I feel the biggest disappointment in Sierra that this review didn't really harp on is the lack of new features for non-iOS users. There's not that much in this update and the end user features that are available right now are solely focused on iPhone users. As an android user, I can't use siri on a day to day basis, I can't do automatic unlock with my watch, etc. You'd suspect that most mac users have iPhones, but that's not been my experience since most developers use mac but also use android.
The Photos upgrade for "moments" is quite nice, assuming you use Photos to store your photos.
The storage upgrade where they can remove forgotten debris files and then migrate your unused files to the cloud is great for most people.
I realize most HN readers have already drawn their saber and are 2/3rds over the gunwale at my suggestion that a computer make a decision about the disposition of a file, but this one feature is going to reduce my "friends and family tech support debt" by about 75%. A couple of clicks and I can fix their full computer. In the process of that I have quietly gotten them to backup their documents to the cloud so when I get the "my computer won't turn on" call I don't have to spend hours extracting and recovering their hard drive because they NEVER backup. Thanks to "apps", I can finally convince people that paying $1.99/mo for cloud storage isn't some evil plan to loot the world economy. People are used to small payments for computer services.
I'm pretty sure it does. It just doesn't replace the local copy with a reference to the cloud version. Otherwise it could't synchronize between computers.
Dropbox. I disable syncing for certain files, and its only stored in Dropbox. I need access again without using a web browser? I turn on syncing for that folder again and the files are synced back locally within a few seconds to minutes.
I priced out getting an external SSD drive ($300 for 1TB). Its cheaper for me to just buy a year of Dropbox at a time (1TB @ $100/year if paid annually).
A mechanical drive is more likely to fail if exposed to shock or magnetic fields; unless its safely encased in a rack in a datacenter, its not an acceptable form of data storage.
Citation needed. You don't need for the drive to never ever go bad you just need for primary and backup not to fail in the time window required to replace the drive. Most of planet earth relies primarily on magnetic storage including people outside the data center.
I need citations that mechanical drives will fail from shock or magnetic fields? I'm not going to waste my time googling references for that.
> Most of planet earth relies primarily on magnetic storage including people outside the data center.
Right. And I'm arguing SSDs are sturdier in that regard when not safe in a chassis somewhere. SSDs can withstand higher shock forces, have no glass platters or mechanical arms that can contact each other, and are not affected by magnetic fields.
It takes quite a bit of shock force [1] and a pretty insane magnetic field [2] to damage rust.
Also you could buy 2 6tb hdds [3] for the price of that single ssd and mirror them for another level of redundancy, so in my book they come out way ahead of ssds and cloud storage for backup/archival purposes.
If you use a filesystem that checksums you will know if the drive is likely bad and wont lose data unless local and backup go bad within the window required to get a replacement for whichever died. See zfs.
If your proposed backup solution is only used for periodic backups and isn't in constant heavy use 2 $50 1tb drives in raid1 would be quite secure against data loss and last years and for a bonus would be unlikely to be compromised by hackers or mined by the nsa for signs you are a terrorist.
If you project replacing the drives every 5 years your annual cost could be $20 and your up front cost no higher than dropbox. Its even entirely likely that you could get by with a single drive for a annual cost of $10.
well I also didn't tought bad about MacOS sierra and I'm a developer.
What I really hated was iOS 10. I mean after ~9 years they move the goddamit camera to the lockscreen right side, so that I open the camera since I always "played" with the lockscreen before and that always stresses me. Also why should I want to access everything from the lockscreen? this is just stupid.
UX changes that do more harm than good.
Edit: Oh and Clock Sleep timer swipe delete, doesn't work anymore. If I put a Clock into "sleep" and than still woke up after 5 minutes I can't remove the sleeped timer.
I was under the impression that one of the iOS 10 betas added support for getting at notification options without 3D touch on devices that don't support it, but since all of my personal devices support it I can't actually test that (and the development device I use is intentionally still running iOS 9).
Siri, Cortana, and Google Now are mainly for collecting personal user data, and understanding user behaviour. Microsoft has already made cortana available on iOS and Android (though it is not baked into OS). Similarly Google has made their tech available on other platforms. Apple's data harvesting ambitions are not huge currently, mainly because of their absence from search and advertising business, but I wont be surprised if one day they make Siri available on other platforms too.
