Automatic Wireless Headphone Switching

If you have any of Apple’s newer wireless headphones or ear buds that use the H1 chip, including the second-generation (2019 or later) AirPods, the AirPods Pro, Beats Solo Pro, Powerbeats, or Powerbeats Pro, they will now switch automatically between devices to which they’ve previously been paired. When you start using a different device, a banner should appear to tell you that it’s now sending its audio to your headphones.

Apple Arcade Features

If you search in your thesaurus for “gamer,” you’ll see my name listed there…right under antonyms. I don’t believe I’ve ever met another human with less of an interest in games than I have. So I hope you appreciate the gigantic sacrifice I made by signing up for a free one-month trial of Apple Arcade just so I can see for myself what’s new in Big Sur and write about it here!

If you’re already an Apple Arcade subscriber, you know that, on a Mac, the place to go to find new games is the Arcade tab in the App Store. (If you’re not already a subscriber, far be it from me to tempt you to join!)

Here are the new things you’ll see on that tab:

• Games popular with your friends: I can’t speak from personal experience here, because my only Game Center friend is my wife, who is only slightly more enthusiastic about games than I am. But I’m reliably informed that recommendations based on what your friends are playing will appear prominently here.

• Achievements: The individual App Store pages for each game you’re playing now have an Achievements section where you can see your progress and goals. Click the main banner to get more information on individual achievements.

• Continue playing: One cool feature of Apple Arcade—if you like that sort of thing—is that you can play games on any of your Apple devices, then switch to a different device and pick right up where you left off. A “Continue Playing” section on the Arcade tab shows you which in-progress games you can pick up and lets you open them with one click.

• Sorting and filtering: Apple says that you’ll be able to sort and filter games on the Arcade tab by criteria such as release date and controller support. I haven’t seen this yet as of late August 2020.

• Coming Soon: A new Coming Soon category includes games that are about to be released; click Get to be notified when they’re available.

In addition, a new in-game dashboard is planned to show statistics and progress for you and your friends.

Better Family Sharing

iCloud Family Sharing has, for years, been a handy way for up to six people in a household to share a calendar, photo album, and storage space, plus media purchased from Apple (apps, music, TV shows, movies, and books). However, one sore spot for many families, including mine, has been that in-app purchases and subscriptions could not be shared. Big Sur finally makes this possible—though not automatic. Developers must update their apps to take advantage of family sharing for in-app purchases, and some might decide not to (since it may mean less revenue for them). But at least now it’s finally a possibility.

Spotlight Enhancements

Spotlight has, for many years, given Mac users a quick way to search for and open files, apps, contacts, and more with a key combination (⌘-Space by default) or a click on the magnifying glass icon on the menu bar. I wish I could say that Spotlight has suddenly gotten smarter about figuring out what you’re looking for, but that has not been my experience. However, it does include some potentially useful changes.

Two-Tier Results

In order to show at least partial results faster, the first thing Spotlight in Big Sur is likely to show when you begin a search is a list of one or more Top Hits—and nothing else besides Search Suggestions (which may be for local searches or web searches). If one of those hits is what you were looking for, great—you’re done! If not, you’ll need to drill down.

For some types of information, the items in Top Hits are higher-level categories (denoted by an arrow on the right side) rather than specific items. For example, I typed in jahnke to search for my wife’s surname, and sure enough, the top hit was Morgen Jahnke, complete with her picture. But that entry wasn’t her card in Contacts; rather, it was Spotlight’s way of saying, “Is this the person you want to search for?” When I pressed Return with that entry selected, the display switched to a new list of hits, all of which included that full name, with her contact card at the top and documents, images, email messages, and so on below.

If none of the top hits are what you want, you can perform a conventional Spotlight search by clicking a Search Suggestion (or selecting it with the arrow keys and pressing Return). The magnifying glass icon indicates a search for items on your Mac, while the Safari icon indicates web searches. Figure 46 shows an example of a top-level search on my Mac for chocolate, with Search Suggestions listed below.

App Store

The App Store looks and acts very much as it did in Catalina, not counting the usual visual changes such as the full-height sidebar. However, Apple says that, starting later in 2020 with an update to Big Sur, each app page in the App Store will display its privacy practices in a standardized format (much like nutrition labels on food) as reported by the developer. This information will help you determine whether you feel comfortable with the types and amount of personal information the app collects before making a purchase.

FaceTime

If you’re in a group FaceTime call in which someone is using sign language, that person’s image is automatically made more prominent.

Home

The Home app, Apple’s tool for managing HomeKit-based home automation devices, receives new features in Big Sur. (I know I could lose my geek credentials for this, but I still have a “dumb” home with zero HomeKit devices, so I was unable to test these features.) Here’s what’s new, according to Apple:

• Home status: An indicator at the top of the app shows you when something requires your attention or has recently changed.

• Automatic color changes: If you have LED bulbs that change color, Home now offers Adaptive Lighting, which adjusts the color throughout the day (warmer in the morning, cooler in the afternoon, and less blue at night).

• Face recognition: If you have a HomeKit-compatible video camera (including a video doorbell), it can now identify people whose faces you’ve previously identified in Photos, and can notify you when those people appear in the camera’s view.

• Activity Zones: The new Activity Zones feature lets you select just a portion of a camera’s viewing area for detecting motion and receiving notifications. This is useful if, for example, there’s a window in the frame that might show motion outside, but you want to detect only motion inside (or vice versa).

Music

The Music app features two main changes:

• Listen Now: A new Listen Now category under Apple Music in the sidebar shows your top picks across categories, and offers suggestions for new music based on your listening patterns. (This feature requires an Apple Music subscription.)

