MacOS Sonoma Is The Sleeper Giant Of Apple’s Grand WWDC Showcase

tech.hindustantimes.com:

MacOS is the basis of everything at Apple. It was the core for what turned first into the iPhoneOS which was later rebranded to iOS. And iOS was then the basis for iPadOS, watchOS and also tvOS. In the lead up to WWDC, there weren't many rumours for the latest version of Apple's oldest platform. In the past few years, Apple has been trying to drive the narrative that the Mac is very important for it, something which is also underpinned by the fact that the only hardware that we saw apart from the Apple Vision Pro headset, were just Macs. But the updates in the recent years, besides the transition to Apple Silicon have been timid at best. And that's what one thought before WWDC started, but Apple sneaked in a feature in the Safari browser which could be huge which makes macOS Sonoma the sleeper hit of Apple's biggest WWDC conference in decades. 

Apple touted the ability for the Safari browser to turn any website into a web app on the Mac which will be housed with its own icon in the dock and will even have a toolbar of its own. And this is a capability which will need no extra coding on part of the developer of the website. Now, some may argue, something similar is already possible on the iPhone and the iPad and this is macOS learning from its younger siblings. But the reality is that all of Apple's platforms ping pong against each other and features are cross pollinated. In the initial years of iOS, it learnt from macOS, but now as more people opt for the iPad and iPhone over say a Mac, macOS tends to learn more from them. 

But on a desktop this kind of feature also gets supercharged. Already on macOS, Netflix doesn't provide a native app for example. Now, using Safari, users can still get the native app experience.