That's what I noticed as well. The upgrades are Siri, iMessage, iOS integrations, and iWatch integrations. I don't own an iPhone or iWatch.
The Photos upgrade doesn't matter to me since I use Lightroom on a more powerful PC rather than my Macbook.
I have noticed one small upgrade, clicking the speaker icon in the system tray now shows Output Devices by default rather than having to hold down OPTION.
Has anyone noticed any other small, but convenient, changes?
It's not very practical to use without an iPhone in many circumstances. If I use iMessage people will message me there asking to meet up, etc.. and actually I won't receive those messages until I get home and boot up my Mac. Most people spend the vast majority of their time at work, or out of their home for whatever reason. Using iMessage on a Mac without an iPhone is a bit like the messaging version of only having a landline phone.
El Capitan (I think) added a side-by-side snapping that's handy on widescreen devices. Drag a window close to the left edge and wait, and it'll visually indicate that it's ready to snap to the left half of the screen. Do the same on the right. Really handy to do this with, say, Sublime Text (or whatever terminal, something-vim, something-emacs, Atom, VSC, etc.) and a browser.
Naaah, it's some half-baked full-screen mode with two windows side by side. If you cmd-tab out of either of those apps to a third app you lose visibility of the two full-screen-side-by-side apps a-la Spaces (or whatever it's called this week). Such a let down.
The way Windows 7 does it is about a squillion times better, hold down super and use an arrow key to tell the window to snap to that edge of the screen. Works across multiple monitors too. Use this all the time at work, where I need to use propitiatory Windows-only software.
I guess my question is what non-iOS features do we want? I'm already pretty happy with macOS, and I don't really care to see updates just for the sake of updates. iOS integration may just be a place they feel like they are lacking.
Main thing that comes to my mind is a new file system (and associated revamps of Time Machine/Versions/etc to take advantage), which is clearly being worked on and just isn't ready yet. I might be annoyed with the lack of new stuff if I'd paid $129 for Sierra, but, as a free update it's fine and I'm more than happy for them to let the FS stuff mature until it's ready.
As a user of both platforms (which I'm sure is true for a very large portion of their macOS users), the iOS integration stuff of the last several releases is very valuable and has been toward the top of my wishlist.
At the end of the review, the author also complains about Apple neglecting Mac hardware which 'is no longer running circles around the rest of the PC industry'.
I had the same thoughts a few weeks ago—I needed to buy a new notebook and coming from many years on several Macbook Pros, I was disappointed that Apple hasn't done any significant refreshes for years. So, I decided just to get a nice Thinkpad and put Ubuntu or Windows on it. This journey—and it was a journey taking weeks—was infuriating and I realized that Apple is still way ahead, even with three years old hardware.
To make it short: I faced so many frustrations on the other side just to buy a non-Apple notebook. I lost so much time with find the right notebook that I finally decided for a three year old Macbook Pro maxed out with a Intel quad core HQ CPU—which runs circles around all current notebooks, performance-wise and battery-wise, even the just launched Kaby Lake U series.
Here just a few of these disappointments which brought me back to a 'coasting platform' as the author says: even the best trackpads in the non-Apple-world are still crap, Thinkpad suffer from display lottery (two suppliers two qualities), displays not matching Apple quality and brightness, PWM for brightness control, hidpi screens are still not fully supported by the OS as on macOS, on Windows it's ok, on Ubuntu so-so, but never the consistent crispiness of macOS, good non-Apple-hardware is not cheaper, Thinkpads can get really, really expensive, too much choice with little difference, worse quality control, battery-time never matches Apple's, very often tacky designs (except Thinkpads), innovation takes wrong direction (who needs 2-in-1s), 5K display support (Windows is kind of capable, Linux not), wake-up problems (notebooks don't come back from sleep and if something is not working, trackpad, Wifi, etc.)...
It's often very small stuff but my notebook is my daily driver and it's shocking that a three year old MBP still crushes all brand new notebooks from competitors.
