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.
macOS is not becoming iOS ever, unless you mean apps being migrated over which I also find very hard to believe.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/04/opera-beta-update...
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.
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.
Still cautiously optimistic about macOS Sierra Public Beta. The latest update did fix the login issue. We'll see how it works otherwise.
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.
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?
I pay for as little as 70p for water with Apple Pay.
Maybe have some of the gimmick crew look at all those crash reports I keep sending instead?
The betas have been on a roughly 2 week release cycle.
The deeper platform features, especially the new filesystem, are exciting primarily because they're replacing vastly outdated predecessors.
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.
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).
I would wait for a while.
watchOS 3 is fantastic, like beta 1 was better than the release version of watchOS 2.
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.
Google fixed go for Sierra recently, lets hope they do it again:
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!
