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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.
I really don't care for Siri, nor the fact that the computer will have to actively listen in 24/7 to support that. I was hoping for some under the hood improvements, like a new filesystem, better software RAID, iSCSI, a package management/repository system usable by third parties, so signed code and repos would be easy to add, so we wouldn't need ports, brew, or other third party stuff. Maybe even more blue-sky stuff like having root be a role like Solaris as opposed to an actual user, filesystem snapshots (something like btrfs send/zfs send), deduplication (since all Mac laptops are SSD based, might as well have an offline dedup process to help with storage), maybe even build in a ESXi compatibile hypervisor, so virtualization is baked in and usable without third party utilities, which adds to security.
I wish Apple would actually extend OS X to do more fundamental stuff, not 1-2 gewgaws.
I've got a Mac and an iPhone, and although I would say I tend to favor Apple products, I would not call myself a fan.
I just heard about this "rich links" feature in Messages where links to images or video will display in a preview attached to the link. My immediate reaction was one of revulsion and disbelief. That kind of "feature" is a security nightmare and there better be a way to disable it or else I am NOT going to upgrade. Whoever thought this was a good idea is a fucking idiot. Your phone should NEVER pre-emptively download the content of a hyperlink that someone else sends you. I don't care if it's a trusted site or not.
Apple is moving desktop Macs in the "consumer electronics toy" direction. They have been for some time now. Their focus has been on gewgaws, not fundamentals for a good bit. This is not the company you want to stick with for desktop computing if that's what you care about. They are the company for people who have the attitude of a computer being a disposable device they don't care much about: You get the one you like the looks of, don't worry a whole lot about the technical stuff, and use it until it breaks or you decide you like the looks of a new one better.
If low level stuff and long-term support is what interests you, then you want to look at Linux or Windows. Yes really, Windows, Microsoft makes fundamental improvements to their OS quite often, and they are usually good. Either way while all OSes have fluff you don't care about and will keep getting it, Windows and the vast majority of Linux distros also spend plenty of time on the under-the-hood part.