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

macOS and FreeBSD leave no place for Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite using Linux for a couple of decades, I switched to OS X after I experienced numerous problems with Linux. After spending so many hours fighting to get stuff like PulseAudio, GNOME 3 and systemd working, I finally had enough. Although it was expensive, I bought myself a Mac Mini.

I didn't expect I'd ever say this, but OS X (or macOS or whatever it's called now) 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 Linux. While upgrading my Linux system was always a crapshoot, I've never had any problems doing an upgrade on OS X. At this point I don't think I will ever have any reason to use desktop Linux 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 OS X and FreeBSD available to us, what room does that leave for Linux? I know on my computers it means that there's no room for Linux any longer. FreeBSD is excellent for servers. OS X is excellent for workstations. That means that there's no need for Linux any longer.

Boring

[geek]

This WWDC is so boring I've actually stopped watching. Is it just me or is the age of Tim Cook extremely dull? This is like watching paint dry.

Apple doesn't care about nerds anymore

[LichtSpektren]

Macs were extremely popular with nerds a decade ago, when Linux required a lot of hacking and tweaking to get working on a laptop. "Just save the trouble and buy a Mac, it's certified UNIX with a nice graphical shell and the hardware was high quality" is what a lot of people said. Even at Linux developer conferences, everybody had Macs.

Nowadays, the hardware is not competitive at all for the price point; plus the drives and RAM are soldered in, so tweakers have moved on to other things. OS X is falling way behind in features to Linux (native ZFS, kGraft, gaming and GPU support, etc.), and newer versions are splicing in iOS features rather than adding anything compelling.

I don't blame them. Focusing on stylishness, ease of use and cross-device features (to encourage vendor lock-in) probably yields higher profits than repairability, high performance and terminal utilities. But that's also a dangerous road to go down.

Re:Apple doesn't care about nerds anymore

[geek]

Apple's main "technology" development in the past half decade has been making things "thinner." That's basically it.

It's becoming increasingly clear their vision died with Jobs. That they've been able to coast for 5 years is a testament to the momentum that asshole built. But as it stands Apple is running on technology fumes. All "style" in the world can't mask feature retardation, i.e. their flagship OS is hopelessly outdated in most of its core technologies; they don't seem to be able to improve on a 15+ yr old filesystem, their graphics stack hasn't yet entered this decade, their online services are worst in class consistently, etc, etc, etc.

I worked at Apple when they were tossing around ZFS as an option. I still for the lif eof me can not figure out why they cling to HFS+. That filesystem has eaten more data than any filesystem I can think of. Shameful how they drag that out.

Re:Sierra with Siri

[Sycraft-fu]

I always wanted to choke MS's marketing group with their version names. There are, in my opinion, two acceptable methods of naming a product that continues to get new version:

1) Version numbers. You can have just one number or number.number whatever you like. You decide how to increment them. What matters is that you are consistent, and that the number is easy to find.

2) Version year. When you release a product it is named via whatever year it is released. Doesn't matter how much changed, it gets the release year in its name.

Either one works well for quickly mentally comparing how out of date something is, as well as being able to impress that on users. But it needs to stay consistent or it gets all confusing. You can't go numbers to years and back or things get all fucked up.

The XP and Vista crap is just totally stupid. Fuck off with that. How do I compare "Vista" to "XP"? They are both meaningless terms. It's as bad as Eclipse. No guys, I do NOT know the order of the Jovian moons, please just publish the version number and/or year clearly.