Apple Seeds macOS Sonoma 14.2 Release Candidate to Developers for Final Testing

Apple today seeded the release candidate of its macOS Sonoma 14.2 update to developers for final testing. The release candidate comes one week after the release of the fourth beta.

The developer build of macOS Sonoma 14.2 can be downloaded by developers through the Apple Developer Center and once the correct profile is installed, succeeding betas will be available through the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences.

macOS Sonoma‌ 14.2 adds an Apple Music Favorites playlist for tunes you’ve favorited, as well as Apple-added support for collaborative playlists. Playlists can now be shared with multiple users, and each participant can add songs. Shazam can also be added to the Control Center or menu bar on the Mac.

Stickers can now be used to reply to iMessages with a long press on a chat bubble in the Messages app, and there is now support for the extra-secure iMessage Contact Key Verification option.

Apple’s release notes for the update:

This update introduces enhanced Autofill for PDFs and improvements to Messages and Weather. This release also includes other features, bug fixes, and security updates for your Mac.

PDFs
– Enhanced AutoFill identifies fields in PDFs and other forms enabling you to populate them with information such as names and addresses from your contacts

Messages
– Catch-up arrow lets you easily jump to your first unread message in a conversation by clicking the arrow visible in the top-right corner
– Add sticker option in the context menu lets you add a sticker directly to a bubble
– Contact Key Verification provides automatic alerts and Contact Verification Codes to help verify people facing extraordinary digital threats are messaging only with the people they intend

Weather
– Precipitation amounts help you stay on top of rain and snow conditions for a given day over the next 10 days
– New widgets let you choose from next-hour precipitation, daily forecast, sunrise and sunset times, and current conditions such as Air Quality, Feels Like, and wind speed
– Wind map snapshot helps you quickly assess wind patterns and access the animated wind map overlay to prepare for forecasted wind conditions for the next 24 hours

Clock
– Multiple timers let you run several timers simultaneously and create a name for each timer
– Timer presets help you quickly start a timer with a range of preset options
– Recents makes it easy to restart your recently used timers

This update also includes the following new features:
– Favorite Songs Playlist in Apple Music lets you quickly get back to the songs you mark as favorites
– Use Listening History in Apple Music can be disabled in a Focus so music you listen to does not appear in Recently Played or influence your recommendations
– Shazam Music Recognition allows you to quickly identify songs playing online or around you, even when wearing AirPods
– New keyboard layouts provide support for 7 additional Sámi languages
– Some features may not be available for all regions or on all Apple devices.

For detailed information about the security content of this update, please visit: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT201222

Apple is expected to release ‌macOS Sonoma‌ 14.2 to the public next week.

As usual, MacTrast and Apple both warn users to not install any betas on their daily driver Mac, instead only installing betas on devices set aside for testing purposes.