I upgraded my work laptop (that I don't use a lot) with High Sierra Public Beta and did the conversion to APFS. Everything went very smoothly and the OS itself seems to run fine. I do find it to be a little slow, but then again its the first beta so I don't expect this installation to be stellar and will get better with every upgrade. I have a gen 1, 12" MacBook Retina that I use at work. If I have to wipe it, then I do...no biggie for me.
It just seems to me that lately, Apple betas actually work pretty damn well. I'm sure there are issues depending on what you do with your Mac, but overall, it works pretty well for a first beta.
Anyone knows how to set up sharing iCloud storage with the family?
it isn't likely to be that hard to set up. when its live. such things often are not until the software goes public. or in this case iOS or MacOS. whichever hits first
In particular our iPhones sometimes get the orientation wrong, and Photos can't rotate videos.
Not sure what to expect in Photos improvements. - can we mark part part of a video as "favourite" like iMovie can - can Photos (or iCloud) convert a mov to HEVC permanently (want to save space but keep meta tags)
In particular our iPhones sometimes get the orientation wrong, and Photos can't rotate videos.
Not sure what to expect in Photos improvements. - can we mark part part of a video as "favourite" like iMovie can - can Photos (or iCloud) convert a mov to HEVC permanently (want to save space but keep meta tags)
Any insights anyone can share?
1) The rotate button is grayed out for videos in Photos on High Sierra beta 2.
2) You can edit by trimming it, like with Quicktime X.
3) You can mark the video as Favorite, but that's for the video as a whole within Photos, not a timestamp.
4) You can alter the poster frame for the video in Photos.
5) So far, I've seen no evidence to converting to HEVC and, as previously mentioned, I still can't properly playback HEVC without using a 3rd-party app like VLC Player.
No but running Terminal from the 10.3 partition you'd still be left with the 10.13 recovery partition and in the particular situation I was trying to explore that would surely be problematic wouldn't it as I was wanting to have a virgin SSD to initialize for 10.12 and ..... oh heck I don't know lol. Let me know how it went.
As to CCC being up to speed, it can as of my last reading still not make a bootable clone off of a 10.3/APFS disk on an HFS+, but I may have read that incorrectly. I'll have to go back and re read the notes. I haven't even tried so perhaps I should. My entertainment was deleting the damn boot APFS SSD and re using the same SSD as HFS+.
Ok, first off, CCC's latest beta CAN read APFS and create a bootable clone of an APFS volume to an external HFS+ volume (I just did IT!)
Second, the terminal command diskutil apfs deleteContainer disk# works perfectly. You have to use diskutil apfs list to determine the disk# assigned to the APFS container. It leaves you with an HFS+ formatted volume (or two if you start with a Fusion Drive). Yes, EVERYTHING on the APFS volume is GONE, so a clone becomes essential unless you want to just start with nothing more than a vanilla macOS install.
I am now running my High Sierra environment that was on an AFPS Fusion volume on a HFS+ Fusion Volume. Took most of the day to compete the steps.
So, I started with a so-so working APFS 10.13 PB2 environment. After loading up the 30 day trial of CCC (latest beta), I was able to make a clone to an external FW drive. Presently while CCC beta can READ APFS, it can ONLY write HFS+, so the clone IS HFS+ but this is what I wanted anyway.
Then I rebooted into the clone and verified that while slow (FW800) it was fully operational.
Then I opened up terminal mode (remember I am in 10.13 at this point) and issued the diskutil apfs deleteContainer command, which removed the APFS container as well as the Fusion drive linkages
Then I recreated my Fusion drive (4 additional terminal commands) formatted as HFS+
Then I downloaded a fresh copy of the HS PB2 and had it install to the newly reconsitituted Fusion Drive.
Then I did a migration of the CCC cloned data over to the Fusion drive
After I allowed the kernel extensions to load (SIP has been tightened up in HS), everything came up.
Of course the majority of time was spent in making the CCC clone (about 2.3 hours) and then the migration back of my data once I had a clean HS install. The actual APFS container deletion and Fusion Drive recreation took maybe 15 minutes total.
I could have just as easily restored my 10.12.5 clone rather than installing a fresh copy of 10.13 and migrating my 10.13 data. I wanted to give 10.13 a chance as the issues I was starting to see were all APFS related.
Yes, the key to this is to start with a clone or clean install of 10.13 so that you can boot into it and then remove the APFS mess on your normal boot drive.
"Ok, first off, CCC's latest beta CAN read APFS and create a bootable clone of an APFS volume to an external HFS+ volume (I just did IT!)"
I am well aware of that, sorry, it mistyped I meant 'to APFS', did it the minute Mike released the beta CCC to developers with 10.13 dev beta 1.
Yes I can do all that with terminal and do often if no alternative, we were discussing entirely erasing the entire disk, hence running Terminal from the recovery would leave the recovery partition. Sort of like painting yourself into a corner, no? I simply had found a way that was as fast if not faster than Terminal as I have Parallels and Windows 10 running most of the time I am tinkering and MiniTools wipes the entire drive with a click ready for initializing back in macOS. I find Terminal a PITA unless no fast alternative.
