Apple refining macOS 10.12 Sierra in new High Sierra 10.13 revision

Posted:
in macOS edited June 2017
Seemingly similar to Apple's development philosophy from Leopard to Snow Leopard, Apple's new macOS 10.13 High Sierra will continue to enhance ideas and shifts in the operating system fro 10.12 Sierra, alongside a slew of new features and enhancements.




Presented at the 2017 WWDC conference, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi announced the new version, and highlighted a few features of the macOS operating system update, due in the fall.

Safari

Apple benchmarked Safari on the new machine, and it "smoked" all comers on High Sierra. 80 percent better performance on modern JavaScript.

Other additions to Safari include blocking of auto-play videos, Intelligent Tracking Prevention using machine learning to identify trackers and segregate cross-site traffic monitors.

Mail includes a new composition screen, and 35 percent less space to store mail boxes.

Photos

Photos has a new view, including a chronological display, and new filtration mechanisms. Metadata including categorization are automatically synchronized across devices.

New editing tools have been added, including selective color modification, curve changes, and all edits synchronized from Photoshop or Pixelmator back to the photo library.

Apple has also opened up its printed photos to third parties -- but hasn't shared much information on it.

APFS coming to macOS

The new default file system will be the new APFS, coming to High Sierra. An Apple demonstration of a copy was nearly instantaneous.




APFS was designed with all of Apple's platforms in mind, scaling from watchOS to iOS and tvOS to macOS, and taking advantage of the fact that most of the company's products are now using Flash or SSD storage. It also was designed with encryption in mind as a primary feature.

Apple's iOS 10.3 brought APFS seamlessly to the iPhone and iPad.

Migration of H.264 to H.265/HEVC

Citing the wider adoption of 4K and HDR videography, Apple is adding support to macOS for H.265 and HEVC. The MacBook, MacBook Pro, and new hardware announced today will all have hardware decoding support for H.265, but all High Sierra compatible machines will support the codec.

Metal

Metal 2 includes driver optimizations, and apple claims that it brings up to a 10 times better draw call throughput. More bugging tools are now available, and the Mac Window Server has been migrated to Metal as well.

Federighi noted that Apple uses Metal for deep learning, and this will continue even further in High Sierra.

Perhaps most importantly, Metal 2 will ultimately bring the ability to use Thunderbolt 3 external enclosures for high performance video cards officially in macOS. A developer kit will be made available with an AMD GPU, with the capability ultimately being brought to all users.

Virtual reality, and augmented reality

Federighi also announced that Metal will be coming to augmented reality solutions. Apple is working with Steam, Epic with the Unreal Agency, and Unity to bring their VR platforms to macOS.

Availability

High Sierra will be available today for developers, and later in the month for public developers. Any computer that supports Sierra will run High Sierra.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 31
    saareksaarek Posts: 1,520member
    Ugh, what a horrible name.
    pscooter63SpamSandwich
  • Reply 2 of 31
    gilly33gilly33 Posts: 433member
    And the complaining starts. 
    StrangeDaysSoliwatto_cobramacseekerpscooter63SpamSandwich[Deleted User]
  • Reply 3 of 31
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    saarek said:
    Ugh, what a horrible name.
    Maybe Sierra Nevada was unavailable.
  • Reply 4 of 31
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    If all someone has to complain about is the name then I guess Apple did a pretty good job. 
    StrangeDaysSoliwatto_cobrapscooter63SpamSandwichtallest skil
  • Reply 5 of 31
    Eric_WVGGEric_WVGG Posts: 966member
    Very excited about this. "Snow Leopard / Mountain Lion"-style releases that focus on tech stuff are the absolute best Mac releases for nerds. 
    Soliwatto_cobrapscooter63SpamSandwichnetmage
  • Reply 6 of 31
    dsddsd Posts: 186member
    Our crack marketing team ascended the highest peaks and came back and named it... macOS High Sierra. (laughter) - "they assured us this name is fully baked."

    Definitely designed in California.
    StrangeDaysjSnivelywatto_cobraevilution
  • Reply 7 of 31
    eightzeroeightzero Posts: 3,056member
    Cool. Great it runs on all Sierra compatible macs. I like the price.

    But does this mean I can run YouTube videos on Safari now? I'm tired of having to cut/paste links into Chrome.
  • Reply 8 of 31
    Eric_WVGGEric_WVGG Posts: 966member
    eightzero said:
    Great it runs on all Sierra compatible macs.
    That is super cool, so glad my dad can get one more new OS release on my old 17" MBP
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 9 of 31
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    saarek said:
    Ugh, what a horrible name.
    Here's my take:  Think Lion - Mountain Lion, Leopard - Snow Leopard.  It is standard nomenclature for Apple and no doubt decided at the time they selected Sierra as the upgraded version of the same OS.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 10 of 31
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    My thoughts are mostly about the new filing system for Macs.  I wonder how compatible it is with the likes of Carbon Copy Cloner and Disk Warrior 5?  Also will it play nice with attached externals or restoring files from TM.  Knowing Apple it will be pretty seamless and CCC will patch quickly as always for developers but I can't wait for the developer web site to come back up to access the read me files.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 11 of 31
    Eric_WVGGEric_WVGG Posts: 966member
    Good question, Time Machine too. I know there's some speculation that Time Machine simply won't work with APFS, but that seems like much too important of a feature to leave out.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 12 of 31
    shapetablesshapetables Posts: 201member
    They just couldn't bring themselves to call it "macOS Mammoth" :D  

    One could imagine the headlines an hour later "Apple plans mammoth new release in Fall". Still, all of the pot references in that keynote...
  • Reply 13 of 31
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    eightzero said:
    Cool. Great it runs on all Sierra compatible macs. I like the price.

