Security: Password management
Over the last few releases, Apple has slowly built many of the most useful password manager features into iOS and macOS, including sync between devices, automatic password generation, warnings about reused and potentially breached passwords, and more. These features don't fully replace a dedicated password manager for Android users, advanced users who make extensive use of multiple password vaults, or IT people who need to be able to centrally manage passwords for a large group of users. But for people at home, it's considerably better than "using the same six passwords for every single site you visit."
Sonoma's main addition to the arsenal is password sharing—essentially separate password vaults that can be shared with other people who have a compatible device tied to their iCloud account. The area where you set this up in Settings is a bit misleading, implying that people need to be in your iCloud Family Sharing group to have access to passwords, but once you set it up, the only limitation is that people you share passwords with must be in your Contacts somewhere.
Upon setup, each group member can decide which of their passwords or passkeys to share with everyone else in the group, ideal for sites or apps (daycare/school, banking, utilities, health care, and so on) where you share access with one or more people. It clears that same "good enough for lots of people, considerably better than nothing" bar that the other password management features have cleared, and the addition of shared password groups might even help it replace a paid password manager for people whose families and friends mostly live within Apple's ecosystem.
One caveat is that this password sharing won't work on any Macs or iDevices running OS versions older than Sonoma or iOS 17. If you have any of these older devices associated with your iCloud account, you'll get a warning about them the first time you set up a shared password vault.
Sonoma also makes this built-in password manager useful for one big constituency: Mac owners who use Chrome (or some other Chromium browser) instead of Safari. An extension that previously just enabled password syncing for Chrome users on Windows can now be used in macOS as well. Signing in is quick—download the extension and click on it, and macOS will show you a six-digit code. Once you've entered it, you're set.
More data access restrictions
The macOS Mojave update (10.14) began requiring apps to request permissions before accessing certain types of data, and releases since then have added more of them, based either on the type of data (photos, mail, etc.) or the folder location (Desktop, Downloads, etc.).
Sonoma adds a write-only permissions mode for the Calendar app, so software can create new appointments without needing to read the existing ones. Access to your Photos library can also be granted to apps on a per-photo basis, allowing you to share some but not all of your pictures with a given app.
Apps will also need to ask before they access any data in another app's data container—sandboxed third-party apps will start doing this automatically, even if their developers haven't updated them specifically for Sonoma.
USB device access settings
Ventura added a security prompt that asked users for permission every time they attached most USB accessories to their Mac for the first time. In the Privacy & Security area of System Settings, there's a new drop-down where you can either disable the prompts entirely or make the Mac ask for permission every time you connect that accessory, even if you've granted permission before.
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