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The Behind-the-Scenes Changes Found In MacOS High Sierra (arstechnica.com)
Apple officially announced macOS High Sierra at WWDC 2017 earlier this month. While the new OS doesn't feature a ton of user-visible improvements and is ultimately shaping up to be a low-key release, it does feature several behind-the-scenes changes that could help make it the most stable macOS update in years. Andrew Cunningham from Ars Technica has "browsed the dev docs and talked with Apple to get some more details of the update's foundational changes." Here are some excerpts from three key areas of the report: APFS
Like iOS 10.3, High Sierra will convert your boot drive to APFS when you first install it -- this will be true for all Macs that run High Sierra, regardless of whether they're equipped with an SSD, a spinning HDD, or a Fusion Drive setup. In the current beta installer, you're given an option to uncheck the APFS box (checked by default) before you start the install process, though that doesn't necessarily guarantee that it will survive in the final version. It's also not clear at this point if there are edge cases -- third-party SSDs, for instance -- that won't automatically be converted. But assuming that most people stick with the defaults and that most people don't crack their Macs open, most Mac users who do the upgrade are going to get the new filesystem.
HEVC and HEIF
All High Sierra Macs will pick up support for HEVC, but only very recent models will support any kind of hardware acceleration. This is important because playing HEVC streams, especially at high resolutions and bitrates, is a pretty hardware-intensive operation. HEVC playback can consume most of a CPU's processor cycles, and especially on slower dual-core laptop processors, smooth playback may be impossible altogether. Dedicated HEVC encode and decode blocks in CPUs and GPUs can handle the heavy lifting more efficiently, freeing up your CPU and greatly reducing power consumption, but HEVC's newness means that dedicated hardware isn't especially prevalent yet.
Metal 2
While both macOS and iOS still nominally support open, third-party APIs like OpenGL and OpenCL, it's clear that the company sees Metal as the way forward for graphics and GPU compute on its platforms. Apple's OpenGL support in macOS and iOS hasn't changed at all in years, and there are absolutely no signs that Apple plans to support Vulkan. But the API will enable some improvements for end users, too. People with newer GPUs should expect to benefit from some performance improvements, not just in games but in macOS itself; Apple says the entire WindowServer is now using Metal, which should improve the fluidity and consistency of transitions and animations within macOS; this can be a problem on Macs when you're pushing multiple monitors or using higher Retina scaling modes on, especially if you're using integrated graphics. Metal 2 is also the go-to API for supporting VR on macOS, something Apple is pushing in a big way with its newer iMacs and its native support for external Thunderbolt 3 GPU enclosures. Apple says that every device that supports Metal should support at least some of Metal 2's new features, but the implication there is that some older GPUs won't be able to do everything the newer ones can do.
Like iOS 10.3, High Sierra will convert your boot drive to APFS when you first install it -- this will be true for all Macs that run High Sierra, regardless of whether they're equipped with an SSD, a spinning HDD, or a Fusion Drive setup. In the current beta installer, you're given an option to uncheck the APFS box (checked by default) before you start the install process, though that doesn't necessarily guarantee that it will survive in the final version. It's also not clear at this point if there are edge cases -- third-party SSDs, for instance -- that won't automatically be converted. But assuming that most people stick with the defaults and that most people don't crack their Macs open, most Mac users who do the upgrade are going to get the new filesystem.
HEVC and HEIF
All High Sierra Macs will pick up support for HEVC, but only very recent models will support any kind of hardware acceleration. This is important because playing HEVC streams, especially at high resolutions and bitrates, is a pretty hardware-intensive operation. HEVC playback can consume most of a CPU's processor cycles, and especially on slower dual-core laptop processors, smooth playback may be impossible altogether. Dedicated HEVC encode and decode blocks in CPUs and GPUs can handle the heavy lifting more efficiently, freeing up your CPU and greatly reducing power consumption, but HEVC's newness means that dedicated hardware isn't especially prevalent yet.
