“macOS Sierra has many new features and enhancements, some of which are significant and others that are more minor yet still nice to have,” OSXDaily writes.
We’ve picked a handful of features new to macOS Sierra that you’re sure to enjoy and actually use…
1: Siri on the Mac
2: Picture-in-Picture Web Video
3: Cross iOS-to-Mac (and vice versa) Universal Clipboard
4: Storage Recommendations and Optimization
5: Logging in with Apple Watch
6: Keep Folders on Top with Finder Sorting
7: Messages Link Previews
All 7 features explained in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Having Siri on the Mac (finally!) is very powerful. macOS Sierra users, just ask invoke Siri and ask, “What can you do?” to get a list of the many things Siri can do on your Mac.
Asking Siri when my birthday is got the wrong answer to that given when I asked it on my phone (it’s tomorrow), yet my Mac said it was today despite also bringing up my contact details showing it as tomorrow.
What time zone are your Mac and iPhone set to? could they be different?
Nope, both London. It was about 1 in the morning, so even if it thought I was way further east it couldn’t have thought it was tomorrow.
Never would have thought to try this, but when I asked “when is my birthday?” Siri didn’t even skip a beat… she pronounced my correct birthday immediately.
It’s odd it gets all birthdays right on my iPhone, but on Mac despite showing the right date in the contacts page it declares all birthdays for anybody I ask about as being a day earlier. I’ve changed timezones, changed the date, changed the time and it still does it. Siri doesn’t actually seem to look at the system date either as if you ask what day it is and have changed the date on your Mac it will still say the correct one. Looking online yesterday it’s the same with a other people as well.
I suppose that your will just have to celebrate your birthday two days in a row!
If/when you figure out the root cause, we would be interested in learning more about it.
Happy Un-Birthday!
Far more Un-Birthdays then one birthday a year.
Be happy!!!!
As the jingle from GTA: San Andreas goes on one of the radio shows, “Celebrate with cake!”
If I ask Siri what my calendar is like for any given date, she always returns an answer but displays the 24th August?!?
Anyone else having this issue?
Why doesn’t Sierra have iMessage background effects? (Fireworks, Balloons, Lasers, Confetti, Shooting Star)
??
Samsung’s latest galaxy 7 feature is a hidden self-destruct button designed to trigger premature explosions.
That’s because Samsung management passed a memorandum to toughen up the phones because they wanted more military contracts. One engineering team took it too far….
Aside from sports and a range of near useless queries.. a head to head comparison between Google voice search and Siri shows Siri to be a truly weak implementation. It’s simply not well done. It’s voice recognition engine is pretty terrible, it most commonly comes back with either wrong answers or “here’s what I found for you on the web”.. Snarky, silly answers aside, Siri has several parsecs to go to be the equal of Google’s voice search. Even my Xfinity remote has better voice recognition software. Siri on the Mac is not some kind of revolutionary development. It’s not “vastly improved” (it can’t even offer different voices as it does in IOS).. The novelty wore off about a week in. But this is typical of how these things break out. Google offers better web/cloud based services… Apple makes better products and offers an integrated ecosystem (and a far better desktop OS in general).. also the whole Desktop-iCloud thing is pretty annoying..
Exactly,
The voice recognition on the Comcast X1 DVR is better, Google Voice is better, Amazon Alexa is better, MS Cortana is better and the VW built in voice recognition is much more accurate than Apple Siri.
Since almost everybody licenses technology from Nuance, this may reflect basly on the state of Apple’s internal SW team for AI and voice recognition. Maybe “Clueless Eddie” Cue is in charge of Siri.
Honestly, come on dude.
I have toyed with all the competition on voice, Siri after two weeks of use actually is far better then the rest.
Siri when used with CarPlay is operating through the same speakers and mikes as the OEM system. It is far more accurate than the clueless Siri.
Apple is not sweating the details. It seems to be more interested in binkies on Text Messages.
On feature 6, he must be talking about a new view or something. Arrange “by kind” has always taken care of looking for folders.
Add features I’ll hardly use, yet me and many others are still not happy they removed the very useful feature of colored folders in exchange for the close to completely useless colored Tag dots.
Speaking of removing useful features, I also liked Snow Leopard’s Safari feature where you can choose from the menu to just eMail the link only to someone. I use that every day on my old laptop and miss it on every other updated beyond Snow Leopard Mac I use.
If you pair a Bluetooth headset (Plantronics) to a Mac running Sierra, it will stream audio from the OS but it will not use the Bluetooth headset mike for anything as it does not see it as an input source. Plug in a wired Plantronics USB headset and it sees both the Mic and the headphones and works fine with Siri.
Not sure if this is a simple Driver issue for the Bluetooth mic as an input or if it is a Siri thing. Either way, Apple needs to put it on the to do list.
Meanwhile on iOS there is no problem using the same Bluetooth headset.
Anybody else having a problem with Bluetooth mic input on Sierra?
I suspect DavGreg knows this, but for newbies:
https://www.apple.com/feedback/
This is where anyone can report bug and other problems. In this case, click on your type of Mac to get the the feedback form. Happily, you’ll also find the popup for “Which operating system are you running?” is up to date and lists ‘macOS 10.12’. TY Apple.
I use a Bluetooth speaker with mic. It works fine with Siri. Didn’t have to setup anything in audio, picked it right up. It is just a cheap shower speaker I picked up from big lots for like $20.
I already love Logging in with my AWatch. I feel like a super spy that logs in to his stuff. I know its seems like a simple feature but its ow so cool.
Did anyone else lose all of their Apple Mail signatures? I thought that an odd bug… I’d love to be able to get the text for the icons in the new message bar back too. Anyone know if that’s possible?
I don’t see any newly introduced features of Sierra that I need. Frankly, Ive’s flat white design meme is hideous and the incessant iCloud push is annoying. Snow Leopard remains the most usable stable and fast OS Apple has ever released, by a large margin.
APFS can’t come soon enough, though. With Cook’s track record for product introductions, I fear Apple will release new MacBooks and iMacs and Mac Pros and MacOS 11 all on the same day in late 2017.