MacOS Sequoia Finally Gives Us Proper iPhone Mirroring, Complete With Notifications

At the WWDC 2024 event, Apple announced a litany of new features that are coming with MacOS Sequoia. One such feature is iPhone Mirroring, that like the name suggests, mirrors your phone screen on your Mac — a feature that previously required either third-party apps, or less than useful facsimiles. It can be used for more than scrolling through apps, according to Apple's presentation. The mirroring mode also integrates your iPhones notifications right into the desktop of your Mac. Clicking on said notification brings up your mirrored phone screen, and the subsequent app. 

From a functional perspective, you control your phone through the trackpad on your MacBook, or the keyboard. Your iPhone also stays locked while mirroring, and the audio is piped through your Mac, instead of your iPhone. This can be helpful from both a privacy and general usability standpoint. Additionally, your iPhone can also be used as a secondary always-on display while it's paired and mirroring with your Mac. Apple's presentation showed an iPhone showing information like weather and your calendar. 

Another feature joining iPhone Mirroring is MacOS Sequoia's revamped windows management, allowing you to better de-clutter your desktop when you have multiple windows open. Similar to a feature that exists in Microsoft Windows, Sequoia now allows you to "snap" windows into place. On the video conferencing end, you can now preview what you're going to share before you share it and, if you want, replace your background with a custom image. 

Apple has also announced a password manager app with Keychain that can sync all of your many logins across all of your Apple devices. Windows devices can join the party, too, with the iCloud for Windows app. Safari is getting updated for Sequoia to now include machine learning capability as well. The Highlights feature automatically makes suggestions depending on what you search, and the Reader mode uses machine learning to do its best to remove clutter from the page to make reading long portions of text easier. 

MacOS Sequoia is expected to come out for MacOS devices this Fall.