Apple has announced that macOS 14 Sonoma will be released on 26 September, that’s less than a fortnight away. So should you now be preparing to upgrade to it within hours or days of its release, or leave it another few weeks or months?

If you’re intending to stay with Ventura or Monterey, you should expect their next updates the same day, to take them to 13.6 and 12.7 respectively. While the Monterey update should be security-only, that to Ventura should ensure compatibility with iOS 17.0, due to be released on 18 September. If you’re expecting a new iPhone then, you’ll want either 13.6 or 14.0 as soon as you can get it.

Supported Macs

• iMac 2019 (iMac19,x) and later
• iMac Pro
• MacBook Air 2018 (MacBookAir8,x) and later
• MacBook Pro 2018 (MacBookPro15,x) and later
• Mac Pro 2019
• Mac Studio
• Mac mini 2018 (Macmini8,1) and later.

If you want to run Sonoma on an older model, then you’ll need OCLP, when it supports Sonoma.

Features

The list of new and enhanced features is so long that Apple has summarised it in a PDF. Here I’ll mention just a few that strike me as being particularly significant.

From the moment that you start Sonoma, it looks different. The highlight comes once you’ve logged in and it displays one of its new wallpapers (Desktops, for those who can remember) and its slow-motion screensavers. These may seem trivial and of no consequence, but Sonoma delivers the best visual experience of any version of macOS to date.

Safari ventures into new territory with profiles, something I’ve experienced in one other browser, Ulaa. Set up separate profiles for work, personal use, development, and other tasks. Each keeps its own history, complete with Tab Groups, favourites, cookies and extensions. In addition to those, you can save favourite websites to the Dock as Web apps, giving you instant access to them.

Passwords have some useful improvements, among them the ability to create password groups and share them with others, much as you can in some paid-for password managers. Apple is also adding passkey support for signing in with your Apple ID on the web. Whether that will work with other password managers (the few that now support passkeys) remains to be seen, and there’s no way to transfer a passkey between different vaults.

For those who use Family Sharing, you can share individual folders in iCloud Drive with other family members, giving everyone access to family documents, photos, and other items of common interest.

If your Mac is set to use English as its primary language, you’ll soon notice that autocorrect has improved significantly, and offers predictive text without making a nuisance of itself. Expect this to improve steadily over the coming year.

Lockdown Mode isn’t for everyone, but for those who find it valuable, it has new networking defaults, safer handling of media, and more security optimisations.

Visual look up adds some interesting and potentially exciting domains. Use it on an image of food, and it will suggest appropriate recipes. It can also tell you the meaning of various signs and symbols you might encounter in product information and laundry tags, and suggest routes to stores it can identify in photos.

System Settings is steadily improving, with even better search, some redesigned panes including Displays, and better navigation controls.

Internals

What you won’t see listed in Apple’s summary are major internal changes and improvements, which you’ll normally only find in developer documentation. I’ll mention just two areas of particular interest to me.

Virtualising macOS on Apple silicon Macs sees several new features that you’ll be able to experience when running Sonoma VMs on a Sonoma host. The most impressive of these is auto-scaling of the virtual display, which creates a sharp image of the VM in windows of almost any dimensions. This is by far the neatest solution to the display resolution problems that have troubled virtualisation in Monterey and Ventura. Viable, ViableS and Vimy already support this option.

Another improvement, in virtualisers that support it, is the ability to halt a running VM to quit it, then resume in the same state when you next open that VM. Although I haven’t yet implemented this in my apps, in some situations it will make a big difference.

Digging deeper still, and leaving Apple’s documentation behind, Sonoma should see significant improvements in security in XProtect Behaviour Service (XBS) with its Bastion rules. So far, in Ventura, this has merely observed and recorded processes that have broken those rules by accessing sensitive folders containing private browser data, for instance. Apple has now proved its method of updating Bastion rules inside an XProtect Remediator update, and must surely be aiming to take this new system live in Sonoma, and start blocking processes breaking its rules.

Stability

With each new version of macOS supporting a more cohesive group of Macs, stability should be improving. All the comments that I have heard so far suggest that recent beta releases have been thoroughly stable and reliable, and ready to fly once the tiddly bits like new wallpaper and screensavers are in full running order. I will be upgrading three of my four working Macs to Sonoma on 26 September.

For those who prefer to wait a bit longer, be very careful when you choose to update, say, to 13.6, and when you use SilentKnight. It’s likely that, like Ventura, Apple will release Sonoma as an update, rather than using the full installer for an upgrade. Don’t get caught and unintentionally become an early adopter.