Metal 2
While both macOS and iOS still nominally support open, third-party APIs like OpenGL and OpenCL, it's clear that the company sees Metal as the way forward for graphics and GPU compute on its platforms. Apple's OpenGL support in macOS and iOS hasn't changed at all in years, and there are absolutely no signs that Apple plans to support Vulkan. But the API will enable some improvements for end users, too. People with newer GPUs should expect to benefit from some performance improvements, not just in games but in macOS itself; Apple says the entire WindowServer is now using Metal, which should improve the fluidity and consistency of transitions and animations within macOS; this can be a problem on Macs when you're pushing multiple monitors or using higher Retina scaling modes on, especially if you're using integrated graphics. Metal 2 is also the go-to API for supporting VR on macOS, something Apple is pushing in a big way with its newer iMacs and its native support for external Thunderbolt 3 GPU enclosures. Apple says that every device that supports Metal should support at least some of Metal 2's new features, but the implication there is that some older GPUs won't be able to do everything the newer ones can do.
It seems like every other update of MacOS and Xcode break something big. I'm even thinking of migrating to a VB-based Hackintosh for my Mac needs just to be able to rollback bad updates.
I'm excited about the new file system. I've corrupted HFS so many times.. But I'm gonna wait several months until the critical bugs are sorted out before I go there.
... cool. That A Good Thing. Let's hope it continues. :)
it's clear that the company sees Metal as the way forward for graphics and GPU compute on its platforms.
No.... an Apple only proprietary graphics API is not the way forward. Vulkan is the way forward. It will be available on Windows, Linux, smartphones, BSD, everywhere... except Apple, apparently.
Metal is about vendor lockin, but they don't have enough of the total computing market to make that work out in their favour.
Replacing HFS with APFS brings a lot of new features similar to ZFS but it's also going towards the Android/iOS security model where the system and user data are separated and the system read-only without a root user anymore.
Although it will probably be trivial to break out, we're moving more towards commercial ecosystems that no longer will support tinkering with the OS.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The main problem with HEVC is the patent licensing. In order to use HEVC you need to get 3 different patent licenses from 3 different patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media).
There are some companies with HEVC patents, like Technicolor, which aren't in any patent pool so you also need to get a patent license from them. Technicolor says they have done this "to enable direct licensing" of their HEVC patents. Sounds convenient.
The patent licensing situation has reduced the x265 developers to begging the patent pools for better licensing terms. I recognise the x265 team is trying to make a buck but I think they'd be better off focusing on building an AV1 implementation than throwing their lot in with HEVC. HEVC's licensing is just not web friendly.
Luckily, the HEIF image format is content format agnostic (presentation and slides). In principle you could use HEIF with VP9 or with AV1. Apple may never support VP9 but I don't think they can avoid adding support for AV1 in future. AV1 will have too many advantages over HEVC (better performance, royalty-free licensing) to ignore.
I ran Sierra for some months... then eventually reformatted and went back to El Capitan.
Why?
First of all if you really need some high performance Macing, there's the iMac Pro coming out at the end of this year...
But I don't know why you are even asking where the Mac Pro is, since everyone who cares already knows it's coming after 2017.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'll say, as a game developer that has written a) OpenGL, b) Metal, and c) Vulkan renderers, I have no problems with Metal.
A year since "release" and Vulkan is still half baked - we're up to sub point release FIFTY ONE. Sit down and write the basic Vulkan code required to just cope with the swapchain and get back to me. In 2 weeks. It will make you self harm.
Metal is actually quite nice. They've hit a nice level of exposing power vs not making you have to fuck with every bloody register setting in the driver. The main problem is the Obj-C interface. Doing profiling and seeing how much time is eaten by obj_msgsend() will make you sad for a "high performance" API. But taking some time and making C++ shadow classes for some of this mitigates it.
It's now a year since Google featured Vulkan at IO and the Android situation is the typical cluster fuck. We've done the work, but have no intention of shipping until Qualcomm (Adreno) and the Mali people make drivers that aren't hot garbage.
Not an apple fanboy by any stretch (Want me to rant about xCode? Got a free week?) but uninformed people should stop constantly pushing for Vulkan without appreciating what a mess it is - especially on mobile. It will probably get there -- enough people are invested to make it happen. But it's not there yet.
