【House of Pleasures (House of Tolerance)】

After four mountainous macOS releases,House of Pleasures (House of Tolerance) Apple has left the high road and entered the desert. The newest version of the company's desktop operating system is called macOS Mojave.

The macOS 10.14 Mojave update comes with a bunch of visual changes, including Dark Mode, as well as a new way to organize your desktop and improve your workflow by using your iPhone's camera to add content to your desktop apps. The newest version of macOS also gets some new apps, including News, Voice Memos and Home, as well as a fresh new App Store.

And no, Apple is not merging macOS and iOS -- but it is bringing some iOS apps to the Mac.

For many users, the most important new feature in macOS Mojave will be the Dark Mode, which makes your desktop, well, dark. In previous versions of macOS, you were able to make your dock and menu bar darker, but other interface elements blinded you with whiteness. Not anymore -- in Mojave, apps like Finder, iTunes and even Xcode, will have a dark interface option. While some users will prefer to leave things as they are, many people (pros, especially) will welcome the ability to make their desktop easier on the eyes during those late night sessions.

Other visual changes include dynamic desktop wallpapers, which change throughout the day (for example, you get a darker, evening background photo in the evening).

You can now also organize your cluttered desktop into Stacks. With this feature, all the content of your desktop is automatically arranged into stacks (by kind, date or tag). You click on one to see all the content in one stack, and they stay organized: if you add an image to your desktop, it'll fly into the image stack. Quick Look, a feature that fires up when you select a file and tap spacebar, enables you to quickly edit all kinds of files.

Apple also introduced a number of subtle changes into its existing apps and features. Sidebar, for example, now shows file metadata, and it's easier than ever to turn a portion of your screen into a video.

Mojave is also taking a giant leap forward when it comes to connecting the desktop experience with other gadgets in Apple's ecosystem. With Continuity Camera, for example, you can use your iPhone's camera to add images to a document you're working on on your Mac.

Not all changes will be immediately apparent. Under the hood, Apple has made several security and privacy enhancements, including making sure your data accessed by apps like Camera and Microphone is secure. Safari also has an interesting new option that lets you disable comment sections and social sharing buttons on websites (though you have to enable it yourself).

Gaming in Mojave should be faster (up to 20x, Apple says) and graphics more beautiful, and developers will welcome the speed improvements in machine learning models.

The Mac App Store has undergone a thorough redesign as well. It now lets you access topic-based apps under tabs called Discover, Create, Play, Develop and Work.

One thing that's definitely not happening is any kind of merging of macOS and iOS. However, Apple did make some small steps toward this goal by adding four of its own iOS apps -- News, Stocks, Voice Memos and Stock -- to the Mac for the first time. Judging by the way Apple's Craig Federighi presented it, Apple is very wary of doing more of this before it's actually ready, so it'll open this possibility to third party developers in 2019.

The macOS 10.14 Mojave update will become available to consumers in the fall. Developers will be able to access a beta version on Monday.