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The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. This isn't a crit

The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. I remember the 10.2-10.6 releases and just how significant they were and it feels like rearranging deck chairs in comparison nowadays.

aneidon 9y ago
Just to clarify, I’m very excited overall for the update, although of course it is lots of under-the-hood stuff. When I wrote biggest I meant the biggest feature I’m not sure will be launching with the update.
coldtea 9y ago
>This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. There's a whole new FS that went into production in something like 4-5 years (unheard of) among lots of over things...
- johnbellone 9y ago
  I am very skeptical of a new filesystem that is going out to users that fast. I haven’t tested the beta yet, but I would imagine we still have the option of using HFS+? Otherwise I’ll wait six months or more to even attempt it.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    I hear you, but the FS has been silently deployed to millions of iOS devices already, so I'd imagine it's pretty well tested for them to bet customer data on it. I also haven't had any issues with APFS on 10.13 beta, but I haven't used it in any fancy way yet.
  - lvillani 9y ago
    If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install. Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.
    - empyrical 9y ago
      If I'd like to stick with HFS+ for now, do I have the option to during the upgrade? I dual boot with Windows and I'm worried about something getting messed up and am not sure if there's a way to read APFS from Windows yet (I back up of course, but want to avoid potential issues)
      - eridius 9y ago
        There is not any way to read APFS from Windows.
      - empyrical 9y ago
        Update: I upgraded, and everything happened automatically. No option to opt out of APFS conversion so yeah, if that effects your workflow you should know that. Went without a hitch for me though!
  - cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
    You do have backups, right?
gradstudent 9y ago
I remember the first time I saw Spotlight. It was magic. Then came Expose. Wireless that worked. Sleep that worked. Trivial configuration of things like sshd, apache and samba. Amazing days. Lately I only upgrade when forced. I ran 10.8 until earlier this year when I finally upgraded my machine. Then I spent a week trying to figure out how the hell to get gdb working again because binaries now require code signing and there's this horrible new thing called System Integrity Protection that tries to protect me from myself. They also took away my Escape key and replaced it with this TouchBar nonsens just because I wanted an i7 CPU. To put this into perspective: I practically live inside vim.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  SIP is protecting you from rootkits. And it’s pretty trivial to turn off if you want to do that.
  - robert_foss 9y ago
    And from being productive!
    - acdha 9y ago
      Details? Unless you’re developing malware or low-level system extensions SIP should have no impact on day to day work.
      - qhwudbebd 9y ago
        It breaks all sorts of things, even the version of py2app that Apple themselves ship - but are too lazy to test or read bug reports about for year after year.
        acdha 9y ago
        “All sorts of things” is a broad statement to toss around without at least some links. I primarily work in python and had never even heard of the py2app issue since it’s not an incredibly common tool and most python developers I know use newer versions of python. That’s why I questioned the original broad claim: I know there are edge cases but most of the developers I know work on Macs and SIP just isn’t mentioned often enough for it to be anywhere near as bad in general as a few random commenters claim, not to mention that anyone I know who’s at all security savvy appreciates that it’s a trade off rather than a unilateral bad move.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wiredfool 9y ago
Snow Leopard was a boring release, but a very nice OS. This release feels like it might be similar.
- phamilton 9y ago
  Snow Leopard freed up something like 12 GB of space. I was impressed.
dkersten 9y ago
I've been finding the same with iOS updates lately. iOS 11 has some nice improvements, imho, but they're not any major advancements, just the usual incremental improvements. Could have just called it iOS 10.4 and be done with it. That wouldn't be PR-friendly enough though.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  If you have an iPad the iOS 11 update is huge. Being able to run two apps side-by-side with drag and drop supported across the system is a fundamental change to how you interact with stuff. The new dock and changes to the multitasking interface and behavior take some getting used to, but my iPad feels like a much more powerful device than it did a week ago.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    I do have an iPad on which I've been using the 11 beta for the past few months and I love the new multitasking support, but is it really big enough to warrant a major version bump? You already could run two apps side by side in iOS 10 (I was a pretty heavy user of that feature, which is incidentally also the primary reason I opted into the beta), it just wasn't quite as flexible. Drag and drop is new, for sure. I suppose I haven't used it much so haven't really noticed it. The dock seems like a small improvement over the old dock, added because of the better multitasking. They're great improvements for sure, but they still seem like incremental improvements to me.
    - wlesieutre 9y ago
      Everything Apple has done since iOS was first introduced (or arguably the initial iPad support in iOS 3.2 ) has been incremental improvements. But drag and drop is one of the bigger ones, IMO on-par with the initial multitasking support which incidentally was the update that finally convinced me to buy an iPad. For an example of where this smooths things out, I've been using Readdle's Documents as an approximation of a local filesystem for a while now. Saving an image to that before was tricky; iOS doesn't have a way to isolate an image out of a page, just copy or save to camera roll. So you could save to camera roll and then import it over, but you lose the filename in the process and replace it with something generic like "Image 10". Or you can do weird workarounds like using Workflow's "Get images from page", which pulls up a slideshow of all the images on the page, which you then get to scroll through and find the one you wanted. Now you just drag it and put it straight into the destination. You can also drag the URL bar over, which saves the URL as a new text file. And if I have data in Documents that I want to use elsewhere, there's no shenanigans required with piping it through share sheets, I just drag it out and use it. If you want something less permanent than a file manager, the popover multitasking is also a good platform for temporary "shelf" style data buckets. I'm currently trying Scrawl Pouch, but I've seen a couple others that looked equally nice. It's basically intended as a drag-and-drop destination to temporarily store any type of data until you want to drag it back out somewhere else. This can be the obvious stuff like images and links from Safari, PDFs and other files out of Documents. You can also drop things like map pins, which can be shared via messages or email or dropped as links into Pages documents. I haven't experimented a lot with 3rd party apps, but presumably we'll see this show up in other ecosystems, maybe dropping things like audio effects between a family of media creation tools, or someone could make a 3rd party service for sharing paintbrush presets that you could drop into Procreate. They've also brought in the "spring-loaded folders" behavior from Finder for this. If you're dragging a URL and you want to add it as a Safari bookmark, you can hover it over the sidebar button to pop it open and then navigate to the folder where you want to drop and save it. Or after the sidebar opens, you can hover over the Reading List tab to put it there instead of bookmarks. It's integrated like that throughout the entire OS. A whole lot of things that just weren't possible on iOS are now a 2-second interaction.