I see this train of thought in Apple-centric forums like MacRumors and here on HN. The typical "I can't believe Apple is doing X!" or the "Why hasn't Apple upgraded X yet, Apple is dead! I'm moving to X company now".
I work in IT. I see and use many different laptops all the time. These people really don't get how bad a lot of the other options are, even when they look great on the companies marketing page.
The reality is that innovation in laptops died when the tablet and phone boom took the market by storm. Apple hasn't been innovating with the Mac, but neither has anyone else. Any new MacBook Pro will be just another step above the already steaming pile of trash that the majority of "PC" laptops are.
I've been going through the same motions. You end up with Thinkpads as the only viable alternative (esp with the numeric keyboards, which I like); but once if you get decent specs, they become as pricey as mbp's, plus there is the lottery of quality you randomly get. I'll wait a month, see if Apple does an event.
It seems like there are a lot of tools, patches, and installers in the Hackintosh/"not quite supported Mac" realm that are supposed to be blindly trusted by users. It's like a few guys figure something out and release a fix but they are rarely explained or documented.
Do you know if there is a forum thread or mailing list or site documenting what this program does with source available?
> Hackintosh/"not quite supported Mac" realm that are supposed to be blindly trusted by users.
That's pretty normal for the Apple user community. Not long after the release of Sierra, you had people on forums asking for other (not App Store) sources for an ISO to download and install from because the App Store was (predictably) swamped.
No one had a problem with installing their OS from god knows where, they just go ahead and trust any source that said, yep, this is totally a legit Sierra installer.
Welp, your alternative is end of life from Apple. Install Little Snitch, monitor usage, scan for viruses. I'm only giving you my anecdotal evidence, as well as 200 pages of responses on Macrumors.
"And finally, Apple Watch unlocking also requires 802.11ac Wi-Fi because of the way the software determines the distance between your watch and your Mac. That list includes:
MacBook (Early 2015 and later)
iMac (Late 2013 and later)
MacBook Air (Mid 2013 and later)
MacBook Pro (Late 2013 and later)
Mac Mini (Late 2014)
Mac Pro (Late 2013)"
I have a Mid-2012 Retina Macbook Pro, and I actually upgraded the wifi card to the one in the Late 2013 because I wanted 802.11AC (It's one of the few things that are not soldered to the board). It works without any issue, I wonder if it will work with this apple watch unlock feature.
Apple uses bog-standard Broadcom wireless chips for their AirPort Extreme cards, this one is advertised as "mac-compatible" but any of the BCM943X cards will work as long as they are standard mini-PCIe cards.
So unless I want to use Siri on my computer (I don't) or tighter integration with iPhones (which I don't use), this update brings mostly nothing of significance.
Xcode 8 runs fine in El Capitan in my rMBP, and Safari 10 will be released for El Capitan (and earlier, just not sure how far) at a later date, from what I understand. The Technology Preview is the way to go for those who want the latest Safari features anyway.
It was unclear to me from the review, does the Spotlight Siri integration now let us type "Remind me to put out the trash cans when I get home" in Spotlight and have it perform the same action Siri would have done? I feel like for the couple of things that Siri parses well, it's way easier to use than the app itself, but I'm not going to speak into my computer in my open-plan office.
Well, it's not a good design choice, but it's what you might expect of a slapdash attempt to make a "minimum viable marketing bullet point" release with a skeleton crew of engineers maintaining the product line that is currently the company's lowest priority.
> if you’ve got a Mac with a fan and that fan is currently spinning loudly, triggering Siri will slow it down so that the fan noise doesn’t interfere as much with your speech.
These kinds of small details make me happy. Nice touch as usual, Apple.
If you're running any Logitech hardware, specifically mice, I recommend waiting to upgrade. Numerous issues have been reported (see [1][2][3]). For my Marathon M705 mouse, I cannot use back/forward and scrolling is only half working, plus the Logitech Control Center is crashing randomly and actually uninstalled itself this morning without warning, which is always cool.
I'm fascinated by this line: "In macOS Sierra, ECN is enabled for 50 percent of TCP sessions. So should you run into a creaky old firewall that hasn't been updated in the past decade and a half (it happens), then clicking the link again will probably solve the issue."