We're only a 15 months past initial release, and the extension fiasco that is OpenGL is starting in Vulkan...
I really miss the glam metal of the late 80s-early 90s. Guys like Motley Crew, Twisted Sisters, Trixter, Black 'n Blue, Queensryche, Vixen, Ozzy, & so on
I don't own a Mac, but heck, if I'm getting METAL, it might be worth the price
While HEVC is probably going to be useful in the future, since it does offer good compression and the licensing is likely to get sorted one way or another, VP9 is useful NOW. Google will send you videos in VP9 format if it can since not only is VP9 Google's format, but it gets better per-bit quality than MP4/AVC. Well given that Youtube is, by far, the big name in video hosting for the 'net, makes sense to support it. On top of that, Netflix has started making use of it as well. They are the very biggest commercial streaming service. So between the two it is a massive amount of use.
I can't see why you'd want to add HEVC, which is brand new, still having licensing issues and thus has next to zero adoption before VP9 which is already a major force. I mean shit even Edge supports VP9 these days. Safari and IE are basically the only browsers that don't these days (and IE is deprecated).
I would DEFINITELY like to subscribe to your podcast, and listen to it backwards.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wall Street refers to Apple as a 'gadget maker.' They really only see the iPhone. Any other product lines are seen as side products. People in Wall Street look at Apple and basically consider the Apple Watch and the Macintosh as about the same thing: a side distraction for Apple.
Replacing HFS with APFS brings a lot of new features similar to ZFS but it's also going towards the Android/iOS security model
Sure that's fine and all but I don't think many users will see a difference, power or otherwise. It's just more secure for those that leave the locks in place.
To me the more interesting thing is, Apple is not phasing this in as an optional FS you can install, but instead going balls-out and making conversion the default option for every install! That means millions of Mac users when the upgrade (and historically most will in a short period of time) are all going to be converting the entire filesystem out from under the installer...
Tell me developers out there that your blood does not run cold at the thought of trying something like that at that scale...
Apple does have a bit of a leg up in that a lot of developers will try installing it first and they can shake out most of the edge cases that way, but still.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Jony is that way about the insides of the computer.
I don't think you understand, he's more like a robot that does what he is tasked with to obsession.
The guiding principal this time is "replicability". You wanted replaceability world? Well Ive is going to give you a computer you can replace individual pins on the CPU on if you desire, or think alternating silver and gold would simply look cooler.
Each fan blade of the 300 whisper quiet micro-fans will be detachable, each core of the CPU removable and lovingly polished for maximum throughput. In fact CPU and GPU cores will be interchangeable and you will be able to increase the instruction pipeline to whatever size you like.
I hope you all really wanted modularity because you are going to see so many modules your head will explode, not that the resulting mess would stick to the completely hydrophobic surfaces that make up the ten thousand case panels.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
support of metal doesn't mean you don't have to write Vulkan
Actually it does. It means you only need to support Metal and Direct3D and that covers every reliant consumer personal computer OS.
And what exactly are the advantages of Vulcan over Metal? No, really... serious question. Because just about every time I've seen an argument for Vulkan vs. Metal it's been all ideological purity, not technological superiority.
Does Vulkan have features that are missing in Metal (And Metal 2)? Is the performance better? Do they control patents that are being denied to Apple? If I don't care so much about free software, the GPL, and all that, but want to be able to use the better product, what's the BFD?
Imagine all the people...
Wall Street wives use iPhones.
>1. Siri everywhere! No thanks. It's helpful to turn speech-to-text when I'm driving two tons of car. If I'm at a computer, I have a keyboard. Don't get me wrong, good speech-to-text (and in reverse) is awesome when it helps somebody. But as an ordinary able-bodied computer user, I don't trust any corporation that is recording everything you say to their device.
