“Talking to my computer is not exactly something I’ve always dreamed of. But there Siri is on a Mac for the first time, beckoning me to press her wavy button that now resides in the dock,” Mark Spoonauer writes for LAPTOP. “‘What can I help you with?’ she asks. Then I start barking commands, like ‘Open the Laptop 2016 folder,’ and it just pops up on my screen in the Finder. Siri’s reply: ‘Your file, boss.’ I could get used to this.”
“Apple’s assistant is clearly the star feature in macOS Sierra, which is in developer preview now and will be available to consumers starting in July as a public beta,” Spoonauer writes. “The final form arrives this fall. But the Sierra update introduces several other upgrades, many of which require an iPhone running the upcoming iOS 10 (or an Apple Watch with watchOS 3) to get the full benefit.”
“The continuity between Macs and iPhones is getting so good, it’s almost a waste for Android phone owners to buy a Mac. You’d miss out on not just Hand-offs (the ability to pick up where you left off in apps across devices) and making calls from your Mac but also new features in macOS Sierra such as Universal Clipboard and Apple Pay,” Spoonauer writes. “With macOS Sierra, you’ll be able to get right to work with Auto Unlock. This feature leverages your Apple Watch to automatically unlock your Mac. You just open the lid, and off you’ll go.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, we’re armed with Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and Apple TVs and nobody lacking such a lineup can come even remotely close to our day-to-day capabilities. We are more efficient and we can accomplish much more than non-Apple device sufferers because our devices are infinitely more integrated. No other platform or ecosystem can compare.
SEE ALSO:
A week with macOS Sierra – June 22, 2016
The new ways Apple’s macOS Sierra works with your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch – June 22, 2016
Methinks Siri should be renamed to Majel Barrett.
I think that “methinks” should be banned from the internet!
Handoff? Yawn.
Siri won’t be popular in an open plan office. But then who still uses a Mac for work?
Yes, voice interfaces will be used minimally, if at all, in typical open bay offices. Personally, I don’t use local search (even Spotlight) all that much (probably once or twice in the past year). But, the typical home and home office users might use it regularly.
The problem that I have is the lack of addressing the needs of true pro users. I’ve lamented this on this site before. Apple’s pro systems are at least 18 months behind their competition and some are as much as 3+ years behind the competition.
I, and many of my associates, use Apple hardware for real work ranging from very high bandwidth communications analyses to image analysis and feature extraction to small nuclear simulations. However, if Apple does not upgrade their pro systems within the next year to the *then* state of the art (not the state of the art as of six months ago), I know of many who will jump ship to Windows or Linux boxes. They don’t want to do it, but can’t continuously be hobbled by old hardware.
All great points. My sense is that Linux is gradually becoming the professional OS of choice for many applications. It is being installed onto up-to-date PC hardware, not Macs. Why Apple is literally asleep regarding this situation, I have no idea. Their loss. Keep your eyes on the road please Apple before you 💥🔥
Our company installs equipment that previously used Windows PCs to operate the system as well as the credit card server. As of this year our new system runs Linux and the credit card server has been replaced with EMV credit card readers that are end to end encrypted at the reader. No more windows PCs in our new systems!
A blessed event! Too bad Apple missed out.
…Who still uses a Mac for work?
What an asinine post!
How reminiscent of the olde ‘Macs are toys’ meme.
I hereby nominate you as most asinine poster of the week!
Congratulations.
But I warn you!
You have some stiff competition!
🐀💀
People who make statements like yours about using a Mac for work are clueless, I have been making a living using Mac computers since 1990 I am a sound editor/mixer/engineer and every studio I’ve ever worked at I’ve used Macs, sometimes we have those machines going 24/7 at very busy times.
MS has no real mobile presence and Google has no desktop OS (other than a thin client), so it may be hard for them both to catch Apple on this synergy.
Sweeeeeeeeeet!
Shoot. I can live without Siri, but the hinted voiceover fixes and all… That’s what I’m looking for.
““The continuity between Macs and iPhones is getting so good, it’s almost a waste for Android phone owners to buy a Mac. ”
“MS has no real mobile presence and Google has no desktop OS (other than a thin client), so it may be hard for them both to catch Apple on this synergy.”
