Apple Announces Its New Desktop OS macOS Sierra Featuring Siri, Apple Pay (9to5mac.com)

After playing with the names of cats and a few California landmarks, Apple at WWDC 2016 announced that its desktop operating system will now be called macOS -- and its first version update is macOS Sierra. It comes with a range of new features including Siri, the digital voice assistant. The move comes roughly a year and a half after Microsoft brought its Cortana virtual assistant to desktop platform Windows 10. Sierra also supports Apple Pay payment service via Safari web browser. Ars Technica reports about some other features of macOS Sierra: Universal Clipboard answers a longstanding complaint of Mac and iOS users -- copying and pasting now works automatically between an iOS device and a desktop Mac device. iCloud now plays an expanded sync role, too, letting you move files and folders from Mac to Mac or from Mac to iOS. Another new feature called Optimized Storage can sweep through old documents and files and push them to iCloud, clearing up local disk space for other uses. It also can automatically dump your trash, clear your web history, and do some other behind the scenes sweeps. Tabs are coming to more and more applications. Federighi said that Apple wants tabs on all multi-window applications, and says that tabs can be flipped on without developer modification. Update: 06/13 18:55 GMT by M : macOS Sierra won't support many Mac models from 2007, 2008, and 2009. Find more information here.

Comments

Re:macOS and FreeBSD leave no place for Linux.

[mspohr]

Here... fixed that for you:
Despite using OSX for a couple of years, I switched to Unix after I experienced numerous problems with OSX. After spending so many hours fighting to get stuff like Finder, iMovie and web browsers working, I finally had enough. Although it was inexpensive, I bought myself a Chromebook.

I didn't expect I'd ever say this, but ChromeOS is superb. It is UNIX under the hood, but with a really nice UI. Most importantly, it just works. There's no fighting with it like there was with OSX. While upgrading my OSX system was always a crapshoot, I've never had any problems doing an upgrade on Chromebook. At this point I don't think I will ever have any reason to use desktop OSX ever again.

I moved all of my servers over to FreeBSD. Like OS X, it was a breath of fresh air. Everything works so much better. Plus I get ZFS out of the box. Plus most of its code is released under much friendlier and freer licenses than so much Linux code is.

So I need to ask, with ChromeOS and FreeBSD available to us, what room does that leave for OSX? I know on my computers it means that there's no room for OSX any longer. FreeBSD is excellent for servers. ChromeOS is excellent for workstations. That means that there's no need for OSX any longer.