AirPlay Display
>When your notebook is close to a desktop Mac with its own larger display, you can now use the display of that nearby Mac to extend that on your notebook, provided that they both fully support AirPlay. Both need to be signed into the same Apple ID, and to be able to connect with one another over Wi-Fi or through a USB cable, with Bluetooth turned on. Open the Displays pane on the notebook and enable the other Mac using the Add Display pop-up at the lower left. At first, the image shown on your notebook might require a magnifying glass, but you can then adjust the resolution on each, and whether you want the connected display to mirror or extend that on the notebook.
Wi-Fi is more convenient to use for short periods but has a noticeable lag which all but vanishes if you use a USB connection between the two Macs. It’s more than adequate if you just need the additional display area to show static images or reference documents, but you wouldn’t want to use it to edit a document for too long.
of Display in the Accessibility pane. Below that, Monterey adds the ability to colour the outline and fill of the pointer to give it better contrast against the display contents.
In Big Sur, changing the 12-/24hour setting in the Dock & Menu Bar pane only worked when you adopted the setting standard for your region, that’s 24-hour for Europe, and 12-hour for the USA. Now you can choose freely which you want.
6 Bluetooth blues
Monterey fixes a bug in the Bluetooth menu which showed historic charge values for peripherals such as wireless keyboards, mice and trackpads. In the past, to get current figures you had to open the menu twice in succession. Although you now only need to open it once to see the latest charge result, this may no longer display any value when you’re recharging the peripheral. Until it’s fixed, either disconnect the charging cable briefly, or use the item’s pane to discover its battery level.
7 App Store updates
Monterey doesn’t address the App Store’s long-standing problem of not delivering app updates on time, with some still being hidden for a day or two after release. To force the app to offer all the updates that are available, first click on Discover and wait until it has loaded its front page, then select Updates and press ⌘+R. In a couple of seconds it should list every update it has available for you, rather than just the ones it fancies.
8 Frugal macOS updates
If more than one Mac shares your local network, economise on its downloads for macOS and App Store updates by running the Content Caching service in the Mac that’s running much or all of the time. Set this in the Sharing pane. Once running there, that Mac should download each update once, after which that update will be supplied from that Mac, minimising download time for most updates. This is important in Monterey, as the size of macOS updates tends to be large.
9 Low Res AirPlay
To get the full benefits and highest resolution from AirPlay, you need to use a recent model which enjoys full support. However, older models can still connect and play
movies and audio at reduced quality, which might be as good as you need.
10 Help help
If you haven’t opened an app’s Help book before, you may have trouble the first time you try in Monterey. First, if the app isn’t in one of the standard Applications folders, move it to one of them. If it doesn’t open properly then, quit the app when you can, wait a minute or two, open the app again and it should work better. If you look at the Help book inside the app, you’ll also notice that it has changed to look like a regular folder now; that’s probably because of a bug which doesn’t recognise Help books properly.
11 Activity Monitor
If you have an M1 series Mac, it’s easy and instructive to see what macOS decides to run on its Efficiency cores. Open Activity Monitor, select CPU in its main window, in the View menu select All Processes and sort the contents of the window according to the % CPU column. Then open the CPU History window from the Window menu. Efficiency and Performance cores are labelled there, and you’ll notice how routine system tasks like Spotlight indexing and Time Machine backups run only on the Efficiency cores, unlike your apps.