Apple Announces macOS High Sierra | Hacker News Reader

Apple Announces macOS High Sierra

techcrunch.com

169 pointssalimmadjd167 comments

"Safari also now blocks auto-playing videos and will use machine learning to identify trackers and segregate the cross-site trackers so advertisers won’t be able to easily track you across sites."

Finally, I feel a corporation is using ML to project me, rather than sell me.

Apple products are more expensive, but you know the saying: if you're not paying, you are the product.

Safari is free.

Real, fully fledged Safari is only available on Apple Products

No, it is not. It's part of Mac OS, which is not free. There used to be a Windows version of Safari, but that was a long time ago.

I mean, macOS is free, so long as you are putting it on Apple hardware.

in the same way that ferrari engines are free.

If they build a better engine, do you get the new motor in a crate, or do you have to go to the vendor? You don't get it at all? So not the same way then.

Well actually if you are a Ferrari F1 engine customer you do get the engine improvements Ferrari makes and the engines do arrive in a crate. So if you are Haas F1 Team then yes, it is very similar. </smug>

So if I build my own Ferrari to spec (Hackintosh), Ferrari will provide an engine for free?

If you buy a Ferrari, yes.

So, no.

It is free like macOS is free, as in, it isn't. It is software that only runs on hardware created by that company: it would be like considering your embedded microwave control software free with the purchase of the microwave.

Safari for Windows is long gone if that's what you were thinking.

Its not free, but it could be less not free... there was a time you paid for new versions of OSX.

Not really, because in order to [easily] use Apple software, you must buy Apple hardware.

I think this is kinda misleading. Sure Safari is free, but is ONLY available on OSX/iOS which can only be obtained by purchasing apple devices. This is unlike Chrome, which is free for anyone, across any platform.

One of my coworkers once told me he preferred Apple products over any other vendor if only because he believes that by paying higher for apple products, he is paying for the privacy/security aspects of having his data secure and personal. I'm not sure how much this is true, but this datapoint does seem to confirm that theory.

Isn't Safari is available on Windows as well?

It was discontinued many years ago, but an old version is still available for download.

Though they didn't discontinue it to drive Mac sales, but because not enough Windows users were using it.

Firefox, Chrome and Microsoft's relentless pushing of Internet Explorer/Edge makes it hard to survive on that OS.

Well, they only made it in the first place so web developers could test their websites on Windows in a way that would verify compatibility with iOS and Mac. As Chrome (which is very similar to Safari, of course) and iOS came to be a very critical web deployment target, it was no longer needed. Safari for Windows wasn't built purely to have those users use Safari, nor was it discontinued to make people use Mac OS X: it existed so iOS and Mac OS X users would not be ignored by web developers running Windows.

Not for about 4 years I believe

Maybe your coworker should try installing Little Snitch and watch the attempted connections to apple servers.

I have Little Snitch, and there aren't any. Do you just assume this to be the case?

Some people assume, some have look into the logs. Maybe you should have a look what LS logs for you too.

For example: http://imgur.com/a/tBDrt

These are pre-login connections, and with the exception of Flux and Citrix Receiver, all the processes belongs to Apple. Why do they have to connect at all?

• akd is the AuthKit daemon, which among other things authenticates you to the App Store and to iCloud.

• captiveagent detects when you're on a captive-portal network, it does this by checking for known-content domains apple controls

• helpd is the daemon that connects to Apple's online help docs

• locationd powers location services

And so on. These are all easy to google. Come _on._ >:[

Really, easy to google? With "quality" answers, like these, full of guesses?

> Does anyone know what the nbagent process is?

> ...

> It appears to be something related to Software Update and/or the Mac App Store, so allowing it seems safe. I'd speculate that it showed up in the latest OS X update since I'd never seen it before today either, and the first google hits seem to appear only very recently.

Sorry, while honest good effort, that's not acceptable answer. And that's before we start investigating processes that do connect AFTER login - what the heck is "systemmigrationd"? (try googling that).

Sorry, but macOS regarding privacy is almost as bad, as Windows. It has many processes that connect somewhere, it is uncertain what these processes do, etc. How can someone even audit that?