I know a clean install is wonderfully easy and works but with about 50 apps to test, both under booting to HFS+, APFS, and running on externals in HFS+ and APFS, RAID and non RAID, a clone of my Mac Pro's internal SSD is far faster for me and hence the erasing of an APFS and making it HFS+ again was the discussion's point, so CCC unable clone a bootable APFS version is the only temporary hang up which Mike Bombich solved shortly I am sure.
I am on dev b3 and there are some differences in booting issues for me at least but due to NDA cannot discuss here.
Yep 2.3 hours to clone sounds like a Fusion Drive I threw one I bought in the trash, 5400 rpm HDD in 2017 really? SSD attached to it or not, no help in cloning. IMHO they suck. I only use either SSD or RAID 0 over Thunderbolt these days. I can clone 6TB in less time!
Super excited for HEVC. Is there any way to test compression performance and playback in the beta? Beta versions of Compressor or something? Or perhaps Quciktime has new share functionality with HEVC output?
Sharing iCloud files is a huge addition for me! YES!! Thanks for the report, Max!
I've tested HEVC with QuickTime X on 2013 and 2015 Macs on both High Sierra betas. Neither will play back the titles properly, Both show "Converting…", which is common enough for videos that won't play, but this actually loads a white window and let's you play the audio properly. I'm not sure if this simply isn't included as of yet or the Macs are too old. I've tested the media with VLC Player without issue, so I know the source is fine. It was encoded from H.264/MP4 to H.265/MP4 using Handbrake.
Thanks mate! Let's hope they're supporting a broad range of h.265 profiles when fully implemented. And not an Apple only profile. It probably isn't fully implemented yet then.
Super excited for HEVC. Is there any way to test compression performance and playback in the beta? Beta versions of Compressor or something? Or perhaps Quciktime has new share functionality with HEVC output?
Sharing iCloud files is a huge addition for me! YES!! Thanks for the report, Max!
I've tested HEVC with QuickTime X on 2013 and 2015 Macs on both High Sierra betas. Neither will play back the titles properly, Both show "Converting…", which is common enough for videos that won't play, but this actually loads a white window and let's you play the audio properly. I'm not sure if this simply isn't included as of yet or the Macs are too old. I've tested the media with VLC Player without issue, so I know the source is fine. It was encoded from H.264/MP4 to H.265/MP4 using Handbrake.
Thanks mate! Let's hope they're supporting a broad range of h.265 profiles when fully implemented. And not an Apple only profile. It probably isn't fully implemented yet then.
The clip is only 480×360 and 1m:42s long with a size of 39.6MB with H.264/AAC that converts to 18.4MB with H.265/AAC, and there's nothing high-end about the color profile used. If I'm doing something wrong then it's beyond my ken. Here's the relevant data from Get Info for each video codec of the clip, respectively.
Comments
It just seems to me that lately, Apple betas actually work pretty damn well. I'm sure there are issues depending on what you do with your Mac, but overall, it works pretty well for a first beta.
In particular our iPhones sometimes get the orientation wrong, and Photos can't rotate videos.
Not sure what to expect in Photos improvements.
- can we mark part part of a video as "favourite" like iMovie can
- can Photos (or iCloud) convert a mov to HEVC permanently (want to save space but keep meta tags)
Any insights anyone can share?
2) You can edit by trimming it, like with Quicktime X.
3) You can mark the video as Favorite, but that's for the video as a whole within Photos, not a timestamp.
4) You can alter the poster frame for the video in Photos.
5) So far, I've seen no evidence to converting to HEVC and, as previously mentioned, I still can't properly playback HEVC without using a 3rd-party app like VLC Player.
I am well aware of that, sorry, it mistyped I meant 'to APFS', did it the minute Mike released the beta CCC to developers with 10.13 dev beta 1.
Yes I can do all that with terminal and do often if no alternative, we were discussing entirely erasing the entire disk, hence running Terminal from the recovery would leave the recovery partition. Sort of like painting yourself into a corner, no? I simply had found a way that was as fast if not faster than Terminal as I have Parallels and Windows 10 running most of the time I am tinkering and MiniTools wipes the entire drive with a click ready for initializing back in macOS. I find Terminal a PITA unless no fast alternative.
I know a clean install is wonderfully easy and works but with about 50 apps to test, both under booting to HFS+, APFS, and running on externals in HFS+ and APFS, RAID and non RAID, a clone of my Mac Pro's internal SSD is far faster for me and hence the erasing of an APFS and making it HFS+ again was the discussion's point, so CCC unable clone a bootable APFS version is the only temporary hang up which Mike Bombich solved shortly I am sure.
I am on dev b3 and there are some differences in booting issues for me at least but due to NDA cannot discuss here.
Yep 2.3 hours to clone sounds like a Fusion Drive
Safari is extremely buggy in rendering, often pages only half render...