Why I use macOS Monterey in 2024?

Like Big Sur, but better

First, this version of macOS has almost the same performance as Big Sur, I don’t know if they made improvements but in my test I found out that Monterey has more stability than Big Sur in some background services, and in some apps like Apple Music it works

In fact, if you look closer, you will find no difference in design terms between the two, however, this doesn’t mean something bad, but instead, something good, I mean, Big Sur already brought us the newer iOS kind style, and it worked great, so, why fix it?, and the thing with monterey is that, there are really good changes, with the first being a very useful one.

Airplay on Mac, a feature so simple, yet so useful in my daily average

I love it, its so cool that you can use your iMac or macbook as a bigger screen for your iPhone or iPad, you can use your mac as an Apple TV, and its beautiful, for example, I play some music on my iPhone while I’m doing stuff, but as soon as I need to use my macbook, I can use the speakers of it as an extension of the audio coming from my iPhone without issues, its just two clicks away and it works like magic, meaning that i dont need a bluetooth speaker or some weird app to play my music or movies from my iPhone on my Mac, its built into the system and it doesn’t require anything but two Airplay capable devices, and that is, in my opinion, a dealbreaker.

My reason why picking this over Big Sur or Ventura: Apple One subscription

Here is the thing, Monterey received a great pair of features thanks to iCloud and Apple One, first, you get the Focus synchronisation between your iPhone and your Apple devices meaning that, if you have the sleep mode enabled, your Mac will follow the rules of it on compatible apps and custom shortcuts, I personally think this is a good feature for productivity, I haven’t used it a lot but its nice to have the little icon on the menu bar.

The next thing they added with Monterey was the iCloud private relay and hide my email features, both of them are paid features of the iCloud+ and Apple One subscription and because I got it I feel like I needed to get the most out of my money, and let me tell you, they are great, for example, the hide my email feature is perfect for avoiding data leaks of unknown websites, think of them like disposable adresses that redirects to your email, meaning that if someone has that iCloud email you can easily switch it to another one without announcing it, in my opinion, better than what other mail provider offers.

And the thing that I use most, the iCloud Private Relay, in other words, the VPN of Apple, well, its not as effective as a VPN but it helps you avoid Facebook and Google for spying your activity on the magic world of web, and you don’t even remember its there, it just works without issues, and the best part, you can disable these features on specific websites if you need to, but personally I just left it on the maximum level of only to my current country and not my current state, as someone said, it just works.

Another reason why I picked this up, it even runs on my “unsupported” MacBook Air

Here is the thing, I started using Opencore Legacy Patcher for updating my MacBook Air 2011, the latest officially supported macOS is High Sierra so running Monterey was something that I didn’t believe was possible, but it is, in fact, im writing this article from my MacBook Air 2011 without issues, and so far the system feels, not like a flash M1 Mac, but its good, its usable with some tweaks, It feels a little bit warmer than with high Sierra and a bit slower, but over all, its good, and I really prefer using Monterey over Windows or worse, Linux.

And don’t get me wrong, Ive been forced to use both Windows and Linux on this machine, and even if its not supported, it works way better than those in this machine, in fact, in Windows it overheats like there is no tomorrow and the cpu and ram always go to the top, and linux works great but the only issue with it is that, I hate Linux (this is personal, nothing to do with business) so yes, even with all those alternatives, macOS beats them in performance and stability (this part is really honest, if you run tests, macOS optimized with tweaks runs better than those), thanks for making a good macOS apple.

Its a reminder of why every single version of macOS is better than Windows

No, seriously, I updated from macOS Mojave and because I wanted to do a fresh install, I set up everything again, however, there is something beautiful about macOS allowing you to copy some apps to external drives and copy them back on another machine (this depends of the program or app and the developer, but sometimes is really useful) while Windows makes it a complete nightmare and torture, anyway, not only did I got a smooth sync with iCloud, but also, the system feel pretty much the same with a beautiful redesign, and that is wonderful.

If something works, don’t fix it, and I’m glad apple keeps macOS that way for many years, and hopefully they keep doing it, however, there are some things they have to fix like spotlight indexing taking a lot of resources or kernel task getting crazy with memory swap, but even those bugs are tolerable and quite fixable if you know what to do, and so I fixed some of them and my Mac feel the same as on Mojave, really, its fast, obviously, this MacBook is modern, however, with some tricks, I keep doing the same tasks like on Mojave and I don’t see a difference, except for one thing.

macOS hates backwards compatibility

As you can see in my OCLP guide for legacy Macs, there is an issue going on with older versions of apps like Final Cut Pro or iMovie on newer versions of macOS like Big Sur and newer, now, this is one of the reasons why people should test updating to Monterey if your Mac has non metal graphics or its new but your workflow uses old versions of apps, if you can update to Monterey, I suggest dual boot if you have enough storage available, that way you use Windows or an older macOS version without issues on your daily basis, and remember, there isn’t any 32-bit support on Catalina, Big Sur and Monterey, take that in mind before updating, and speaking about 32 bits.

Friendship ended with macOS mojave, now macOS Monterey is my best friend

I love macOS Mojave, it is, in my opinion, the best version of macOS, its peak between High Sierra and Catalina, it has full 32 bit support but also integrates Dark mode on the full system, its faster than Catalina and high Sierra, it has support for airplay 2, it supports non metal apps and, overall, its good, I never have issues with it, literally, every macOS version has given me some weird bug or memory leak except for Mojave, in fact, I still daily drive it on 2024 and probably will install it again on 2025, but for the sake of this series of articles about open core and justify paying my iCloud subscription, I wanted to give another try to macOS Monterey

And let me tell you, the first time I tried it, I hated it (just like Catalina) because of some performance issues on both of my MacBooks, but there is some things I manage to disable in order to get the same performance as I have on Mojave, or at least try to get it, its not the exact same, but I think its justified, in fact, Monterey made me fell updated to the point where I found my alternative to Mojave or windows 8.1 if I need to update, it works, simple as that, It has the same improvements of Catalina and Big Sur with some great useful features that improved my workflow, in my opinion, one of the best versions of macOS.

And that’s it for today, I hope you enjoyed this review of macOS Monterey in 2023, its a great system in my opinion and you should try it, especially if you use a newer Mac thanks to the features it has, overall, its good, not perfect, but good, and that is what I think that the users want, anyway, I will keep using Monterey for a few months more until I found anything newer like Ventura or Sonoma, until then, my name is Charles Redstone and I hope you enjoyed my take on macOS Monterey after the launch of Sonoma a few days ago, share it if you want, stay hydrated and have a nice day, I will see you on the next one.