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But if I changed songs, my fellow callers would often stop hearing the audio I was trying to share and get stuck on a loading screen (while it continued to play on my end), and I’d have to quit and restart the Music app to get us synced up again. It was a good experience, and all parties could pause and skip without issue. I played a few Apple Music tracks on a group call, and I would say SharePlay worked about 50 percent of the time. That aside, the beta version of SharePlay is a nice experience - when it works. (It does include Tiktok, which is hilarious.) Hulu, Spotify and HBO Max are supposed to be adopting SharePlay at some point, but Apple hasn’t given me a timeline for Podcasts support. It also doesn’t have Apple’s own Podcast app yet. The supported services are also relatively few, and it doesn’t include any non-Apple big players like Hulu, HBO, Netflix, or Spotify yet - which are the services that people I know reliably have. For one, the official list of services the feature supports isn’t easy to find - I had to get Apple to send me this App Store Preview page.
SharePlay, unfortunately, doesn’t seem ready yet. If you open up a supported service like Apple Music while you’re on a FaceTime call, content SharePlays automatically. Portrait Mode, in particular, works quite well, is easy to toggle on and off, and is something I’ll continue to use. There are a few other neat features that pop up in Control Center, including Portrait Mode (which blurs the background behind you), Voice Isolation (which mitigates background noise while you’re speaking), and Wide Spectrum (which picks up all of your background noise, if you’re doing a virtual guitar lesson or something). Also in the vein of targeting the business market (or, at least, the calls-with-multiple-friends market), FaceTime now supports Grid View, which lays the faces of participants in front of you when you’re on a call (an option Zoom also has).
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Joining a FaceTime call from a Windows laptop is eerily similar to joining a Zoom or Google Meet call - you click the link, the call opens in your browser, you’re asked to enter your name, and you wait around until the host lets you in.
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These links also allow Android and Windows users to join such calls for the first time. (On the other hand, the FaceTime link is just a link it doesn’t come with dial-in numbers and you can’t join from a landline.) These links are very easy to create with a single button on the app’s home screen - certainly slightly less of a pain than they are in the Zoom client on macOS. The significant one for me is that you can now create links to FaceTime calls (as you can with Zoom calls) and send them out to participants ahead of time. While I won’t go so far as to insinuate that Apple is trying to make FaceTime a Zoom competitor, it’s certainly introduced a number of features aimed at making its service more viable for group calls. The tweaks that Apple seems to be most excited about concern FaceTime. Here’s the desktop of a MacBook running macOS Monterey. As is often the case with releases directly following a major redesign, this is a building year for macOS. If you’re someone who prefers to exercise maximum caution and wait a while before upgrading, you’re also not missing all that much.
So my ultimate view on this operating system is, “Sure.” It’s a stable release that I’ve been using reliably for a few months. And we’re still waiting on some of the most innovative parts of Monterey that Apple announced earlier this year to arrive. A few of the features are useful for me, but they’re features you have to seek out and set up. Many of them seem to be catch-up efforts, equipping Monterey with features that iOS (or competitors) already had. It looks like Big Sur, with some tweaks here and there.
Best version of mac os for macbook air download#
I installed the first beta over the summer, forgot that I was using it within a few days, and tried to download it again the following week.
And it was a new direction for the ecosystem in general macOS looked and felt like iOS.ĭownloading macOS Monterey, by contrast, has not impacted my life much. It was the biggest macOS redesign we’d seen in years.
Downloading macOS Big Sur was a big change for me - visually, pragmatically, philosophically.