. Everything else shrinks to a strip on the left, grouped the way you left it, one click away from swapping places.
The active window centred, recent apps parked on the left
Features
What shipped.
A new way to handle windows, a new home for every setting, and a camera you already owned.
System Settings
System Preferences, on the Mac since 2001, was replaced by a scrolling sidebar matching Settings on iPhone and iPad. Not everybody was pleased about where things had moved to.
At launch
Undo Send, Schedule Send, reminders when nobody replied, and a search engine rebuilt to tolerate a typo and still find the message.
At launch
Passkeys
Safari began creating passkeys — key pairs kept in the Keychain and unlocked with Touch ID, leaving nothing on the server worth stealing.
At launch
Spotlight
Rebuilt with rich results and Live Text inside images, and able to start a timer or run a shortcut without you ever leaving the field.
At launch
Freeform
A shared canvas that accepted files, sketches, links and video, with no page edge to run out of and everyone drawing on it at once.
Added in 13.1
Weather and Clock
Two more iPad apps crossed to the Mac, bringing the full-screen precipitation maps and a row of city clocks with them.
At launch
Shared Tab Groups
A Safari tab group several people could add to at once, with everyone's cursor visible on the tab bar as they moved around it.
At launch
Rapid Security Response
Security patches that could install and take effect without a full system update, and usually without a restart.
First used in 2023
Continuity Camera
The best webcam you owned was already in your pocket.
Mount the iPhone above the display and the Mac found it — no cable, no pairing, no app to open. Centre Stage kept you in frame as you moved, Studio Light lifted your face out of a dim room, and Portrait blurred whatever was behind you.
Desk View was the strange, good one: it split the ultra-wide camera in two and handed the person on the call a second, overhead-looking shot of the desk in front of you.
Desktop
A bloom, lit two ways.
Ventura's wallpaper is a single flower of overlapping petals — daylight and blue sky in Light, the same petals lit against near-black in Dark. Pick one and this page follows it.
Ventura shipped it as a Dynamic Desktop, easing between the two through the day — and this was the release where that setting moved out of System Preferences and into System Settings.
Lineage
Where it sits.
Apple has named macOS after California landmarks since Mavericks in 2013. Ventura took the coast town.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
Ventura made the sharpest cut in years, dropping every Mac older than 2017 and leaving a lot of otherwise healthy machines behind on Monterey.
- iMac
- 2017 and later
- iMac Pro
- 2017
- Mac Pro
- 2019 and later
- Mac Studio
- 2022 and later
- Mac mini
- 2018 and later
- MacBook
- 2017
- MacBook Air
- 2018 and later
- MacBook Pro
- 2017 and later