macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Features/Performance/Battery Life Compared

macOS 15 Sequoia, the successor of macOS 14 Sonoma, is announced at the WWDC 2024 event in June 2024. It is set to replace macOS Sonoma but is it truly worthy of downloading and installing? In this article, I'll show you the key differences and improvements of macOS Sequoia vs. Sonoma regarding features, performance, and battery life.

Biggest change in macOS Sequoia: Apple Intelligence

For the majority of people, the most exciting new feature in macOS Sequoia is Apple Intelligence. It's a personal intelligence system with generative models baked into the core of your Mac. According to Apple, It's designed to understand personal context and deliver useful and relevant intelligence in a way that's private and secure. 

It offers a more personalized experience, powering your Mac with incredible new features to help you write, communicate, and work. Here are the four main aspects you can expect from Apple Intelligence:

System-wide Writing Tools: Proofread, rewrite, or summarize texts in any standard UI framework, including Mail, Pages, Notes, and third-party apps. For example, get suggestions for a quick message response, or read notifications summaries on the Lock Screen.

Image Playground: Create interesting images in Messages or the dedicated app, experimenting with different styles: Animation, Sketch, or Illustration and various concepts from categories like places, themes, etc.

Genmoji: Create inline images to express yourself better. For instance, type a description to view your Genmoji and additional options.

Improved Siri: Siri is enhanced to assist your everyday tasks better. It can now support you everywhere you go, answer all sorts of questions about how to use your iPhone, and deliver information tailored to your needs. For instance, ask it to play the song Jerry recommended, and then it will locate and play the song.

Unfortunately, this feature is exclusive to Apple Silicon Macs and won't be available to Intel-based models.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Performance

It's possible that Macs running macOS Sequoia may experience a decrease in performance, compared with macOS Sonoma because new features like Apple Intelligence demand more resources. That's also why it's advised to prepare your Mac before upgrading to macOS Sequoia.

You can remove unwanted files and clear junk files like caches or logs to free up space on Macintosh HD and optimize your Mac's performance. If you don't want to do all the cleaning manually, use iBoysoft DiskGeeker for Mac to analyze your disk space, look for junk files, and find large files to delete.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Battery life

Some users are reporting experiencing battery drain overnight on macOS Sequoia. This same issue happens on every macOS update because each new version tends to demand more resources than the previous one. If you're concerned about your Mac's battery life, wait for the public release.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: iPhone mirroring

Continuity camera on Sonoma enables you to use your iPhone's webcam and microphone on Mac. But macOS Sequoia takes a step further by allowing you to mirror your iPhone on the Mac's screen. With it, you can control your iPhone from your Mac, catch its notifications, or eventually achieve seamless drag and drop between them.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Passwords

macOS Sonoma unveiled the capability to share passwords with a group of people and keep them up-to-date. Sequoia brings forth a new Passwords app that lets you manage your logins, passkeys, Wi-Fi details, and codes from one single interface.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Windows tiling

On macOS Sonoma, you must manually resize windows to view several apps simultaneously and are only allowed to split the screen into two. But macOS Sequoia has dealt with the issues by allowing you to tile windows. You can now drag windows to the edge of your screen or a corner to place them in tiles or tile them with keyboard shortcuts.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Video conferencing

macOS Sonoma introduced Presenter Overlay, which allows you to appear as a bubble overlay when sharing screens during a video call. With macOS Sequoia, you can preview what will be shared with your audience before it goes live and replace your background to hide the state of your room. These features, Presenter Preview, are not limited to FaceTime. Other video conferencing apps can also take advantage of them.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Safari

One of the big updates for Safari in Sonoma is the ability to turn any web pages into web apps that you can keep in the Dock. Sequoia adds a new Highlights feature that pulls up the most essential and relevant information on a site like directions, or quick links to learn more about people.

The Reader view also gets a boot with a table of contents and a summary displayed at the top of the page. Safari can also detect a video on a page and put it front and center. In addition, the Distraction Control feature can improve the browsing experience.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Notes

The Notes improvements in Sonoma were related to viewing PDFs and sharing with Pages. But in Sequoia, you will be able to record audio and generate live transcriptions (Apple Silicon only), solve math problems on the fly, hide text with collapsible section headers, and mark up your notes.

macOS Sequoia vs Sonoma: Other features

Apart from these changes, there are also other enhancements in Sequoia. For gamers, new AAA titles will be arriving on Apple Silicon Macs, including Assassin's Creed Shadows, Control, Sniper Elite 4, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

These also include the ability to schedule messages to be sent at a later time, get topographical maps, view history and use unit conversion in Calculator, and create reminders from the Reminders app inside Calendar.

Which Macs are compatible with macOS Sequoia?

As the newer macOS version, macOS Sequoia supports a smaller list of Macs than Sonoma. It has dropped support for a couple of 13-inch MacBook Air models from 2018 and 2019. Here are the Mac models that are compatible with macOS Sequoia: