“Nearly every summer brings the promise of sunshine, marigolds, and — in the case of Apple — a new iteration of Mac OS X,” Brandon Widder reports for Digital Trends.
“This year is no different, as the Cupertino-based company utilized its WWDC keynote to introduce developers and Apple users to its forthcoming operating system, MacOS Sierra,” Widder reports. “Name changes aside, the newest OS promises to bring a host of new features designed to capitalize on the system’s tight integration with WatchOS and iOS, Apple’s mobile OS for the iPhone and iPad.”
“Many of the features, namely Siri, take a cue directly from the iOS playbook, while others, like the Universal Clipboard, introduce brand-new functionality to the Apple ecosystem,” Widder reports. “Below are five of the most convenient and useful features coming to a Mac near you later this year — assuming your machine is newer than 2009, that is.
• Siri integration
• Universal Clipboard
• Auto Unlock your Mac for Apple Watch users
• Redefined Photos
• Livelier Messages
Each of the five points above discussed in depth in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What’s your #1 most-wanted macOS Sierra feature/technology?
Siri.
“OK Siri?”
“What release of Sierra will be stable enough to run w/o issues plaguing El Capitan?”
“Hey Siri!”
“When is there going to be any attention put back into the MacOS ecosystem applications, such as Aperture?”
“Oh, and when is there going to be desktop Mac Hardware that doesn’t require a birds nest mess of cables for local storage?”
Apple discontinued Aperture last year.
Still in use. But fear it will soon begin to show its age.
We really don’t want to have to learn something new and photos just isn’t going to cut it.
I know, which is why I said “put _back_ into the Ecosystem”.
Unfortunately, after 30+ years as an Apple customer, the degree to which the ‘eye candy’ has overshadowed the ecosystem’s shortcomings in productivity applications and capabilities have reached a breaking point.
I don’t give a {bleep!} if I can talk to my computer in lieu of typing something, particularly since Siri on my iPhones has been so underwhelming bad.
Thus, my attitude is TAKE THAT BLOATWARE OFF.
Which was ridiculous. I am now no longer fully apple integrated which I was before. Now I am Adobe integrated. Aperture was a great program. Waste.
APFS. Nothing else on the list will do more for serious Mac users.
My Mac periodically freezes with a spinning beach ball. This lasts for sometimes about 5 minutes and then it resolves itself. I hope that MacOS Sierra will resolve this issue.
If it is freezing for that long, you might have a hard drive problem. I’ve seen this on a few iMacs recently. Everything is fine, then one day they start freezing as you say. It last for a while then they start working again. You might want to back up all of your data just in case, and try booting from an external drive. Upgrading wouldn’t fix that and you wouldn’t want to wait that long to fix it anyway, right?
I had that problem with my HD and I confirmed it by looking at the Console logs (system.log) and filtering by “I/O error” I believe. Sure enough, that was my problem.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll check the console log the next time it happens. But just for the record, I don’t have a Hard Drive or even an SSD Drive. I have what Apple calls “1TB PCIe-based Flash Storage”.
I have a Mac Pro too, no PCIe problems though. But I’m chiming in to tell you I had a very odd problem with my Mac Pro that no one could figure. I lived with it for more than a year, until Apple finally replaced the entire guts (processor daughter card, logic board, and I/O backplane) and now it works fine. People kept telling me it was my peripherals, or bad software. It was infuriating. In the end they replaced so much because they had no idea what was causing it. It immediately was fixed by the replacements, so it was clearly something wrong with the machine. I’m just telling you this because you might have a bad machine also. My Mac Pro was well out of warranty, but I proved that it had the problem from day one, and they were kind enough to cover the repair costs.
Thanks cheule for the comment about your motherboard replacement. I have AppleCare, which expires this December. So, I’ll be sure to have them check it out if the problem persists.
Bryan, have you got a solid backup?
Yes. I back up my Mac regularly. Thanks for looking out for me.
“Flash Storage” is SSD.
Hey Krioni, I’ll agree with you that “Flash Storage” is SS in that it is Solid State. But I won’t agree with you that it is SSD, which is a Solid State Drive, as there is no Drive connected to some internal SATA port in my MacBook Pro. Read this article for more information about the different between SSD and PCIe flash storage technology: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2497618/apple-mac/apple-gives-the-mac-pro-blazing-fast-pcie-flash.html
I’ve been subject to the same issue for years and was told the same thing on forums over and over again. I ended up changing 3 hard drives before a friend had the intuition that it might be the hd cable instead. Changed that and the problems stopped.
Indeed, it can be connector problems, too.
One of my MBPro USB ports will charge my phone but won’t make any data connections. Had similar problems with a FireWire port on earlier MBPro.
I have the same issue on my MBP with USB. Left one won’t connect. But charges.