Compare to CentOS/Fedora, where the only hit to internet during pre-login is either DNS or your configuration and all the other hits are user-initiated (except browsers, which do update their certification revocation list, unsafe-urls list, etc).

>> I have Little Snitch, and there aren't any. Do you just assume this to be the case?

So how does an Apple computer manage to do the following, without contacting Apple servers:

iCloud, iMessage, Apple software updates, Apple store?

Those are Apple services. Of course they require it. But non Apple connections don't get reported to Apple, unlike on some other OSes.

You mean the diagnostic info which has a yes/no dialog box on every install? Or the iCloud syncing which is specifically opt-in?

No, I mean the myriad of other connections that Apple processes do. For the sibling thread, I made this screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/tBDrt

Which of these are diagnostic (I said no to that dialog box on install) or iCloud syncing (which I don't use)?

Your coworker gets it :) It’s simply a matter of business models – you don’t even have to like Apple or think they’re lovely people (everyone I’ve met there has been).

Google’s business model is to digitise you and own that digital copy. They use this proxy of you to manipulate and exploit your behaviour for profit and to indirectly rent access to aspects of you to their customers (currently, advertisers).

Apple’s business model, on the other hand, is to make great tools and sell them to you at a price that makes them happy.

(So if you were to buy an Android phone and never use it, Google would be very unhappy. If you buy an Apple phone and never use it, Apple’s still made their profit.)

To cut a long story short, privacy is an absolute competitive advantage for Apple. It is a thing that they can compete on without breaking a sweat (as it doesn’t impact their bottom line negatively) whereas, if Google was to try, they would go bankrupt (as their business model depends on profiling you and violating your privacy).

All you need to understand to grok why Apple is protecting your privacy is that multibillion-dollar corporations don’t get an absolute competitive advantage over their main rivals everyday and – if you do find one – you’d have to be an absolute idiot to squander it. (And I don’t believe the folks at Apple are idiots.)

So yes, Apple’s systems are proprietary and closed, and no, you don’t have to love everything they do, but when it comes to protecting your privacy, all you need to do is trust that under our current system of capitalism, a publicly-traded corporation won’t act against the interests of its bottom line/the interests of their shareholders to squander an absolute competitive advantage against its main rival.

(PS. Longer term, I hope that we will radically alter the topology of technology so that we are not reliant on a handful of kings – benevolent or otherwise – to safeguard our rights. That’s what the Internet of People initiative we just launched with DiEM25 in Europe is all about: https://ar.al/notes/towards-an-internet-of-people-with-diem2...)

You have to* purchase an Apple product to use Safari.

*We're going to ignore the minuscule hackintosh community for a minute.

What a joke misapplication of that phrase. Apple doesn't shirk from making its users "the product" any more than the other big corps.

I believe the phrase is often used to define companies that sell users information to advertisers to generate the majority of their profit. How does Apple engage in this practice?

You're going to have to explain, since typically that phrase refers to the practice of selling user attention or data to third parties as your revenue source, which Apple does not do.

Can you give examples of Apple "making users the product"?

Honest question: What could ML provide for this use case over existing tracking protection extensions that use hard-coded block lists?

> Safari also now blocks auto-playing videos

That's the way it should be everywhere. Or, at the very least, there should be a visible user preference for it.

I totally agree with this. I hate auto-playing videos too. But I am curious what people's opinions are on youtube auto-playing. when I go to youtube or click on a youtube video, I kind of have the expectation that it will start playing for me when the page loads. What does everyone else think?

Maybe it will be possible to whitelist certain sites like Youtube, that would be useful. Even more useful if it did figure out that by itself.

Yes it is exactly that, and says so on the macOS High Sierra page. :)

On youtube.com sure. But most people's issue is with auto-playing embedded videos.

I never want this. I always want click-to-play

If the page is in focus yes. If I open 5 videos in new tabs no.

It would be interesting to know how they will distinguish between trackers and externally loaded libraries like jQuery. A blocked ajax.googleapis.com host or the like could potentially break a lot of sites.

I totally agree with you. Some people complain about Apple gear being more expensive, but I think you need to factor in that they leave other money on the table that they could make by selling our data and generally not pushing for privacy. I largely used Linux for two decades and finally switched back to Apple because I sufficiently trust them (and my workflow is a little bit more effective using osX and iOS).

