Netflix in 4K seems to finally be coming to the Mac

Mac users will likely be able to stream Netflix in 4K, with HDR, once the new version of macOS Big Sur becomes widely available. 

The evidence for this was discovered by tech enthusiast Ishan Agarwal and picked up by 9to5Mac. Agarwal noticed that Safari in macOS Big Sur displayed a 4K Netflix stream with Dolby Vision on his MacBook Pro. 

And 9to5Mac recently noted that the new version of Safari supports HDR videos. This means Mac users will finally be able to watch Netflix in their browsers with the best possible image quality. There’s one caveat, though — only Macs introduced in 2018 or later support 4K HDR. 

This may sound like a small thing, but watching Netflix in 4K is currently a near-impossible mission on macOS. Netflix only supports Ultra HD (Netflix’s name for 4K streaming) on Microsoft Edge and through its Windows 10 App). As The Verge notes, it’s possible to overcome this by firing up Netflix in Windows on a Mac’s Boot Camp partition, which probably isn’t worth the trouble. 

Apple’s macOS Big Sur is coming out in the fall. Some of the biggest improvements in the new OS are to its Safari web browser, which is getting a customizable home page, improved support for extensions and new privacy tools, among other improvements.