Coming this fall, macOS Monterey brings a ton of new features to Apple’s desktops and laptops. But many of these features, including FaceTime Portrait mode, won’t come to Intel-based Macs.
Apple did not announce that some of its macOS features were M1-exclusive during its WWDC event earlier this week. The discrepancy, first reported by MacRumors, was discovered in the fine print of Apple’s macOS 12 release page.
Here are the Monterey features not supported by Intel-based Macs:
- FaceTime Portrait Mode: Similar to the background blur features in Zoom or Google Meet, FaceTime Portrait mode applies a bokeh effect to the background in video calls.
- Live Text: A really cool feature that lets you highlight, copy, and paste text from images. If you have a picture of a classroom whiteboard, for example, you can copy all the text and save it to a word document.
- Apple Maps Detailed Streetviews: Some big cities are getting 3D landmarks in Apple Maps, like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
- Apple Maps Globe View: Basically Google Earth for Apple Maps.
- Text-to-Speech Languages: Monterey offers text-to-speech in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Danish, but only on M1 machines!
- New Dictation Features: Intel Macs won’t get offline dictation or unlimited dictation support (before Monterey, dictation was limited to one minute).
It seems that Apple is slowing software support for Intel-based machines much earlier that some people expected. Of course, this isn’t a doomsday scenario—the M1-exclusive Monterey features really aren’t that important, and Apple will still offer OS and security updates to Intel users for years to come. (Now’s a good time to point out that Monterey works on some 7-year-old Macs, which is an impressive feat.)