And what is Apple’s PC market share again? Oh yes, that’s right … 10%-15%. And this is after the iPhone and iPad frenzy that has gone on for 8 years, the iPod era before that, and Microsoft shooting itself in the foot with Windows 8 and not long before that Windows Vista plus all the security issues on Windows XP. And those are just Macs.
Apple TV? Third in market share behind Chromecast and Roku DESPITE APPLE INVENTING THE WHOLE MARKET AND HAVING A NEARLY TEN YEAR HEAD START. Only a few million Apple TV devices are in the wild, and a lot of those are bought by enterprises as cheap videoconference equipment. Amazon sells almost as many Fire TV units as Apple does Apple TV ones.
Apple Watch? Yeah … wake me when it is more than a glorified fitness tracker/notification mirror. Or when its sales volumes merit being listed as a separate item in Apple’s quarterly reports. Instead, Best Buy has resorted to “buy an iPhone 6s and get an Apple Watch for $50” promotion to try to unload their unsold stock of both before the iPhone 7 comes out (tactics usually reserved for trying to get rid of their unsold Samsung devices).
The vaunted Apple ecosystem hype is just that: hype. 90% of iPhone and iPad owners have Windows PCs. 99% of iPhone owners do not own an Apple Watch or an Apple TV. So when you talk about “we’re armed with Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and Apple TVs and nobody lacking such a lineup can come even remotely close to our day-to-day capabilities” then you are actually talking about a few million actual, living, breathing people in the wild.
Yes, Apple has a great hardware ecosystem with features and levels of integration that no one is able to match. While that is outstanding and marvelous, virtually no one uses it. Virtually no one benefits from it. And it drives no revenue for Apple. The claims that iPhones and iPads were causing people to abandon Windows PCs or MacBooks in droves were false. The Windows PC sales were dropping, but only because people were replacing their secondary Windows laptops with smartphones and tablets. But the MacBook sales were not significantly increasing, and in 2015 they actually began declining. And in 2016, more Chromebooks have been bought than Macs. So, the hardware ecosystem approach that relies on people buying (expensive) hardware from the same manufacturer is a failure. Apple, Microsoft (their whole PC, XBox plus Surface thing) and yes Samsung (Galaxy phones, media players, smart TVs, smart watches and even smart appliances with their smart home/IoT platform based on Tizen with apps that run on Android phones and tablets) … none of it worked. Instead, 90% of people who own iPhones own Windows PCs, and the vast majority of people who own multiple Apple devices, those devices are iPhones, iPads and iPods, not Apple Watches, Apple TVs (third in market share behind Roku and Chromecast despite inventing the market and having a 10 year head start) and especially MacBooks.
So while single platform, expensive hardware ecosystems have FAILED, what has succeeded? Why software ecosystems that are multi-platform and hard independent. Like Google. And Amazon. And increasingly Microsoft, who has dumped Apple wannabe Ballmer in favor of Google and Amazon wannabe Nadella. It allows you to access your apps, services, documents/data etc. no matter what device you are on. THAT is the benefit of owning an Android phone and a MacBook. That is also why Google really doesn’t mind that much if you switch from an Android phone to an iPhone: when you do, you merely switch from using Google’s software and services on one device to another. It is also why even though lots of people switch from Android to iOS, just as many people go the other way and switch from iOS to cheaper Android devices: Google’s products and services are web and cloud-based and not reliant on the quality or capability of the hardware. The same is true for the other most popular mobile apps i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. as well as most mobile games. That’s why Apple came out with the iPhone SE, a cheaper device with outdated hardware, to win them back. But again … $399 iPhone, $200 Android phone … with the exception of losing app revenue from the Google Play Store, Google still makes the same amount of money.
The funny thing is that Apple practically pioneered this multi-platform software ecosystem strategy when they made iTunes and Safari available on Microsoft Windows like 15 years ago. But they didn’t maintain it. Google took that strategy and ran with it, Amazon soon after, and Microsoft has adopted it after jettisoning the Apple wannabe Ballmer. All 3 (really 4 when you throw Facebook into the discussion) are using cloud and web software services to make money off everyone’s hardware while Apple continues to rely on people buying multiple hardware gadgets to maximize revenue streams.