The spotlight may be on AI and iOS 18, but Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will also include a look at the next version of its macOS desktop and laptop operating system.
No one outside Apple knows the California locality that will give its name to macOS 15; last year was Sonoma and Ventura before it. And we won't learn about new features until the keynote on June 10. But it's easy to guess what some of them may be, and speculate on features Apple will port over from iOS or iPadOS.
For example, we’ll likely see stackable widgets or Smart Stack, which automatically switches to the most relevant widget among a prebuilt set. And I wouldn't be surprised to see automatic voice memo transcriptions, similar to automatic voicemail transcriptions in iOS. For now, here's our macOS wish list, some of them likely and some in the shoot-for-the-moon category.
1. A Dynamic Island on MacBooks
This would be similar to the Dynamic Island on high-end iPhones. There’s already a spacious notification center in macOS, but it takes up a lot of screen real estate. It would be good to have an option for compact notifications in the unused area around the MacBook’s notch.
2. iPhone Notifications on the macOS Desktop
By right-clicking the macOS desktop, you can choose Edit Widgets and create widgets from your iOS apps either on your macOS desktop or its notification center. But some iOS apps—typically ones that provide banking and financial data—can’t be set up this way, so I can only see their notifications on my phone. I’d like an option that alerts me on my Mac when a notification from those iOS apps arrives on my phone so that I can go to my phone and respond. Microsoft’s Phone Link app displays notifications from my iPhone on my Windows desktop, so my Mac should be able to do the same.
3. Face ID on a Mac
I like my Mac’s Touch ID, but it would also be good to have an option to use Face ID. It’s possible that the cameras on today’s Mac hardware aren’t equal to the job of Face ID, but maybe future Macs will be able to do it.
4. Built-in Icon Management for the macOS Menu Bar
If your screen is too small to display all your menu bar icons—and that’s likely to be the case with many MacBook Air and Pro models—then you have no easy way to click on the icons that get hidden behind the notch or the menus created by the current app. The only way around this problem is to use third-party utilities that never work well enough. It’s time for Apple to fix this problem on its own.
5. A Built-in Clipboard-History Utility
(Credit: Microsoft/PCMag)When you press Cmd-V to paste from the clipboard, you can only paste the most recent item you copied to the clipboard. Third-party utilities let you retrieve previous clipboard items, and Windows does the same with the Windows Key-V keystroke (see the image above). It’s time for macOS to do this, too.
6. A Silence-Everything Button
When a crucial video call arrives unexpectedly, and I don’t want to be interrupted by notifications from anything else, I want a one-click button that turns off every distraction. I know I can accomplish something similar by turning on Do Not Disturb, but that requires more than one click and allows some notifications to get through anyway. I want a one-click way to be certain that I won’t be interrupted—and also a single-click way to turn everything back on
7. Print Directly From Screenshot Previews
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)One long-standing frustration in macOS is that you have to save a screenshot to a file before you can print it. I like to capture images – for example, puzzles from a PDF version of a newspaper – and immediately print them. The Screenshot preview menu lets me email an image or send it to an app, so why not let me print it without going through extra steps?
8. Change the Color of the Finder's Folder Icons
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)This is a small but long-standing grievance of mine. For years, folder icons in the Finder have been a blindingly bright blue. With some expertise and effort, you can create and apply customized folder icons, but macOS has a bad habit of switching back to the default color without warning. I want an option in the Desktop settings panel to change the default folder icon color.
9. Panels That Control Sound and Time Machine
(Credit: Apple/PCMag)One advantage of the old System Preferences app was that the pane that controlled Sound settings included the option to show or hide the speaker icon in the menu bar. You can’t find this option on the Sound pane of the new System Settings app—you have to find the Control Center pane and enable it there. I want the menu bar option on both the Sound and Control Center panes, not only the Control Center pane. And I want a similar fix for the panes that control Time Machine and other features. Menu bar options belong on the same pane with the feature that the menu bar icon controls.
10. More Keyboard Functionality
One reason Windows is often a more efficient workplace than macOS is that Windows has always let you do almost anything from the keyboard. For example, in Windows, you can press Alt-F to open the drop-down File menu in almost any application, then type a letter to select an item on that menu. The Mac makes you press a convoluted key combination to get to the menu bar (by default, it’s Ctrl-Fn-F2) and then another key to navigate to the drop-down menu that you want. Let us get to that menu directly, as in Windows.
We'll Likely Get Even More Surprises
Of course, there are many other things that I would like to have in macOS that Apple is probably going to provide without my asking. I’ve been waiting patiently for a spacious macOS interface for the iOS Health app, for example, and my guess is that I’ll have it when macOS 15 arrives on my desktop this fall.