• Better searching: When searching in Apple Music, a list of suggested songs, albums, artists, and playlists appears right below the search field as you type, giving you quicker access to likely matches. (This does not apply when searching your own library or the iTunes Store.)

Notes

There are a few small but interesting changes in the Notes app:

• Collapse pinned notes: You have previously been able to “pin” one or more notes to the top of your list (by selecting the note and choosing File > Pin Note). Apple says that in Big Sur you’ll be able to collapse and expand the list of pinned notes. This feature has not appeared in the beta versions as of publication time.

• Improved search: As in Spotlight, search results in Notes now begin with Top Hits, which are the items Notes thinks are most likely to match what you’re looking for.

• Quick styles: Although you’ve long been able to apply text formatting such as bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough, Notes in Big Sur gives you quicker access to them. Icons for each of these formats appear at the top of the style popover when you click the Formatting icon.

• Improved scans: The Continuity Camera feature in Notes (and other apps) lets you insert a photo on your Mac instantly by snapping it on your iPhone or iPad. When you choose File > Insert from iPhone or iPad > Scan Documents, macOS also crops and deskews images, so you get a clearer, straighter picture of a receipt or other document. In Big Sur, the scanning feature improves automatic cropping and increases sharpness.

Podcasts

The Podcasts app has an improved Listen Now category that includes a new Latest Episodes section that shows the most recent (but not yet played) episodes of your favorite podcasts. Podcast listeners in the United States may also see an Episodes You Might Like section with what Apple calls “hand-picked episode recommendations” for podcast episodes (whether among your existing subscriptions or not).

Reminders

The Reminders app has a few relatively small but useful changes:

• Assign reminders: If you share a reminder list with family members, friends, or colleagues, you can assign any task to a particular person (including yourself), and they can also assign tasks to you. The assigned person alone gets any notifications associated with the task. You can assign a reminder to someone else in any of the following ways:

  • While creating a new reminder, click the Assign button below the reminder text and choose a person from the pop-up menu.

  • Right-click (or Control-click) a reminder and choose Assign > Person’s Name from the contextual menu.

  • Select a reminder and choose Edit > Assign > Person’s Name.

  • Hover over a reminder and click the Info icon; then, in the popover, choose the person’s name from the “assign to” pop-up menu.

• Use smart suggestions: As you’re creating reminders, the app looks at the text you’ve typed and tries to identify dates, times, and locations. If you agree, click the suggestion to accept it and add it to the reminder.

  For example, type at 12 and Reminders suggests scheduling the task at noon (Figure 47).

  

  In addition, Reminders may suggest a list where the new item should go, based on similarity to other things that have been on the list in the past (Figure 48).

  

• Organize your smart lists: Reminders includes four built-in smart lists (Today, Scheduled, All, and Flagged), located at the top of the sidebar. (If you don’t see the sidebar, choose View > Show Sidebar.) Although you still can’t add your own smart lists or change the criteria the built-in lists use, you can now rearrange them by dragging them to a new location, or hide any of them by right-clicking (or Control-clicking) it and choosing Hide Smart List Name.

• Search more metadata: Reminders already had a pretty good full-text search capability. In Big Sur, you can also search for people you’ve assigned tasks to, locations where tasks are to occur, and the contents of the Notes field.

• New commands and shortcuts: The following handy commands are new, and feature keyboard shortcuts:

  • Edit > Mark Due Date As > Today: ⌘-T

  • Edit > Mark Due Date As > Tomorrow: ⌘-Option-T

  • Edit > Mark Due Date As > This Weekend: ⌘-K

  • Edit > Mark as Completed: ⌘-Shift-C

  • View > Show Completed: ⌘-Shift-H

Voice Memos

The Voice Memos app, which started out on iOS and made its first appearance on the Mac in Mojave, has some new features:

• Enhance recordings: If your memos weren’t recorded in a soundproof studio, they probably contain background noises, or perhaps unwanted reverberations from the surfaces of the room you were in. The new Enhance Audio feature (analogous to the Enhance feature in Photos) does its best to clean up your recording with just one step: select the recording and choose Edit > Enhance Audio. In my tests, the results have been far from perfect, but are still a definite improvement over the original.

• Organize with folders: Voice Memos has always had just a single list of recordings. After you have dozens or hundreds of these, finding the one you want can be challenging (even with the search feature). Now, however, you can organize your voice memos into folders. To create a folder, make sure the sidebar is visible (if not, click the Sidebar icon on the toolbar). Click the New Folder icon, enter a name, and click Save. Then you can drag recordings from the All Recordings list into your new folder. (They still, however, appear in All Recordings!)

• Mark favorites: Click the heart icon to mark a recording as a favorite. It then appears in the new Favorites smart folder in the sidebar.

• Smart folders: Voice Memos automatically creates smart folders for recently deleted memos, recordings made using your Apple Watch, and Favorites. You can’t edit these smart folders or create your own, but they can help you find certain items.

Weather Widget

Following Apple’s acquisition of the company behind the popular weather app Dark Sky, the company has made some improvements to the Weather widget that’s enabled by default in Notification Center:

• Precipitation in the immediate future: Assuming you’re located in the United States and you use the medium or large version of the Weather widget, you’ll see a chart showing projected rain or snow (if any) for each minute of the next hour.

• Noteworthy weather changes: The widget reports when the weather will be significantly different tomorrow, and displays official alerts from government agencies about severe weather events such as tornados and flash floods. These alerts are currently available only in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia.