MacOS Sierra Beta | Hacker News Reader

MacOS Sierra Beta

developer.apple.com

40 pointsgregmolnar70 comments

I've been a Mac-only user for about 15 years now, and I'm teetering on the edge of abandoning the platform. A lot of technically-minded people I know are considering the same. The hardware is outdated, underperforming, and overpriced - and what's worse is Macs are now completely user-unservicable. So I'm weary when I read about an OS update nowadays (it used to be I was excited), because OS X has been getting slower and more tedious to work with for a long time now.

Metal: it's good that Metal exists, even though Apple has no ambitions to introduce performant or even recent graphics adapters into its PC products. Some people may even have wished for Metal adoption beyond Apple, but that's not happening. What's conspicuously missing from Sierra is Vulkan support, so gaming on the Mac is basically a prohibitively walled garden that can only be tackled economically by the big graphics engines (which have mostly ignored the platform) and pre-existing iOS developers.

Swift 3 and Apple Pay: this should not be an OS feature, or at least one that is featured as spots #2 and #3 on the bullet point list.

Picture in picture: in a better world, this would be a window management feature, but OS X is reducing its windowing capabilities in anticipation of a full merge with iOS, it seems. So this is going to be a specialized video component feature instead. Even on the screenshot they chose to show this off with, it's clear this is drastically worse than just lining up non-fullscreen windows side-by-side.

"..feature merge with iOS"

macOS is not becoming iOS ever, unless you mean apps being migrated over which I also find very hard to believe.

> macOS is not becoming iOS ever

I wish I had your confidence, but even if they keep the Mac line and name, the only UI improvements they have been championing lately are tablet-mode activities.

Sure I'll give you that the design is merging, but they are a single company; wouldn't you expect the design to merge. And I—as a software developer—would appreciate more platform convergence. (I'm looking at you SCNLayer). Though I am completely with you when it comes to feature stuff. I know their engineers work very hard but I wish they would spend time looking at some of their interface changes and really work extra hard to help non-techies "get" them. They seem to be doing that on iOS 10.

> wouldn't you expect the design to merge

It depends on what we're talking about. I would expect UI design elements to merge where the capabilities of devices are converging. That's not happening from the desktop since Apple is against desktop touch input; if anything the mobile side should be moving closer to desktop, but that's not happening either. I would also expect UI designs to be merging where innovation is concerned, say if they invested in better desktop/window manager UI, but in actuality all that is happening is the backporting of iOS ideas that are all centered on the fullscreen mode.

> I wish they would spend time looking at some of their interface changes and really work extra hard to help non-techies "get" them

In my experience that's not really a pain point. I have seen several of my clients adopt an OS X-only landscape in their offices (mostly non-technical people). I feel Apple is actually making heavy inroads in office and home use, but for many reasons is losing the support of technically-minded people who - at the risk of sounding self-absorbed - are early warning indicators that the base of the platform is withering significantly.

Well I think Apple made certain decisions when they started OS X all those years ago that they must now stick to. Like the http2 discussion from the other day. That will keep technically-minded people around. I still believe that macOS is the best machine for me to develop on. I see no close competitor for my work.

And—look—the way the desktop works is not going to be changing drastically any time soon. Their is not much to innovate on, so the obvious next step is to perfect every single interaction and to fine tune every single component of macOS (or Windows or any other OS) to make it faultless. That will keep me and many others around. (And keep trying to innovate and revolutionize in the backroom)

> I still believe that macOS is the best machine for me to develop on.

I'm inclined to agree, but we're starting to hit the zone where I feel I'm using a tool of questionable qualities because of lock-in and the absence of sane competitors. The Unreal Engine IDE runs at 10 fps on my current-gen iMac, an expensive machine based on 2010's hardware and no upgradeable parts that takes minutes to boot up into an increasingly DRM-plagued OS where all the innovation goes into iOS-like features I don't use.

> so the obvious next step is to perfect every single interaction and to fine tune every single component of macOS [...] to make it faultless

I disagree vehemently that this is what's going on. If that was the "problem", my (software) complaints would not exist.

I'm in a very similar situation with a 2013 iMac and UE4. Particularly when using any serious amounts of DebugDraw (such as when the EQS Testing Pawn is used) the performance drops like a stone. I'd get a new Mac, but there's nothing worth paying for, so I'll probably end up trying to get pci-passthrough working with a Windows VM on a Linux base machine.

Udo, that's fair. I agree. I work with Vulkan and Metal all day and sometimes I do wish things were quicker and I had more control over where resources get allocated.

I imagine like Iron Man where he can divert resources to his weapons from his thrusters and stuff. They do keep adding things that need to run when I wish I could selectively turn some things off.

A little off-topic, but what's your experience with Vulkan so far? Are you doing engine work?

I've personally been very impressed with Vulkan. I work with VR a lot and it's ability to streamline work over multiple cores has been great. I think Metal is a little easier to get started with but only because it uses the same binding model while Vulkan is very new. But overall it's been great.

PiP looks great. There's nothing stopping you from opening two browser windows side by side, but that's a huge pain. I don't want all the various other parts of the webpage showing, or to have to resize the window manually to just show the video. I just want to pop-out the video only. I love the feature on my iPad. I think when you try it, you may grow to appreciate it.

> PiP looks great.

For me at least, there is no way to look at that screenshot of a space-wasting yet partially occluded fullscreen app with an awkwardly-placed naked video component on top of it and say it "looks great".

> windows side by side, but that's a huge pain

Window positioning on OS X is a huge pain because literally no work has been done on this by Apple for many years now. Other OSes all have window snapping and other conveniences, but on OS X I need 3rd-party software for that. What's more is that PiP is a barely adequate specialized component from iOS. The more generalized desktop element would instead have allowed to "PiP" any window content I choose by essentially being an always-on-top decorator-less partial window. But the way they are presenting it is not going to be empowering for desktop users in any way. It's a thoughtlessly ported component from the more unpleasant corners of the Youtube iOS app.

There is window snapping in macOS, websearch for Sierra window snapping.

Very similiar feature in Opera desktop since 4 month now [1]. It works pretty good on Windows, Mac and Linux.

[1] http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/04/opera-beta-update...

I am using the public macOS and iOS betas. They are buggy.

Do not enroll in the macOS beta if you have your user account login linked to iCloud, as there have been documented problems with this. My wife still can't get in to her account on our Mac; I'm hoping they fix this in Public Beta 3.

All things considered, it probably wasn't worth enrolling in the betas. I don't want to risk messing up my devices by stepping back to production versions, so I'll just ride these out and get off the beta profile when the final versions are released in the fall.

Hopefully the public betas get more stable as we approach release time.

For me, the iOS betas have been fine since the first developer beta. I usually skip the OSX betas because they require use of the latest XCode which will not let me submit updates to the app store until closer to release.

Interesting to see the other side. I've always used the iOS betas and they've always had the usual expected bugs before say the last pre-release version, but with iOS 10, for the very first time I've found it to be really very usable. It does destroy your battery life like all betas - but it'll have so much debugging turned on and it is... well... beta! But yeah I'm loving iOS 10 (dev) beta as are my coworkers so much that we've put it on our personal phones and are really happy with everything but the battery life and the odd springboard crash every few days or so.

I've had opposite experience, prior betas were very usable, no issues, while iOS 10 has first weirdly notable bug in a "public" beta for me:

Certain Apple first party app background processes don't seem to be updating status as background tasks progress:

- App Store Updates tab doesn't show progress in the circles. Shows initial circle, appears frozen, until app is ready to open and moved to the recently updated section.

- Photos "Uploading n items" status doesn't update until changes to time stamp of when done updating or Now.

Leaving and coming back, force quitting, even rebooting, doesn't seem to cause these screens to update until background process is complete.

However, they are definitely progressing in the background as the tasks eventually finish, then screens update to show completed.

I may have spoke too soon. Yesterday I downloaded the latest iOS Public Beta (#3), and holy moly is it awesome! Super speedy, all the animations and transitions are zippy, and runs like a champ.

Still cautiously optimistic about macOS Sierra Public Beta. The latest update did fix the login issue. We'll see how it works otherwise.

iOS 10 Beta 4 so far has been near flawless on my iPhone 6s+, Beta 3 had some major battery life issues, but 4 seems to have fixed those, the phone phone seems to respond quicker than it ever has, I'm not sure if they've reduced the length of the animations or something along those lines, but it's quite impressive.

GPGTools (MailGPG etc) and rustc / cargo stable are broken with macOS Sierra.

Moreover there seem to be a few memory leaks. Finder eats up more and more RAM until it requires a force-relaunch. Unfortunately the same seems to be true for the kernel, which therefore requires a sporadic reboot. I also encountered the calendar notification service using 100% of the CPU a few times.

I'd wait for a later beta release or the final version.

What's broken about Rust? Can you file an issue :)

Looks like Safari is getting some much needed updates with extensions and the upcoming community engagement. Apple Pay in Safari will allow Apple to add another device type to its payment ecosystem. Overall Safari is getting stronger and is moving in the right direction to keep pace.

Still Apple Pay seems to be americo-centric with only supporting credit cards. In Europe SEPA wire transfers and direct debit is cheaper, safer and has a wider use-case (you can send money to any bank account).

The fact that there may be a better option than ApplePay for 517 million people in Europe... that doesn't on it's own seem like great evidence that ApplePay is "america-centric." The vast majority of the world does not live in Europe's SEPA area.

Disregarding the kind of payment, it does currently rely on NFC in terminals to work, and there are a lot of developed countries, e.g. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, that don't have that technology or don't support it. For example, South Korea does have the infrastructure for Apple Pay in many places (e.g. NFC enabled terminals) but their infrastructure isn't set up for it. Even beyond this, there's a lot of countries that support contactless card payment unlike the US, which makes using Apple Pay even less useful and limits its acceptance.

From what I've read the vast majority of Apple Pay payments are done in the US, so it's not unfair to call it "America-centric".

> Disregarding the kind of payment, it does rely on NFC in terminals to work

The point of Apple Pay in Safari is to move it to online transactions.

> Still Apple Pay seems to be americo-centric with only supporting credit cards

I don't understand - do you pay for everyday goods and services with wire transfers and direct debits? Because that's the use case of Apple Pay isn't it?

I'm not sure how anything could be quicker than a credit card. A normal contactless transaction from me taking my wallet out of my pocket to being done takes about two seconds. Apple Pay is no different except I take my phone out of my pocket instead of my wallet. Maybe Apple Pay by watch could be quicker?

For groceries: 50% cash, 50% debit cards or direct debit – they instantly score you and the content of your shopping cart and use the riskier but free direct debit if they trust you.

But most people have CCs now as well. It's the only sane option besides paypal and quite useful when traveling. I'm pretty sure though that a rather large percentage of CC users pay it within the month and avoid interest.

Direct debit may be free, but they pay me when I use a credit card, with cashback, so it's even better than free. (Of course I know I pay for processing fees in the overall price, but if I'm paying that anyway I should use the credit card).

Yes, debit card payments is who you'd buy everyday goods and services (e.g. the normal grocery shopping) in most of Europe. In Germany many people don't even own a credit card because debit cards fulfill that role already in everyday life.

But you can connect a debit card to Apple Pay as well. I do that.

I haven't used cash this year in London. Last year I've used an ATM 4 times to a total of 70£.

I pay for as little as 70p for water with Apple Pay.

"Much needed updates with extensions" in this case means killing their open development and deprecating extensions entirely in favor of native app extensions that are less capable but more salable.

Safari has definitely been lagging behind from a web developer's perspective. We have a lot more problems with Safari lately than other browsers. I hope it gets the love it deserves as being such a great product.

From a user perspective, Safari is way ahead of other browsers. Much better optimized CPU/memory use, which means everything stays snappier even with hundreds of open tabs, and my laptop battery lasts a lot longer.

No webrtc so I need to keep chrome around for calls. Super annoying

I'm a user and I find not having service worker support makes web pages load slower for me. Also, not having WebRTC makes it less useful as I have to change browsers to video chat with people online.

I believe this can't be understated. I keep bouncing out to Chrome and Firefox, and then back to Safari. Chrome burns CPU (and batteries) like it's going out of style, and Firefox just can't keep up in the performance space.

It's telling when hangouts in Safari takes up less CPU (and performs better) than in Chrome.

Regarding WebRTC: I've not run across any usecase which requires WebRTC to this day - everything I do with web-based communication is one to many, necessitating something like Google hangouts or Skype for video or audio, and Slack/Hipchat/IRC for IM.

Hangouts uses WebRTC in supported browsers, as does Slack IIRC. And Skype is adding support.

> From a user perspective, Safari is way ahead of other browsers.

Depends, I'm much more likely to have to go to Firefox because a site doesn't work on Safari than I am to go to Safari because something didn't work in Firefox.

I would like to keep all my work related sites in just Safari, but I can't.

Much better optimized CPU/memory use

It appears, however, that ClickToFlash doesn't work on Safari anymore: http://clicktoflash.com, and the general "ClickTo" plugins don't work: http://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/: "Due to Apple’s new development policies, version 3.2 is the final version of ClickToPlugin." That's a huge backwards step in usability IMO.

It appears, however, that ClickToFlash doesn't work on Safari anymore

You say that like it's a bad thing. But why does anyone need Flash anymore?

I would switch to Chrome (for its built-in Fash) when I used speedtest.net, but I just now tried and there's a beta version that runs just fine using Safari w/o Flash.

Are you using some legacy apps that are Flash? What's your need?

Meh. A bunch of silly gimmicks. Meanwhile, drag & drop still randomly breaks in Finder, using certain USB 3.0 devices on my mid 2012 MBP causes reproducible kernel panics and Mail.app occasionally crashes while downloading emails.

Maybe have some of the gimmick crew look at all those crash reports I keep sending instead?

Since there's no context, the news today is Beta 4.

The betas have been on a roughly 2 week release cycle.

This seems pretty underwhelming. Swift isn't even a platform feature. Metal is mostly useless for portable application developers, who probably wish it were Vulkan; and furthermore it may indicate that the quality of the OpenGL stack will degrade over time. Given how little time is actually spent entering payment details, I do it maybe once a month, I also don't see the point in Apple Pay on OS X except perhaps for completeness.

The deeper platform features, especially the new filesystem, are exciting primarily because they're replacing vastly outdated predecessors.

Anyone using the betas?

I'm thinking about installing the iOS 10 beta to my main phone but couldn't find any decent info on its stability for a daily driver. macOS is more dangerous anyway so I'd only get into iOS beta.

Don't do it. I had to revert back as it rendered the phone useless. It has so many bugs, that even simple things were not working properly (for instance if you have a group of applications and you want to open one, the first action that happens when you tap on the icon will change the mode to editing [when the icons are dancing and you can move/deleted them]).

I would wait for a while.

Running both, iOS 10 beta has been pretty stable mostly, much better than previous iOS betas, and Mac OS Sierra beta too. They're good enough for daily use but obviously not for any critical stuff.

I use it as a daily and it's fine. Occasional freezes (a few day a day) and very occasional crashes (once a week or so). 6s+.

I've been running Sierra, iOS 10, and watchOS 3 since the first beta. Battery life on iOS sucks if you use any apps that make heavy use of GPS, but it's not OMG UNUSABLE bad. Just annoying.

watchOS 3 is fantastic, like beta 1 was better than the release version of watchOS 2.