I really appreciate this. I hate autoplaying videos on crappy sites. Does anybody here know any browser or extension in windows that disables autoplaying videos by default.

Apple adding native support for eGPUs is huge.

(Can't believe Microsoft missed a beat and didn't add an official eGPU dock to their Surface line. A couple people I know passed on the Surface Studio because it isn't powerful enough despite loving the hardware otherwise)

Technically it does - the Surface Book's "Performance Base" has a beefy NVIDIA GPU inside of it, while the rest of the main system, with an Intel GPU, is in the display portion - though I don't know what interface is used between the display and the base - is it "real" hot-pluggable PCI-Express, something proprietary, or Thunderbolt?

It's a proprietary port, yes.

But what's the underlying electrical and signal interface?

Documentation is a bit vague on it, but from what I can tell the last references to it are just USB3, USB2, and DisplayPort.

However I'm not sure how the GPU in my Surface Book fits into that, as on the surface according to Device Manager it's connected to a PCI bus.

edit: according to a few news sources, the version of SurfaceConnect (at least on the Book) does contain PCIe lanes for the GPU.

> Can't believe Microsoft missed a beat and didn't add an official eGPU dock to their Surface line.

This is also the only thing holding me back from getting a Surface Pro/Book/Laptop. Without Thunderbolt 3 + eGPU support, it's simply not possible to get decent graphics performance on these machines. It's such a shame because I love everything else about the Surface product line.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the Eve V as an alternative: http://eve-tech.com/product/

(I swear their site wasn't this obnoxious the last time I looked...)

I am absolutely betting that the eventual 5k “Cinema Display” has a built-in GPU. It’s not like Apple to make support for hardware markets they aren’t planning on competing in, and an enclosure is too hacky for Cupertino.

Is it really huge, though? They still don't support Vulkan or even OpenGL 4.2 (2011)

What are you even going to use that eGPU with other than installing Windows through bootcamp so you can actually make use of the hardware?

It's been pretty clear for a while that OpenGL on Macs is dead, and that it's "Metal or GTFO". If modern OpenGL is still a requirement for you, grit your teeth and choose Windows or Linux.

OpenGL is also dead on Windows for UWP applications. The only available option is via ANGLE or stay on Win32 until it gets kicked out.

Does this mean opengl is going to work on less and less platforms?

Are there real crosspolatform options left? Or are people going to rely more and more on things like Unity to capture that extra complexity?

With everything realistically heading towards lower level API's like DirectX 12, Vulkan and Metal I doubt many people are going to be rolling their own engines anymore. OpenGL and D3D11 made it fairly doable, but these new API's are more than most people will want to deal with.

Sure, you just use OpenGL or Vulkan and don't bother with UWP. You're shipping games on Steam anyway not the Microsoft Store. If for some weird reason you care about Windows Mobile then UWP still isn't useful because it doesn't support Windows Phone 8, which is the majority of the windows mobile marketshare.

Sure, but the industry is also moving behind Vulkan, not Metal, which OSX doesn't support either.

Apple seems to be playing this as if they are in a position of power when they aren't. OSX needs to be economically viable to develop for or people just won't bother. It's not iOS, they can't force something here.

I'm most certainly one of those people. I just kind of assumed it'd be supported and had to cancel my pre-order after realizing that wasn't the case.

Unfortunately, most Mac ports of games have lower performance (sometimes up to 50%) and less features than their Windows counterparts. Even A+ ports like CS:GO look different (some shaders disabled?) and don't feel nearly as good to play. I doubt these Metal eGPUs will be cross-platform. Unless you're using them for professional work, I think it will be better to just get something like the Akitio Node and use it in BootCamp.

...and XCode 9 beta seems to be available as well with refactoring support (finally). https://developer.apple.com/xcode/

Lots for ML, and their Accelerate framework is already second to none on the CPU. Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn't even bundle BLAS with their OS.

I don't know about geography but High Sierra was also the name of the 1985-era CD ROM data specification. Apple was a participant. Named (if Wikipedia is to be believed) after the High Sierra Hotel and Casino that hosted the working group.

That occurred to me too during the keynote. Memories of the days when installing a CD-ROM meant fiddling with a half dozen settings in CONFIG.SYS to ensure all the drivers loaded properly.

