Aerial is a free, open-source Mac screensaver that plays the same breathtaking cinematic footage Apple streams on Apple TV — sweeping aerial flyovers of cities, coastlines, deserts, and space — directly on your desktop when it's idle.
What is Aerial?
Aerial is a community-built screensaver for macOS that surfaces Apple's curated library of 4K drone and satellite footage — the identical videos that play on Apple TV devices — as your Mac's screensaver. It integrates directly into System Settings as a native screensaver option, so there's no separate launcher or menu-bar clutter to manage.
The project is actively maintained on GitHub and has accumulated a devoted following because it does one thing with uncommon polish: it transforms your idle display into something genuinely worth looking at.
What does Aerial do best?
Aerial's strongest suit is the sheer volume and quality of footage it can pull from Apple's servers — hundreds of videos spanning every continent, the International Space Station, and abstract time-lapses — combined with a surprisingly deep preferences panel that lets you curate exactly what plays.
- Video categories: choose from cities, countryside, underwater, space, and more — or exclude anything you find dull.
- On-screen overlays: optionally display the time, date, location labels, battery status, or even a custom message — all rendered with a clean, thin font that doesn't fight the visuals.
- Multi-display aware: each connected monitor can run a different video simultaneously, which on a multi-monitor setup looks genuinely spectacular.
- Night mode intelligence: Aerial can favour darker, city-at-night footage after sunset and brighter daytime sequences during the day — a small touch that feels surprisingly considered.
- Local caching: videos download once and cache on disk, so the screensaver runs without a network connection once your library is populated.
I've had it running on a 27-inch display at my desk for months, and colleagues consistently stop to ask what it is. Nothing in the same category — not the built-in macOS screensavers, not even the solid but static Irvue — comes close for sheer visual impact.
Is Aerial free?
Yes — Aerial is completely free and open-source under the MIT licence. There are no in-app purchases, no subscription tier, no nag screens, and no telemetry. The only bandwidth cost is the one-time download of whichever video clips you choose to cache locally.
Who should use Aerial?
Anyone who stares at a Mac for long stretches and wants their idle screen to feel less like wasted space. It suits creative professionals who appreciate well-composed imagery, office workers who want a calm focal point during meetings, and anyone who already loves the Apple TV screensaver experience and simply wants that on their Mac.
If you run a Mac mini or Mac Studio permanently connected to a large display — a common home-office setup — Aerial is essentially mandatory. It also pairs well with hot-corner workflows: set a corner to trigger the screensaver immediately, and you have a one-gesture "presentation mode" that looks polished in any context.
It is less useful if your Mac lid is almost always closed (laptop users docked to a monitor who never leave the machine idle will rarely see it), or if you have aggressive energy-saver settings that sleep the display before the screensaver ever kicks in.
What are the best Aerial alternatives?
The built-in macOS screensavers are the obvious baseline — functional, zero-install, but visually dated. For static photography, Irvue rotates Unsplash wallpapers and is excellent for a still-image aesthetic. SaveHollywood lets you play local video files as a screensaver, which is handy if you want custom footage rather than Apple's library. For ambient motion, Koi Pond and similar App Store entries exist but feel comparatively toylike next to Aerial's cinematic production values. None of them match Aerial's combination of breadth, quality, and configurability at a price of free.
How does Aerial compare to the built-in macOS screensavers?
Apple's stock screensavers in macOS Sonoma and Sequoia include some aerial-style videos as well, which blurs the distinction more than it used to. However, Aerial still wins on catalogue depth — it aggregates footage across multiple Apple TV generations, giving you a far larger and more frequently updated library. Its preferences UI is also vastly more granular: you can pin specific videos, set per-display behaviour, schedule footage by time of day, and control overlay elements in ways the System Settings screensaver panel simply doesn't expose. If you've already tried the built-in aerial videos and liked them, Aerial is the logical upgrade.
