Macs finally get a taste of an overhauled Mail app

Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Apple redesigned the Mail app on iPhones with the release of iOS 18.2 update back in December, but strangely skipped the treatment for iPads and Macs. The company has finally made a course correction with the macOS 15.4 and iPad OS 18.4 developer beta updates, which are now available for testers.

The biggest change introduced by the new Mail app are categories. All your emails are now neatly slotted across four categories. Here’s a brief breakdown of how it works:

Primary: For personal messages and time-sensitive content.
Transactions: A section for keeping a tab on confirmation emails, receipts, and shipping-related alerts.
Updates: All the content that you’ve signed up to receive via an email agreement, such as news, newsletters, and social media updates.
Promotions: This is the section where you get marketing and shopping material, such as coupons and sales-related notifications.

Apple, however, notes that if any of your emails across the last three categories contain time-sensitive details, they will appear in the Primary bracket. Apple is also taking an approach similar to social media profiles, when you open messages from a specific sender within these three categories.

Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends
“When you tap a Transactions, Updates, or Promotions message, a digest view of messages from that sender opens,” says the company. This is a great way to catch up on activities such as alerts from your banking service provider, as you see all your payments neatly slotted in a vertically-scrolling card-like format.

Of course, you can always choose to disable categories and enable the classic list view that shows all your emails in the same order as they landed in your inbox. The idea is neat, as it separates unimportant jargon from relevant communication, but it’s not perfect.

The arrival of the updated Mail experience on iPads and Macs solves a big problem, even though it add some versatility, like letting users create their own categories. iPhones have had the new interface for a while now, and if you got used to it, not having a consistent experience on your Mac or iPad was a bummer.

With the arrival of macOS 15.4 and iPadOS 18.4’s first developer beta updates, there is finally some respite. It’s now only a matter of time before the developer and public beta testing comes to an end, and the overhauled Mail experience is available across the entire mobile and desktop ecosystem.

As far as other AI-powered tricks in the Mail app are concerned, Mac users can also take advantage of email summaries, smart replies, and priority messages.

Nadeem is a tech and science journalist who started reading about cool smartphone tech out of curiosity and soon started…

I finally tried Apple Intelligence in macOS Sequoia to see if it lived up to the hype

For the last few years, Apple’s macOS releases have been interesting, if not particularly exciting. But that’s all set to change this year with the launch of macOS Sequoia, and it’s all thanks to one feature: Apple Intelligence.

Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform has the potential to completely change how you use your Mac on a daily basis. From generating images, rewriting emails, and summarizing your audio recordings to revamping Siri into a much more capable virtual assistant, Apple Intelligence could be the most significant new macOS feature in years.

You can finally try out Apple Intelligence on your Mac. Here’s how

The second developer beta of macOS Sequoia is open for business and it includes Apple Intelligence features. It looks like anyone can try it out as long as you’re not in China. That includes people in the EU — even though the AI features might not launch there right away. The features available for testing include Writing Tools, Siri, Safari and Mail summaries, Smart Replies, Memory Movies, transcription features, Reduce Interruptions Focus Mode, and a few more. If you want to have a look yourself, here’s everything you need to do to download the beta and activate Apple Intelligence.

Before you start, make sure you’ve backed up your Mac with Time Machine so you can restore the previous version if anything goes wrong. You can also use a secondary device if you have another Apple silicon Mac lying around because beta versions can go wrong and you have to download them at your own risk.

The best Mac apps for 2025: top software for your Mac

If there’s one thing macOS is known for, it’s a thriving ecosystem of unique, high-quality apps. Whether you’re looking for something to boost your productivity, increase your security, edit your photos and videos, or dive into the world of AI chatbots, you’re bound to find some great options, either in the App Store or elsewhere on the web.

Best Mac apps to change your interface

Alfred

Think of Alfred as Spotlight with a dash of Siri. It’s an application launcher, but it can do a lot more than just that. With Alfred, you can quickly perform calculations, execute web searches, and find word definitions, among many other functions.