If you miss those days you can install a driver to get your camera working on a MacBook with Linux. It worked fine for me but took about an hour or so of fiddling: https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie

No mention of Vulkan? Is Apple determined to avoid supporting it?

Yes, they've announced Metal2 with VR support.

Vulkan might become the next OpenCL, with the focus being Android (7% devices as of today) and GNU/Linux thing.

All major game engines already support Metal, DX 12, NVN (the actual Switch main GX API) and LibGCM. Middleware is what counts, switching the graphics API on a compilation switch.

Apple just announced on the Keynote, Metal 2, Metal VR and updated Metal Compute, with the Window Manger being ported from OpenGL to Metal.

Also how ILM is now using Metal on their production pipelines.

It remains to be seen what will be shown later on the technical sessions.

Except OpenCL was more like Metal - designed by Apple, pushed by Apple, used by nobody.

The major game engines already support Vulkan, too, and Vulkan is getting far more game developer support than Metal is. A few of the major engines, like Source 2 & ID Tech 6, also chose to only support Vulkan and not DX12. Largely because DX12 requires Win10 which means out the gate you've eliminated half of your Windows gaming population compared to Vulkan.

Currently all signs point towards Vulkan edging out DX12 in the Windows gaming market. That could change, of course, but Microsoft making DX12 win10-only as well as the closed access preview thing have so far put it at a pretty large disadvantage vs. Vulkan in these early days. Which matters as otherwise the APIs are pretty much the same, so why go with the Win10-exclusive when you can have the exact same thing but everywhere?

Then for your content creation apps where unity/unreal middleware isn't really an option, that's going to be extra painful. Or they just ignore the problem and run OpenGL 4.1 on OSX and OpenGL 4.5+/Vulkan on Windows, and say "suck to all you pro consumers on mac, you should have bought a windows workstation instead"?

> Except OpenCL was more like Metal - designed by Apple, pushed by Apple, used by nobody.

Because Apple could not stand Khronos politics.

Also Apple isn't to blame Khronos could not make something as usable as CUDA.

Really. only now they start to care about C alternatives for GPGPU?!

> Currently all signs point towards Vulkan edging out DX12 in the Windows gaming market.

Vulkan and OpenGL don't work in UWP, which is the future of Windows application model, nor on XBox.

> Also Apple isn't to blame Khronos could not make something as usable as CUDA.

Apple is the one that developed OpenCL. Apple submitted OpenCL to Khronos. So if Apple isn't to blame then who is?

> Vulkan and OpenGL don't work in UWP, which is the future of Windows application model

It's only the future if applications adopt it. Which since it's win10 only there's no real chance of that happening anytime soon.

Keep in mind Steam is the dominate marketplace for gaming on Windows, not the Microsoft app store (followed by a few other stores - Origin, Battle.net, etc...). So what Microsoft wants to happen is pretty irrelevant to what will actually happen since nobody really cares about Microsoft's store.

> Vulkan and OpenGL don't work [...] on XBox.

Neither does DX12. Console devs aren't writing for UWP nor for Direct3D. UWP on xbox sounds like that old XNA thing - something for maybe indie devs but since indie devs now have a choice of engines to pick from they probably will care even less now than they did back when XNA was a thing.

> Apple is the one that developed OpenCL. Apple submitted OpenCL to Khronos. So if Apple isn't to blame then who is?

The Khronos group that wanted OpenCL to look something else than what Apple cared about.

When one is in minority, better leave.

> Which since it's win10 only there's no real chance of that happening anytime soon.

I remember hearing the same about DX 10/Vista, DX 11/Windows 7 and how GNU/Linux would save the world of gaming with SteamOS and here we are.

> Neither does DX12.

I guess you don't follow XBox SDK news, UWP is irrelevant in XBox context.

> I remember hearing the same about DX 10/Vista, DX 11/Windows 7

And DX 10 & 11 adoption took forever to happen. Those claims were completely accurate. The difference now is that Vulkan is actually good with good tools, debugging, and support (probably because it came out of AMD instead of Khronos), so DX12 brings nothing to the table other than reduced platform support including worse support on Windows. Particularly since both are massive breaking API changes, so you're basically starting from scratch anyway not just porting over your DX11 code to DX12.

I didn't claim GNU/Linux would save the world, so why are you trotting out that claim as if I did?

> I guess you don't follow XBox SDK news, UWP is irrelevant in XBox context.

Huh? I literally said "Console devs aren't writing for UWP nor for Direct3D." as the very next sentence. So I'm obviously aware of that, why are you pretending I'm not?

> I didn't claim GNU/Linux would save the world, so why are you trotting out that claim as if I did?

Because it is the only OS where Vulkan is actually relevant in practice.

Also Vulkan tools only look good to developers that never used graphical debugging tools outside OpenGL, specially in regarding to shader debugging and frame level information.

> Huh? I literally said "Console devs aren't writing for UWP nor for Direct3D." as the very next sentence. So I'm obviously aware of that, why are you pretending I'm not?

Because you reveal not knowing about DirectX, by mentioning Direct3D, which has died long time ago and then go on to compare UWP and DirectX 12 to XNA.

While what XBox game developers care about is XBox SDK, which already has support for DirectX 12.

> Because it is the only OS where Vulkan is actually relevant in practice.

Vulkan has a very strong presence on Windows, which is what I focused on entirely.

> Also Vulkan tools only look good to developers that never used graphical debugging tools outside OpenGL, specially in regarding to shader debugging and frame level information

RenderDoc, one of the major graphical debugging tools, has Vulkan support in addition to Direct3D 11 & 12 support. It seems you're just entirely oblivious of everything about vulkan...

> Because you reveal not knowing about DirectX, by mentioning Direct3D, which has died long time ago

Direct3D is the 3D graphics API of DirectX. It's not dead. If it was we wouldn't be having this discussion at all as Direct3D 12 wouldn't even exist. DirectX is more than just 3D graphics APIs - that's what D3D is. DirectX also includes Direct2D (not dead, either), DirectCompute for GPGPU, and XAudio2 for low-level audio access.

Most of DirectX, though, has died over the years - like DirectInput, DirectSound, and DirectSound3D. Direct3D & Direct2D/DirectWrite are largely the only parts of DirectX that matter anymore.

Apple's style has always been controlling everything from the lowest level to the highest level. They won't support other people's standards unless without a choice.

Anyone else able to pitch in on the JS performance claims? How honest is it?

https://webkit.org/blog/7536/jsc-loves-es6/ :)

Impressive results, and an even more impressive writeup. Thanks for linking.

Would be nice if this translated into real world apps and Apple allowed embedding new WebKit into native apps.

WKWebKit doesn't even support printing properly from 3rd party code.

Sadly Apple has no interest in helping developers make hybrid iOS apps. WKWebView and UIWebView will only give you headaches.

Mozillas tracker: https://arewefastyet.com

Hopefully it improves the Bluetooth support as on my 2013 rMBP it's really flaky. Unable to use my Magic Mouse and keyboard without getting annoyed by the constant disconnects.

Sounds great.

I think most of the Safari updates are as well in it's webkit js engine.

Although I'm really still confused why does Apple bounds their Safari browser with it's OS updates.

I will be very, very happy if I can receive up-to-date battery-savvy browser, without having to wait for a full-blown conference.

Apple are a bit old-school about releases, they seem to bundle all major updates together and only give security and minor updates to their previous releases, and they follow that for all of the software they provide.

This is how it has historically been for 90's and early 00's unix-like operating systems like *BSD and Solaris. A lot of things come bundled with the base so everything in the operating system's base release is updated with a new release of the kernel that comes bundled with it.

It's in Apple's interest to get everyone onto the latest macOS, so packaging app updates into the OS update helps accomplish that.

The counterpoint is that doing these releases means having to roll out 100 changes at once instead of trickling them out continuously

The reason people hate upgrading is half "losing features", half "everything breaks". Imagine if they rolled out changes continuously?

Yeah, Win 10 and Arch Linux are poster children for "everything just works".

well... Chrome updates all the time (version 50 now, can you believe it?)

I haven't used Win 10, but even Win 8 was pretty good for me (crashed less than Sierra + the new MBP).

I don't want even more updates to apply. It's a nuisance. And most of the time they don't make things better for me in any appreciable way.

... but you also get people like us fawning to find out 'whats next' and the associated big press hype that accompanies such an event..

They inconsistently support older OS's. The current Safari 10 runs on the previous release, "El Capitan".

Safari 11 will be available on Sierra as well.

Wonder how Steve Jobs would feel about all these Dad jokes becoming a part of Apple's brand.

Didn't Jobs once say taking LSD was "one of the most important things that ever happened" to him? I'm sure he'd be just fine with the weed jokes ;)

Sure, weed jokes — but the general "dadness" of the last few keynotes seems new and a bit weird.

I don't think it's every presenter though, just Federighi. He's been known as "the dad joke guy" for a while now. Personally, I kinda like it when each presenter has a distinct personality, it keeps it all from blurring together.

Will new APFS mean a beast of an upgrade as it changes my fs?

Considering it currently probably is HFS+, yes. Absolutely.

If you're on iOS 10.3, you've already been upgraded from HFS+ to APFS. I believe this was done for all iOS users without much notice.

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/ios-10-3-will-be-apple...

So to answer your question, maybe not so beastly.

This is about the macOS update. High Sierra is the first macOS release with APFS as default

Yes, I was just showing as an example of how seamlessly they were able to upgrade iOS devices to APFS.

It's a far more constrained (and typically, more frequently backed up) environment. I don't think it really answers the question of 'how is it going to work out on macOS'.

Of course not, but it shows that transparent in-place update should be possible.

iOS 10.3 was a hell of a test-run for case-sensitive filesystems.

On the Mac side, we've got potential case-insensitivity, so I believe the case-insensitive version of APFS is the upgrade to keep an eye on.

HFS+ was already case-sensitive on iOS.

Right, and case-insensitive is a harder problem to tackle.

It took about 45 minutes on my 2012 MacBook Pro with 256GB SSD.

The pitch meeting for that must have been something else.

Yeah, everyone's making a big deal out of the name. Is "Sierra" some sort of stoner reference I don't understand, or is it really just the fact that they put the word "High" in there? Is that really how grade-school we've all gotten?

I think it's half funny because of the 'high' and half funny because it's just a really lazy naming scheme.

How is it any different from the large cat naming theme?

It'd be fine if it were actually consistent and they picked different locations. But 'High Sierra' is a region, 'Yosemite' is a park in that region and 'El Capitan' is a large rock in that park (side note...a large rock that was climbed without ropes this weekend...Alex Honnold is both insane and a huge inspiration). They've essentially made the last three releases about the same place. It's lazy and inconsistent. And it's not like there's a shortage of exquisite places in California. Big Sur, Shasta, Lassen, Mendocino, Lost Coast, San Simeon, Joshua Tree, Catalina, Monterrey Bay...just off the top of my head, I've named 9 better California places that they could have used for their releases.

It'd also be kinda funny for them to jab at Microsoft's advertising and have an OS X Mojave, since it would fit with their naming scheme.

Some of those names I recognise from other IT-related products (Mendocino, Catalina, Monterey...). Generally speaking, naming products after CA landmarks has been done for 30+ years in this industry, it just feels very unoriginal. I think it's a desperate attempt from Apple to remind you (or themselves) that they "design in California", despite manufacturing in China, selling in Europe, and stashing profits in Bermuda; and to suggest the OS is "hard as a rock", as opposed to the wobbly and airy "windows".

I very much preferred the big-cats theme. It humanised the OS in powerful ways, making it an extremely powerful and very intelligent animal that dominates through speed and elegance. Rocks are just dumb and static.

Advocate here; rocks are quite dynamic on geologic timescales. Also, I don't think it really makes sense to call them dumb, as that is a quality one would apply to something with a central nervous system and capacity to self-identify in conjunction with capacity for intelligence.

We know that rocks don't have a CNS; if they can self-identify the mechanism for this and their experience is obviously quite alien to our own so it doesn't make much sense to project human qualities onto them without more information.

It is true that the qualities of rocks are quite different than those of large felines.

Place > Park > Region seems pretty consistent to me, shows a sense of relationship between the different versions and that they are closely linked together rather than being entirely different

It's in keeping with their "Tick-Tock" naming since Snow Leopard:

Leopard (Tick) -> SnowLeopard (Tock)

Lion -> Mountain Lion

Mavericks -> ...(uuhhh...whoops?)

Yosemite -> El Capitan

Sierra -> High Sierra

Mavericks was a work-in-progress shitshow of a release, that's probably why it never got a "tock". Apple was keen to let people forget.

I think they missed a trick by not naming Mavericks as Los Gatos, which is a suburb quite close to Cupertino and has some connections to Apple.

Los Gatos translates as "The Cats" so it seems like it would have been a nice way to end the big cat naming scheme.

And put a suburb photo on a wallpaper?

Imagine it: http://www.mijusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Los-Gatos.j... :D

Mavericks was when OS X/macOS became free (as in no $$ to update to.)

It's a dead horse of a running joke that C-Fed's been flogging for the past few WWDCs

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033717/

No it's actually an entire region in E. California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecology_of_the_Sierra_Nevada

I hate how Apple's utilization of these public domain names hijacks the search results for them... Now Sierra will forever be associated with a crappy OS.

The background photo of Mac HighSierra I would reckon is probably somewhere along the 395 Corridor, probably June Lakes.

Two things if I may say: for one, Sierra being 'crappy OS' is extremely personal point of view, such as mine, when I think it's a best OS for desktop computers available to date. Second, I really think Sierra 'as in the mountains' is going to outlive Sierra 'as in the macOS iteration'. I've far more faith in the mountain being there long after humanity, not to mention some OS from 21st century ;)

if you read, i caveated it in the context of "search results"

There is also Siera On-Line as in the guys who made King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory etc., giving us the first age of PC dominance in computer gaming...

There's a few... It's called High Sierra, the guy on stage made a joke about this OS being "fully baked" and this is the first major release of macos that recreational pot has been enacted in California.

Part of the joy (for some people) of the keynote is Hair Force One's Dad Jokes™. It's never been high-brow, nor is there any attempt at it.

I'm going to hold out for High Sierra Plus.

Plus

Woah Woah .. how does one get a VR headset to run on a Mac? Are they referring to a macbook pro and Oculus?

The demo was a Vive.

Metal VR and Valve support.

Auto video-blocking and tracking blocking built in is huge.

"It's all about deep technologies which are the foundation for new technologies".

What an utterly pointless statement.

APFS don't support compression like HFS+ ?

During the 2016 talk on APFS they mentioned it was dropped for various reasons. SSD performance is so ridiculous now that the CPU can't decompress quickly enough, so it'd impair performance. The new notebooks and desktops do 3GB/s read/write, so that's a lot to crunch through in real-time.

I'd suppose if compression is imporatant, do it in your application.

Transparent compression on FS level is really usefull. HFS+ had that, and all modern FS have that. Be able to compress 1M text files of source code for example.

I'm not sure the compressibility of files is really a factor these days. The largest files on your disk are probably either application software and associated libraries or some kind of media files which are already compressed.

Not many people have a meaningful amount of raw text files sitting around on their system, and those that do can always create a compressed volume if they're so adamant about them being transparently compressed.

Compression is worth it if it saves even a GB on a 128 SSD, or a few hundred MB on a 16GB iPhone.

In an alternate universe where all Macs come with at least 512GB storage, things might be different.

Footnote: Apple still sells 16GB devices: http://www.amazon.in/Apple-iPhone-5s-Space-Grey/dp/B00FXLC9V...

All new devices are 32GB+, so it's less and less of a concern each day, plus the sorts of media files that tend to clog up these devices (photos, video, music) are inherently incompressible.

For 95% of users the space gains from compression in APFS are pretty much irrelevant.

But you can't create a compressed volume with APFS, that's the point isn't it?

You can create a compressed HFS+ volume that's stored on APFS if this is so critically important to you. Otherwise, deal.

Thanks for sharing Apple's rationale, but I disagree. The bottleneck is space, not speed, of SSDs. Few people need a GB per second of read or write more than they need space. If compression gives me even a GB of extra space on a 128GB SSD, I'd take it.

In fact, a 7200RPM hard disc is adequate for me.

I would respectfully argue that you perhaps are the outlier, rather than the people who want more speed out of their direct-attached storage.

Disk speed was the most significant performance bottleneck for years — a point that Apple has repeatedly made in their developer guidelines on performance[1].

I think this is (happily) starting to be less of a concern with these new SSDs capable of 2GB-3GB/second. The 1TB SSD in my 2013 Mac Pro benchmarks at 1GB/sec and I find doubling/tripling that an extremely attractive proposition.

Other than offline backups and archiving systems, I literally haven't used a spinning-magnetic-media storage device since 2013 (and avoided them when possible before that). And I definitely don't plan to ever do so again.

[1]: e.g. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Pe...

I wonder if this is a divide between geeks / power users / developers on one hand, who want more speed, and average users, who want more space. Every time someone talks about speed, that statement comes from a geek. By contrast, I have heard non-technical people complain about insufficient space on their 128GB Macbooks, but not about the speed. Maybe my sample size isn't big enough. I don't know.

When you said that people want more speed out of their storage, sure, we all want it in the abstract, but did you mean even at the cost of having less space for a higher price?

My iMac's Fusion Drive failed, in the sense of not using the SSD at all, and I didn't notice much difference except in specific situations, like booting, app startup and swapping. On the whole, I wasn't any less productive or more irritated with a hard disc. A small screen, a slower Internet connection and having to move data back and forth to external hard discs are a bigger pain for me than the speed of a hard disc, assuming it's 7200 RPM.

You're in the minority and that minority is shrinking. APFS isn't being designed for HDDs, support for them is more of a concession than a concern, as the future is, clearly, SSD or better.

SSDs already have higher capacities than any HDD, and soon their price will drop down to parity and then below as SSD gains continue to outpace those in the HDD domain.

We're in the transition period here where, for the next few years, SSD space will still be at a premium vs. HDD. Beyond that the SSD will offer vastly more storage than you could possibly need at a cost you can afford.

In the interim if compression gives you an extra GB of space then make a compressed volume and mount that. It's fully under your control.

Maybe you're right that in a few years, I'll be able to buy a 6TB SSD for the $200 I'd pay for a hard disc today, but speaking as a user about to buy a computer, I want one that works great today. Which means worrying less about filling up my paltry 128GB SSD.

The other, non-technical, solution is for Apple to make 512GB SSDs standard :) But Apple is going in the other direction, introducing a 128GB SSD.

I still maintain that even I can come up with a better naming scheme than "places in California you've never heard of."

https://medium.com/@nathanstocks/dear-apple-your-naming-sche...

Can anyone confirm that they finally fixed the bug prevents an ethernet connected computer from becoming a hotspot?

slightly off topic but we should have alternates lik puri.sm guys. if the privacy is quite important at this age, their slick linux hardware woth to look at it.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science..

Off topic: can I just say how much I hate TechCrunch articles? Clearly poorly and hastily written, with grammar issues, calling HEVC a "container" format, and WTF is a "Thunderbolt 3 enclosure" when it comes to external graphics cards? Like I get it, first to market wins the ad clicks, but come on. Do we have to keep upvoting this crap on HN?

A Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for External GPUs is exactly what it sounds like: A GPU that sits external to your computer, and connects to it via Thunderbolt 3.

It's hardly TC's fault you don't know what that is. Just Google it.

I know what an external GPU is. But the external graphics aren't powered by an external GPU "enclosure". They are powered by an external GPU.

The external GPU is in an enclosure and that enclosure doesn't have to have a GPU in it. Most of the Thunderbolt 3 to PCIe enclosures support other PCIe devices.

Exactly. You can put whatever you want in it, but the only thing that people would want to, generally speaking, is a GPU.

Think of a small case with a power supply unit and a single PCEe slot inside. You plug any regular (internal) video card of your choice in it, and connect the case to the main computer via TB3, making the video card available as an external video card. That's a TB enclosure. These things has been for awhile, at least since TB came out.

It's not called eGPU enclosure because technically it can contain any other PCIe card, though it is almost exclusively used for video cards as other devices usually can be powered by TB cable itself.

Thunderbolt 3 enclosure for eGPU sounds like a PCIe slot in a box that you connect with TB3.

> "WTF is a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure"

come on now

Really inspired OS names Apple's got these days...

I mean if they're going for geographical places in California, why not "macOS Sierra Nevada" ?

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