Apple adds new wallpapers to macOS Sonoma beta

Apple on Wednesday released macOS Sonoma beta 7 to developers. As the company has been refining the new version of the Mac operating system ahead of its official release this fall, users running macOS 14 beta may notice that the system now has multiple new animated wallpapers.

New macOS Sonoma animated wallpapers

macOS Sonoma introduces a new Lock Screen that looks extremely familiar to the iPad’s Lock Screen. But on the Mac, the Lock Screen can display beautiful animated wallpapers. Previous betas already had 22 new animated wallpapers, and Apple has now considerably expanded this list. In total, macOS 14 now comes with more than 120 new wallpapers.

Most of these animated wallpapers may look familiar to some users. That’s because they’re the same footage used for the Apple TV aerial screensavers. The animated wallpapers are organized into four different categories: Landscape, Cityscape, Underwater, and Earth.

When it comes to Cityscape, there are wallpapers from different locations around the globe, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, London, Dubai, and Hong Kong. Landscape features wallpapers with footage of places like the Sonoma River, Grand Canyon, Iceland Coast, Patagonia Lake, Yosemite Mountains, and Liwa Dune Fields.

Once you set one of these wallpapers, they remain static on your Desktop and become animated on the Lock Screen. You can turn off the animated version on the Lock Screen if you prefer, which will make the image always static.

Another interesting detail is that you don’t need to install macOS Sonoma beta 7 to get the new wallpapers. That’s because they’re part of a catalog that can be updated remotely. This suggests that Apple may introduce new wallpapers in the future without having to release a new version of macOS.