Download it now: macOS Monterey just dropped

October 25, 2021

The latest version of macOS just dropped with some missing marquee features. But fear not, there are plenty of other improvements to make the free download worthwhile -- like Live Text, which will blow your socks off.

In other news:

  • We have review roundups for the new AirPods and MacBook Pros. Big surprise: Reviewers like them, except for a few niggling issues.

  • Rumors of blood glucose monitoring for the next Apple Watch are back, with a small twist: new players.

  • If you want a distinctive case for your iPhone 13, look no further than the Cult of Mac Store. Plus, they're dirt cheap.

-- Leander Kahney, EIC.

The new Mac operating system offers improvements to Safari and FaceTime, and a new Focus mode. But two of its biggest features — Universal Control and SharePlay — won’t debut until later.

The first wave of AirPods 3 reviews just came out, and they’re full of good news for those considering Apple’s latest truly wireless earbuds. Sound quality draws praise, as does battery life.

Reviewers relish the mini-LED display, the return of useful ports, and the sheer power of Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. However, some harbor mixed feelings about the screen notch.

Cupertino is reportedly collaborating with a pair of Asian companies to add non-invasive blood sugar monitoring to the wearable next year.

The SwitchEasy Flash Sale in the Cult of Mac Store is still in effect — and you can get 30% off select iPhone 13 cases. But act fast! The sale ends at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time Monday.

Now subscribers can communicate in real time with up to 32 other people during workouts. The new capability taps FaceTime’s SharePlay feature, which works on iOS devices now and comes to Macs later this fall.

Following a parade of shaped-product releases — triangles, squares, hexagons — you can now buy Nanoleaf Lines for $200 and use them to make all sorts of lighted shapes.

The first Korean Apple Original tells the story of a scientist so desperate to find out how his family was killed that he’s willing to connect his brain to theirs to access their memories.

Jazz great Miles Davis probably never imagined one of his classic song titles, “All Blues,” would end up in a headline about an M1 iMac-based computer setup. And it’s not every day you see a completely color-coordinated workstation that’s not just “Kind of Blue” (to drop another title), but drenched in blue hues.

Tweets o' the day

One more thing ...

"Thus far, we're pretty much using our computers as good servants. We ask them to do something -- we ask them to do some operation like a spreadsheet, we ask them to take our keystrokes and make a letter out of them -- and they do that pretty well. And you'll see more and more perfection of that -- computer as servant.

But the next thing is going to be computer as guide or agent. And what that means is that it's going to do more in terms of anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and patterns in what we do, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing we'd like to do regularly, so that we're going to have, as an example, the concept of triggers. We're going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact." -- Steve Jobs

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