Introducing congestion features to a network is always scary (you can blackhole your clients and even trigger unintended behavior that affects the health of the network) but introducing non-determinism in your TCP connections seems like an odd way to do it.
I don't see "second fiddle to iOS" as necessarily a terrible thing.
OSX is a fine operating system. It's stable, strikes a great compromise between power, security, and ease of use, and is useful for pretty much anything you want to do with a present-day desktop.
I personally want Apple to keep it mostly the same but polish it, make it more secure (without making it less useful!), and improve things like stability and performance. Other than that I'm fine with it as-is.
Same here, Granted (I just moved to it really 3 years ago) I really wish they also paused OS release/delay them a bit longer. By looking back on older versions, I wish we had another Snow Leopard like version since some of the latest releases seem to be not completely polished but I welcome the new features as well
With Siri in macOS, Cortana in Windows 10, and Google Now in chrome.. The operating systems have turned into data mining software. This is an alarming trend.
Companies are no longer making money from operating systems by selling licenses, but using their software platforms for harvesting personal user data. Cross-device and cross-browser tracking is catching up. And the worse part is that majority of consumers don't really have a choice
How does voice dictation enable data capture that wasnt already doable before? They already have calendar apps, browsers for web searches. The things you type pipe through the OS already. I'm not saying your concerns aren't valid, just that I don't see how these make it more about data mining.
voice dictations were local. The data you stored in calendar did not go to cloud, and even if it did, nobody correlated your calendar with your web searches or your location. Various pieces of data existed in their own Silos, without needlessly going to cloud.
These personal assistants are combining data from all sources (your contacts, location, search history, calendar, across devices) , correlating and storing it in one place to build a personality profile. This has huge privacy implications.
I mentioned, majority of users don't have a choice.
The way they bake it into Operating system, and leave it enabled by default, it ends up enabled on majority of devices even if user is not using it.
Additionally these companies are going to extreme lengths by coupling these data-collection features with core OS functionality.
I can't be the only one who is massively disappointed that, not only did we not get ZFS, but APFS forgoes the most important feature - data checksumming - with a snobby hand-wave of "trust us", yet includes it for meta data.
Sure, APFS is a tremendous improvement over HFS+ (Hardly Fail Safe), but such as missed opportunity.
Did they update the FreeBSD userland? The neglect to the core of the system the last few years has gotten increasingly more annoying to deal with. There are now glaring incompatibilities due to the age of a lot of the core tools. Stuff as basic as "readlink -f" works everywhere except on MacOS, simply because they haven't bothered to update it in a decade...
It also looks like the OpenGL support is untouched for yet another release from the article, and that's another pain point for me, since it's the poorest supported of all major platforms at this point.
I was mostly disappointed with Siri on macOS - there is no homekit support. The dream of sitting on my computer and verbally turning off the lights was premature. I still have to reach for my phone =/
Everything else Siri could do seems a bit pointless (to me) on a computer. The latency added by asking Siri to do something makes using keyboard and mouse much quicker, I feel.
Not just you asking, but Apple processing it while you wait to see whether it understood correctly.
The only time I use Siri is calling people when I'm wearing gloves. I don't see it changing on a computer.
My biggest problem with Siri is that half the time it feels like muttering magical incantations - get the words in the wrong order and the spell doesn't work.
Be aware: Sierra breaks Karabiner and Seil. You'll need to use Karabiner-Elements, which has far less functionality than Karabiner. Notably, you can't remap caps lock and you can't assign to more than 2 keys, so caps-lock "hyper" is out.
You _can_ remap Caps Lock. It's even in the [readme](https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements/blob/master/usa...). I was using Seil on El Capitan and after upgrading to Sierra I went to the Seil website and I see it says "use Karabiner elements now". Ok, I uninstalled Seil, installed Karabiner elements, got configuration example from readme file and it works as it did before. I use it to switch keyboard languages with Caps Lock key.
Much better PDF search.
Swift 3.
Clipboard sharing for people for whom iOS is a productivity system.