    But does this mean I can run YouTube videos on Safari now? I'm tired of having to cut/paste links into Chrome.
    1) No idea what you're running but that shouldn't be an issue.

    2) You can also enable Develop mode so you can select Chrome from Open Page With from the Menu Bar -or- you can drag the favicon from the Safari URL bar to your Chrome icon in the dock to have it load that page.
  • Reply 14 of 31
    eightzeroeightzero Posts: 3,056member
    Soli said:
    eightzero said:
    Cool. Great it runs on all Sierra compatible macs. I like the price.

    But does this mean I can run YouTube videos on Safari now? I'm tired of having to cut/paste links into Chrome.
    1) No idea what you're running but that shouldn't be an issue.

    2) You can also enable Develop mode so you can select Chrome from Open Page With from the Menu Bar -or- you can drag the favicon from the Safari URL bar to your Chrome icon in the dock to have it load that page.
    Thanks. I have made all my macs Adobe flash free. A lot of pages and YouTube content out there apparently depend on it. Chrome seems to run stuff fine though. Should I be worried?

    I'd rather Safari somehow ran this stuff without flash. But I suppose that is an Adobe issue.
  • Reply 15 of 31
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    eightzero said:
    Soli said:
    eightzero said:
    Cool. Great it runs on all Sierra compatible macs. I like the price.

    But does this mean I can run YouTube videos on Safari now? I'm tired of having to cut/paste links into Chrome.
    1) No idea what you're running but that shouldn't be an issue.

    2) You can also enable Develop mode so you can select Chrome from Open Page With from the Menu Bar -or- you can drag the favicon from the Safari URL bar to your Chrome icon in the dock to have it load that page.
    Thanks. I have made all my macs Adobe flash free. A lot of pages and YouTube content out there apparently depend on it. Chrome seems to run stuff fine though. Should I be worried?

    I'd rather Safari somehow ran this stuff without flash. But I suppose that is an Adobe issue.
    I haven't had Flash installed in Safari for years and YouTube playback hasn't been an issue for years. Well, until recently when they stopped supporting 2160p for browsers that don't support the VP9 

    YouTube hasn't even used Flash as the default option for a couple years. I'd check for a rogue extension or plugin that's causing Safari to push for Flash.
    edited June 2017 eightzero
  • Reply 16 of 31
    eightzeroeightzero Posts: 3,056member
    Soli said:
    eightzero said:
    Soli said:
    eightzero said:
    Cool. Great it runs on all Sierra compatible macs. I like the price.

    But does this mean I can run YouTube videos on Safari now? I'm tired of having to cut/paste links into Chrome.
    1) No idea what you're running but that shouldn't be an issue.

    2) You can also enable Develop mode so you can select Chrome from Open Page With from the Menu Bar -or- you can drag the favicon from the Safari URL bar to your Chrome icon in the dock to have it load that page.
    Thanks. I have made all my macs Adobe flash free. A lot of pages and YouTube content out there apparently depend on it. Chrome seems to run stuff fine though. Should I be worried?

    I'd rather Safari somehow ran this stuff without flash. But I suppose that is an Adobe issue.
    I haven't had Flash installed in Safari for years and YouTube playback hasn't been an issue for years. Well, until recently when they stopped supporting 2160p for browsers that don't support the VP9 

    YouTube hasn't even used Flash as the default option for a couple years. I'd check for a rogue extension or plugin that's causing Safari to push for Flash.
    Hum. Maybe ghostery...
  • Reply 17 of 31
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    MacPro said:
    My thoughts are mostly about the new filing system for Macs.  I wonder how compatible it is with the likes of Carbon Copy Cloner and Disk Warrior 5?  Also will it play nice with attached externals or restoring files from TM.  Knowing Apple it will be pretty seamless and CCC will patch quickly as always for developers but I can't wait for the developer web site to come back up to access the read me files.
    Yeah I've heard imaging will also be a kind of a thing of the past with the new file system. This sucks for IT people like myself who rely on imaging Macs. I guess I'll wait and see how this all works. 
  • Reply 18 of 31
    dwalladwalla Posts: 15member
    No mention of updating OpenGL support to latest iterations. Nor no mention of Vulcan support. Metal is awesome, but game developers don't want to write for multiple graphics API's. 
  • Reply 19 of 31
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    APFS does snapshots, so it's possible that macOS could get a Windows-like recovery option so you could go back to a last known good configuration with ease.
  • Reply 20 of 31
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    eightzero said:
    Soli said:
    eightzero said:
    Soli said:
    eightzero said:
    Cool. Great it runs on all Sierra compatible macs. I like the price.

    But does this mean I can run YouTube videos on Safari now? I'm tired of having to cut/paste links into Chrome.
    1) No idea what you're running but that shouldn't be an issue.

    2) You can also enable Develop mode so you can select Chrome from Open Page With from the Menu Bar -or- you can drag the favicon from the Safari URL bar to your Chrome icon in the dock to have it load that page.
    Thanks. I have made all my macs Adobe flash free. A lot of pages and YouTube content out there apparently depend on it. Chrome seems to run stuff fine though. Should I be worried?

    I'd rather Safari somehow ran this stuff without flash. But I suppose that is an Adobe issue.
    I haven't had Flash installed in Safari for years and YouTube playback hasn't been an issue for years. Well, until recently when they stopped supporting 2160p for browsers that don't support the VP9 

    YouTube hasn't even used Flash as the default option for a couple years. I'd check for a rogue extension or plugin that's causing Safari to push for Flash.
    Hum. Maybe ghostery…
    I don't think Ghostery would affect that, but I'd disable all Extensions, verify that you have no plugins under Help » Installed Plug-ins, and verify the data at…

    edited June 2017
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