But is that software?
Time to run Spinrite on the HD.
Yeah but we’re still waiting for version 6.1 where you can run it on macOS, no Windows required. 💤💤
After El Crapitan I will wait at least three months before “upgrading”.
A good idea for any OS.
i’m having that problem with Flash. Sometimes it’s Spotlight…
Check your console log for respawning processss. I had one and launchd was extremely persistent .
Deleting the entry solved the problem for me.
Auto Unlock. Universal clipboard close second.
I wish the universal clipboard held multiple clippings. I.e. clipbook.
Will Spotlight + Siri be able to use AFSP to index remote volumes accessed with smb, and assign tags to file groups? And can Siri be automated? It should work the same way I direct my housekeeper on cleaning day
None of the above.
Folders on top.
Of those I only agree with Siri.
Universal clipboard is relatively useless for me because I’ve used multiple clipboards on the Mac for years, making it incompatible with the iOS clipboard (except perhaps for the last clipped item).
Since I use Google Voice and Calendar the Apple Watch was always a non-starter.
“Refined” photos means maybe they made it usable? Too late, I moved on to Lightroom and haven’t looked back.
Finally, livelier messages? Meh. Most adults will ignore it or get bored quickly, and younger people are already doing this with multi-platform Snapchat which their friends already are on.
PIP and APFS
PIP looks pretty useful too.
Not sure if they are rolling out APFS wholesale. That is a massive change and may only be feasible on new devices and an option if you choose to wipe and reformat a drive.
APFS isn’t in Sierra and won’t be finished for approximately a year. It sounds remarkably like ZFS, which brings up bad memories. Let’s hope the APFS project is successful. If it works, it will be goodness.
Zealous developers will find anything immediately wrong in the beta. Mainstream consumers will find the rest of the flaws, if any 🙄, in the final release. That will lead to a really final release, then a final final release. (Isn’t that the accepted Apple pattern with new OS technologies?) My one hope is that APFS solves more problems than it introduces.
APFS, as what sounds like Son-Of-ZFS, would have some profound problems. I so hope Apple has them roped and tied. I don’t want us to go through the whole ZFS disappointment again.
Funny, but I was watching ‘iOS Today’ over at TWiT during tea time and they were talking about the Apple beta cycle, just as you described it.
According to my fading recollection and distant view, ZFS was something acquired from Sun by Oracle, who kicked it around like a rag doll whilst fooling with their own file system proposal. It was looking like a snafu so Apple mainly kept the HFS home fires burning, tossing a tuppence and a glance toward the open source efforts.
Early on, security rose up as the industry’s paramount issue in computing, mobile or not, and Apple moved aggressively to whole-disk encryption. By 2014 (almost too late, but whatever) the decisive order came to double down, implementing differential encryption through a fresh rewrite of the file system. Apple moved, and continues to move, rapidly with this “unsung” technology. If it works right APFS will be a boon to Apple’s enterprise penetration, both mobile and desktop… and as Microsoft demonstrated, when you have the confidence of IT in business, you can ride for a long time. Benefits will trickle down to individual consumers. What, you don’t believe in “trickle-down” economics? Pffft.
For the core of the ZFS project at Apple, Sun Microsystems was it’s own company. If I recall correctly, Sun promised to help Apple adopt ZFS, then did absolutely nothing. I don’t know why. The ZFS project floundered around for years until pronounced dead one random day. Two open source projects (that I know of) persisted in their attempt to get ZFS working on Macs. One of those projects remains, and may well be the core of the APFS project. Don’t quote me please.
I like your insights about enterprise penetration. Microsoft continue to ride that hog, despite incredible incompetence in many areas. As for ‘trickle-down’ anything, that phrase will forever engender in me thoughts of overlords peeing on peasants. Sorry. 😉
I’m more excited about the changes in the music app in iOS10. Most of the features demonstrated were exactly what I have been wanting for a while.
Brandon Widder needs to learn Apple’s naming system. For example it’s macOS NOT MacOS.
I wish ‘Stability’ were on that list so I could choose it…
The feature I want is the one that results in no more articles with “Hidden Features” in the title.
Could we get Bridge to start working again? I know, Adobe needs to do that.
Looking forward to Siri, watch unlock and universal paste. For me, the messages update is useless’ seems more for tweens. For god’s sake, I hope they do more for Photos than what they showed at WWDC. We REALLY need an album to hold all photos not in some other album – call it Uncategorized if nothing else. Then, we can go there and begin to make sense of the MESS that is the Photos app. A third party could do better than what6 Apple has done. The first three features will definitely have me upgrading as soon as the tested release (the one with a .1 at the end of it) is available. I might finally get an Apple TV4 now that there’s a dark mode.
When will the comment section be fixed so the replies don’t become a single line running down the page in the iPhone app?