Apple today seeded the fifth beta of macOS Monterey, the newest version of the macOS operating system. The fifth beta comes two weeks after Apple released the fourth macOS Monterey beta, and it is available to both developers and public beta testers.
Registered developers can download the beta through the Apple Developer Center and once the appropriate profile is installed, betas will be available through the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences. Public beta testers can install the proper profile from Apple's public beta testing website.
As with all new betas, Apple recommends not installing the new macOS update on a primary machine because it is early release software and could have bugs.
macOS Monterey introduces Universal Control, a feature that lets a single mouse, trackpad, and keyboard be used across multiple Mac or iPad devices, plus there's a new AirPlay to Mac feature.
Safari has been redesigned with a new tab bar (with a toggle for two different designs as of the third beta) and support for Tab Groups, and FaceTime has gained spatial audio, a Portrait Mode on M1 Macs, and Voice Isolation for cutting out background noise. There's also a new SharePlay FaceTime feature that lets Apple users watch TV, listen to music, and share their screens with one another.
Shared With You, a separate feature, keeps track of the music, links, podcasts, news, and photos that people are sent in Messages, highlighting it in the relevant apps. Notes has a new Quick Note feature for jotting down thoughts, and collaboration is easier with mentions and an Activity View.
The Shortcuts app from iOS is now available on the Mac, and Focus helps people stay on task by cutting out background distractions. There's an updated Maps app with a whole slew of new features, and with Live Text, Macs can now detect text in photos or provide details on animals, art, landmarks, plants, and more in images.
Mail Privacy Protection hides IP and prevents tracking through invisible pixels, and iCloud Private Relay keeps Safari browsing protected. There are many other new features in macOS Monterey, with a full rundown available in our macOS Monterey roundup.
Update: While Apple initially also pushed the update to public beta testers, it appears it was pulled soon after.
Top Rated Comments
Also, FYI, don't let my badge and post count fool you; in my case, look at join date instead. My first Mac was an iMac G4 USB 2.0 which came preinstalled with Jaguar and bundled with Panther upgrade discs. Those were, indeed, “the days”, but we paid through the nose for upgrades (I bought a boxed copy of Tiger for €120, IIRC, and paid for all ESD upgrades on the MAS right until the last one, having only skipped SL because my 2009 iMac came bundled with it). And the same should go for everyone else here, even if it's the other way around or anything in between; maybe our fellow forum-goer simply joined us later on or even bought a Mac much, much later, but that doesn't mean they didn't reach the same conclusion just by staying informed – maybe even as far back as way before buying their first Mac, yes – and looking objectively at the current state of affairs.
The switch to Intel brought about an explosion of choice and different possibilities (remember Steve Jobs' old, cutesy 2x2 product matrix for the then recently revamped Mac line? Yeah, neither do I), as well as third-party software and peripherals galore. How many really critical bugs were related to the latter, with external hard drives getting mysteriously erased, audio interfaces suddenly not working at all, etc., remember those? Yeah, that's why public betas are essential, as developers alone can't cover the entire gamut of configuration combinations.