PiP for entertaining the kid in the lap of the power user.
I don't get your sarcasm. It's free, what is there to buy?! I have been using it for roughly 12 hours and, as I said, it's kind of underwhelming in terms of new features. It's not "bad" in any way, it just doesn't feel fresh or more powerful unless you are longing for iOS features on a desktop OS.
Yes, that was my point. The idea was to poke fun at your expressed disappointment at this free update. However, I forgot that to attempt sarcasm on the internet is never a good idea. And that also my comment was poor contribution either way. Sorry.
As a fellow Apple power user, I share your sentiment regarding the sarcasm. It seems like a change happened in the past few years that to love something, means to love it unconditionally, to the point that you must be blind to it's weaknesses and flaws. Blind to the point that to acknowledge them or, gasp, speak of them, is sacrilege. That's a movement I simply can't buy into. How can anything improve if it can't even acknowledge and be honest with itself about what it's weaknesses and failings are?
Introspection isn't always pleasant, but it's quite often the path toward becoming something better.
The irony is that if Apple had simply said "there will be no update this year", people would probably say "fine, the current OS is good enough for now". But when they do make an fairly small update, it is "disappointing" because it didn't add much. It's neophilia - always wanting "new stuff" for its own sake, even though what we have is pretty good.
A useful criticism would point out exactly what desired additions or changes were missing from the update. However, I'm mainly seeing a lot of general disappointment vaguely around "lack of newness".
No, I wouldn't say it's fine and haven't been - my HN comment history will attest to that. OSX is showing it's age more and more every year. Yosemite. El Capitan. Sierra. You may as well have labeled them iOS integration package 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2.
I have to install at minimum 10+ 3rd-party apps on a clean OSX install just to reach baseline feature parity with other modern operating systems these days.
I install Chrome, Keepingyouawake, spectacle, f/Lux, littlesnitch, MSOffice, atom, iterm2, Xcode and a few others. Many are either done via homebrew or the App Store. Be cool to have a new thread for people's "must have" apps.
Curious as to what other operating systems come with that bevy of tools, since you said "I have to install at minimum 10+ 3rd-party apps on a clean OSX install just to reach baseline feature parity with other modern operating systems these days."
Oh, no, definitely not. You're right, that would be absolutely ridiculous. The base 10+ apps or so I mentioned earlier are listed a bit further down in this thread here:
That said, Linux is looking more and more appealing every OSX release and with how much I use it already via docker containers, virtual machines and the like, that will probably be my next move if Apple continues removing power user features from OSX while letting software release quality continue it's decline. There are some amazing open source alternatives available for the vast majority of apps on that list that I've been testing for months now as I honestly don't believe Apple really wants to change to meet the needs of yesterdays power users anymore.
If Apple hadn't released an upgrade, we wouldn't all have to go through the time of upgrading, fixing apps that are broken (or finding new versions, etc). There is a cost to all of Apple's users from OS upgrades, and we can be annoyed that we are spending that time / energy and getting nothing of value back.
I started the upgrade this morning, took a shower and when I came back it was done. Logged in and clicked a couple of buttons (activate Siri etc) and everything was just like I left it when I started the upgrade. I could jump right back in. Perfect.
No, I downgraded because cocoa builds of emacs randomly crash (fixed in git head), as does TeXShop (not obviously fixed yet). Also some other apps weren't running because of gatekeeper changes I didn't bother to investigate seriously.
The lack of new features meant that I had no motivation to try to fix my problems / run git heads of software / figure out gatekeeper.
My El Capitan upgrade failed, and I wound up having to do a clean wipe and install... Which wasn't too bad, except I happened to be on vacation, and the wireless where I was staying went out and did the install tethered to my phone (that was an expensive phone bill).
Ever since an upgrade to yosemite corrupted my partition, I never ever do upgrades on vacations (nor do I upgrade when it's just out)... I don't trust Apple's QA enough
I don't know why he asked, but I was confused about your statement. I wasn't sure of your intent. Were you asking if the user "did not buy it" metaphorically? Or were you suggesting that because the update is free (therefore impossible to buy), users should restrain (or properly frame) their criticism?
