The big news last week was the big release of iOS 12, tvOS 12, watchOS 5 and the minor update for the HomePod, but as Apple promised at its ‘Gather Round’ event a few weeks ago, today is the day that we get macOS Mojave. And for the first time in a few years, Apple has now dropped support for a number of Mac models, which is to be expected now in a few cases. For example, last year with macOS High Sierra – Apple was still supporting the iMac models from mid-2010, a computer which was 7 years old at the time and is one I personally use day to day. With macOS Mojave this year, the minimum model iMac model supported is now the 2012 range.

What’s new?

This years release of macOS is a little similar to the iOS 12 release. Where it wasn’t the huge blockbuster release like iOS 7 and iOS 8 were a few years ago, instead it focuses on performance and the little details.

Dark Mode & Wallpapers

In macOS Mojave, Apple has finally added a system wide dark mode option, now also with different accent colours for the buttons. You can choose other colours other than Blue and Graphite. Dark Mode now controls all of the system apps including Finder, System Preferences, Messages and more. Third-party apps can also use the API too and even on the first day of release, multiple macOS apps have been updated to take advantage.

macOS Mojave Dark Mode

New Mac App Store

Since Apple introduced the Mac App Store back in 2011 alongside the release of Mac OS X Lion, nothing has been done in the meantime to improve the experience or even update the overall design. Little minor tweaks were added when Mac OS X Yosemite came out and the entire OS was updated, but now with macOS Mojave some real time has been spent to redesign the store to help improve the experience and the discoverability of new apps. The design has taken inspiration from the redesign of the iOS App Store with iOS 11 from last year.

macOS System updates have now moved from the App Store, to the System Preferences page, which makes much more sense too.

macOS Mojave Mac App Store
macOS Mojave Mac App Store

New apps ported from iOS

New apps, including the Home app, Stocks, Voice Memos and Apple News have all been added to the Mac with the new update. Voice Memos and Stocks both sync with iCloud from iPhone and iPad.

Home app in macOS Mojave
Home app in macOS Mojave

Other notes

Apple has mentioned that macOS Mojave will be the last version of macOS to support legacy 32-bit apps, much like it did with iOS recently, Apple wants to faze out 32-bit in favour of 64-bit.

Source: Apple Newsroom