I'm writing a book. It's technical so has quite a lot of mathematics in it, but also a lot of normal text. I'm using Latex. I figured it might be a good time to try speech input since I'll be doing it for 2 years and the technology has probably improved somewhat over the last 20 years. I tried every speech-to-text system available to me and it's hopeless. The attempts of the computer to hear jargon correctly are laughable. Trying to enter equations is a lost cause. There is no way known to mankind to get it to correctly put in $ instead of 'dollar' when I say dollar. I can type in equations 1000% times faster.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
One of the mild annoyances of using macOS/OS X is the littering of the dot underbar (i.e., "._foobar") files. Does this go away with APFS? Thanks in advance.
Also, does High Sierra fix any of the myriad of problems macOS has with mounting NFS? Have they added support for NFSv4 yet?
What about the Icon\r litering my git repos?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Sell me macOS to use on the Intel box of my choice or in a VM. Thanks!
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
And what exactly are the advantages of Vulcan over Metal? No, really... serious question.
Industry support. Vulkan will allow the same code to support every other major OS outside the Apple ecosystem, so will have 20X as many games as Metal ever will, not to mention better graphics drivers.
I've only noticed one difference since the 'upgrade'. The 'mark as junk' button in Mail.app has been replaced with a 'move to junk folder' button, which completely breaks if you have more than one email account, because you can no longer have a single spam folder, but have to instead use the junk folder on each mail server. It also breaks the custom rules that you can configure to run when an email is marked as junk. It provides no benefit at all (previously, hitting the 'mark as junk' button would move it to the junk folder if that was your default action for emails marked as junk) and breaks things. Apparently the Mail.app team is a deeply unhappy place. They seem to be taking every crappy misfeature from the awful iOS mail app and porting them, rather than actually improving anything.
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My problem is that I can't help but assume that the Danish screamo band gets 2/3rds of a cut, and Apple gets the other third
If that were true, then this would a a much better deal for the artists than pretty much any distribution mechanism other than CDBaby. I suspect that Apple's cut is actually a lot higher.
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Yes and no. Those ._foobar files don't appear on HFS+ either, they're only there for things like NFS or SMB shares or FAT filesystems that don't have the ability to store some of the metadata that Mac apps expect to work. The VFS layer transparently maps the metadata to and from these dot files when using a filesystem without the relevant metadata support. There are basically three solutions to this problem: silently lose the extra metadata (probably a bad idea), report an error to the program (which probably doesn't have handling for it) or store it somewhere else (which is ugly, but at least something that you can hide in the GUI). The ideal solution is for every (local and network) filesystem to support storing arbitrary metadata, but I don't know how we get from here to there.
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It's just a shame that your public don't spend. If you want to actually make money as a developer, Android isn't your target.
I've filed a bug report, provided a trace, sent them mechanisms for reproducing, and pointed to the pile of Apple user forum posts of people with the same issue. No fix yet.
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Done changes?!
What are you, a fucking Okie??
...as I understand it. It allows for software to work for both iOS and Mac platforms, which is especially important since the graphics on the iOS stuff is custom silicon. It would make more sense for Vulcan if the iOS stuff was running NVIDIA or AMD graphics... but it isn't.
Junk mail is organised in a hierarchy. There's a top level junk mail folder where you can see all your junk mail and it has a child junk mail folder for each mail account. Seems like the best of both worlds.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
I think that Apple does not want users to be able to run comparable benchmarks
But you can run Windows on a Mac.
8. Photos library! As a technically minded user of Apple products for many years, having lived through spotty transitions between iPhoto, Aperture and Photos, I don't trust Apple to curate my photo library at all. Instagram is better.
Dumbing down iPhoto into Photos by taking out user-designed folder organization was a change that has sold millions of copies of Adobe Lightroom.
Women become rampaging bull-dikes.
No, that's just because you're using your Mac at a university.
I was excited about APFS, but now I wonder if Apple will couple it to some technology only present in Apple SSD's.
I'm running a Samsung 850 Pro SSD in my 2012 MBP and it's awesome. But I can foresee Apple saying "how dare you use a Samsung product! No APFS for you!"
> I don't understand why Apple is resisting the Vulkan API
Because Apple suffers from Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome.