Have been using the iOS and MacOS betas since day one without a problem as my day to day devices. There are certainly bugs and crashes here and there but no deal breakers. However, I wouldn't recommend it for most anyone, since when things do break I can easily find work arounds, where the average person may not, and if compatibility for something you rely on breaks then you are out of luck if you don't have extra mac laptops or phones to work on. These betas are far more reliable than previous years. To note, you have a typo in your title. "macOS" is a thing, "MacOS" is not.

My general guideline for prerelease OSes is: don't install them on anything you need to actually work. If you have a spare device and want to mess around then go for it, but putting it on your primary phone is complete madness.

I've been using iOS 10 beta since Public Beta 1. Like others have said: mostly stable, with terrible battery life.

One thing particularly annoying for me is HTTP Proxy: it seems that as of Public Beta 2 setting it will cause the device flood the server with many requests. I'm using GlimmerBlocker and on the server side it'd get 1k+ threads almost instantly after I turned on the proxy setting on the iOS side.

Other annoying bug is WebKit View would lose width setting randomly in 3rd party apps (e.g., Reeder).

The latest beta ironed out a lot of interface bugs I was having, and the battery life is a bit better. But don't expect iOS9 battery life, because comparably it's atrocious. Par for beta course.

Don't install the beta. iOS 9 beta literally bricked iCloud backups on my iCloud account. I had to get Apple Engineering to wipe everything. Even deleting backups wouldn't fix it, it had to be cleaned up in the backend. Yuck.

The production iOS 9 cloud restore 'bricked' iCloud photo sync from my devices (iCloud Photo Library, not Photostream which was fine).

iCloud Photos wouldn't update on the devices because iOS 9 thought the devices were still restoring from backup. Apparently a known issue with tedious workarounds involving mounting phone as a drive.

iOS 10 beta fixed the issue (perhaps expectedly, as it wouldn't make sense to preserve a pending iOS 9 restore after update), and all the iCloud Photo Library syncs worked again.

I prefer as little interaction with Apple's data centers as possible, but that is the opposite of the direction MacOS is headed. A quick review of increasing number of web services I pay for each month makes for depressing reading and I see the handwriting on the wall... soon I'll be paying apple to view my files.

Looks like go(lang-1.6.3) is broken again in this beta, worked nice in beta 3.

Do you have a link to a discussion around this? A quick search of their GH issues as well as mailing lists didn't turn up anything.

Well, I have a go utility I use (Syncthing) that does not work anymore and the go compiler itself does not compile anymore (Xcode 8 beta 4 installed). Both worked fine in beta 3.

Google fixed go for Sierra recently, lets hope they do it again:

https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/24967/

Now there is an issue, even with a first hint of a fix (not tried yet)

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16570

Go 1.7-rc5 with a fix for macOS Sierra beta 4 is released [0], see also this issue [1]

[0] https://golang.org/dl/#go1.7rc5

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16579

Are there APIs for Apple Pay and PIP that would let Firefox integrate those features if they desire, or are those APIs locked down for Apple only?

Apple Pay: From https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/703/?time=9...: "You take an Apple Pay server URL, and this URL is provided from Safari. You send this URL to your web server, which then requests the merchant session." -> Seems like Safari only :/

PiP: From https://developer.apple.com/macos/: "And if you use a custom video player, it’s easy to add a Picture in Picture control using the JavaScript presentation mode API." -> Seems like it's possible for 3rd party browsers to implement it!

They have said that Apple Pay for the web would converge with window.Payment but atm they do not feel the spec is acceptable enough.

Not familiar with Apple APIs. Is that supposed to mean that they plan to eventually open up the API so that other browsers could implement it, or no?

No so the window.Payment[1] isn't in the right place yet—according to Apple—to be ready for their use. You can read more in [2]. So eventually ApplePay.js would (I presume based on their language) disappear to some extent and all browsers could use the Payments API and Apple wouldn't need their own custom solution.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-wg/2016...

I'm wondering myself if/how they're going to do that. There are a lot of iPhone users that use Windows.

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