The most pleasant surprise of Sequoia is its application compatibility. I didn’t encounter any significant breakages in my day-to-day apps. For my first couple of days using Safari with the Bitwarden extension, some complex webpages failed to render correctly. This eventually resolved itself, so I assume some caches needed to be updated. Bitwarden is failing to autofill on at least one of the websites I use daily, but I can work around this by copying and pasting my credentials.
Sequoia is snappy. This is especially noticeable with Safari page rendering. It’s rare for Apple to have a release that has solid improvements in performance while adding a lot of functionality.
Until Apple Intelligence is added to Sequoia, its marquee feature is iPhone Mirroring. I’ve been using it often. It works very well except for two issues. First, one of the iOS apps I use only partially works because left/right swipes aren’t registering using the mouse pointer. Second, the connection fails about one in ten times I open iPhone Mirroring. These are annoyances which I’m sure Apple will fix soon. iPhone notifications on the Mac works flawlessly. I’ve selected which notifications to receive on my Mac so I’m not inundated.
Sequoia’s application feature enhancements are genuinely useful. I appreciate that reminders are now integrated into Calendar. I periodically used the Reminders app, but now I’ll be using reminders much more often. Math in Notes is a welcome addition. I don’t foresee this being used by most of Apple’s customers, but it’s a nice bonus for math and science-oriented users.
Apple still hasn’t fixed a bug with Outlook.com accounts on Apple Mail. On certain messages, the blue read dot fails to disappear after reading a message. To clear the offending dots, Apple Mail needs to be quit and reopened. I’m losing hope that Apple will fix this. It’s likely that Apple’s QA testers aren’t using Outlook.com accounts so they aren’t finding the issue.
I’m looking forward to Apple Intelligence. Once its features are added, Sequoia could be one of Apple’s most impactful releases in years.