Sometimes they are correct, others times no.
If they would just fix their shitty OpenGL 4.5 support everyone would be happier instead of inventing yet-another-standard
Well, if it technically can't run on anything that's not a Mac running a recent version of macOS or iOS, I'd say Metal is technically deficient. Vulkan has the technical ability to run on pretty much anything non-Apple, and that limitation exists only because Apple won't adopt it; nobody but Apple can adopt Metal, so the situation for Vulkan can potentially improve (on top of already being a better situation to begin with) while the situation with Metal cannot.
Metal is what you do when you're the market leader, not when you're trying to gain market share.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Because:
1. My "friends and family" IT support role drops to basically 0 when those friends and family have Apple products.
2. As a nerd, I know good engineering when I see it.
Lots of nerds like Apple products. In my experience people who really understand technology have respect for Apple products & Apple's philosophy (even if it doesn't fit their needs).
The people who hate Apple, by and large, are tech wannabees who think that spending all day on stackoverflow to figure out how to print to a wireless printer makes them l33t or something. I find this group of people to be boring and stupid--and I'm glad that Apple doesn't try to appeal to them.
Except that it's stored on the mail server, whereas I want it stored locally inside my local items folder. I have a mail rule set up in the 'perform this action for junk mail' bit of the preferences dialog that moves all junk mail to this folder, and I've had that rule set up since Mail.app supported junk mail filtering (replacing a prior rule that dumped things there if they had the relevant SpamAssassin rules set). They've broken this functionality for no apparent reason, when the original behaviour worked fine.
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Half of what I hear about Vulkan is that it's an "industry-standard" dumpster fire; it came out considerably after Metal and DX12, and still reeks of half-baked thoughts rushed to market.
Were I calling the shots, I'd give Vulkan more time to polish out its issues.
For those that feel differently, there's even moltenvk which appears to layer Vulkan on top of Metal.
And, of course, many of the major graphics engines just abstract DirectX, Vulkan, Metal, and OpenGL away from the game developer anyway, so it's hard to see how it'll be a real issue.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Except that it's stored on the mail server, whereas I want it stored locally inside my local items folder.
Why the hell would you want to do that? Isn't the major point of recognizing junk mail (apart from the obvious of not seeing it in your incoming folder) to not download it onto your computer until you go to the SPAM folder and tell your mail client to download it )and moving it out of that SPAM folder in the process)?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Spam filtering locally requires that you download the mail. Doing it on the server (which is not what we're talking about) would mean that the learning would be separate. I keep an archive of spam so that I can quickly train new spam filters to know the difference between email I expect and email that I think is junk. The current implementation in Mail.app downloads the mail, runs it through my filter rules, and then stores it in the relevant local folder (so that I can read all of my mail offline). When I notice the spam filter has missed something, I used to hit the mark as spam button, at which point it would be moved from the current local folder to my local spam folder. I can do this offline, when I have no Internet connection. The new mechanism sends it back to the server from wherever it ended up.
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Spam filtering locally requires that you download the mail. Doing it on the server (which is not what we're talking about) would mean that the learning would be separate. I keep an archive of spam so that I can quickly train new spam filters to know the difference between email I expect and email that I think is junk.
So how do you put a "new SPAM filter" into Mail.app? Your argument makes less sense the more you go into the details. Just stop, okay?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Huh? I don't want to put a new spam filter into Mail.app (though new major releases in the past have come with rewritten spam filters, which benefit enormously from having a pool of spam available to train), but in the past I've moved spam filtering between multiple systems, which is why I want to keep a log of spam messages. That's largely irrelevant though: Mail.app has a system in preferences to determine the action when a mail is marked as spam. These rules work fine for mail that is automatically flagged as spam. Prior to Sierra, they worked fine for mail manually marked as spam. In Sierra, there is no mechanism for manually marking mail as spam and triggering these rules, instead the 'mark as spam' and 'run move to a spam folder which is not the one that I designated' actions are conflated into a single button and there is no mechanism for subsequently running the rules that I've defined for how to handle spam. This is a regression.
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