aneidon 9y ago

Just to clarify, I’m very excited overall for the update, although of course it is lots of under-the-hood stuff. When I wrote biggest I meant the biggest feature I’m not sure will be launching with the update.

coldtea 9y ago

>This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. There's a whole new FS that went into production in something like 4-5 years (unheard of) among lots of over things...

johnbellone 9y ago
I am very skeptical of a new filesystem that is going out to users that fast. I haven’t tested the beta yet, but I would imagine we still have the option of using HFS+? Otherwise I’ll wait six months or more to even attempt it.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  I hear you, but the FS has been silently deployed to millions of iOS devices already, so I'd imagine it's pretty well tested for them to bet customer data on it. I also haven't had any issues with APFS on 10.13 beta, but I haven't used it in any fancy way yet.
- lvillani 9y ago
  If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install. Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.
  - empyrical 9y ago
    If I'd like to stick with HFS+ for now, do I have the option to during the upgrade? I dual boot with Windows and I'm worried about something getting messed up and am not sure if there's a way to read APFS from Windows yet (I back up of course, but want to avoid potential issues)
    - eridius 9y ago
      There is not any way to read APFS from Windows.
    - empyrical 9y ago
      Update: I upgraded, and everything happened automatically. No option to opt out of APFS conversion so yeah, if that effects your workflow you should know that. Went without a hitch for me though!
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
  You do have backups, right?

gradstudent 9y ago

I remember the first time I saw Spotlight. It was magic. Then came Expose. Wireless that worked. Sleep that worked. Trivial configuration of things like sshd, apache and samba. Amazing days. Lately I only upgrade when forced. I ran 10.8 until earlier this year when I finally upgraded my machine. Then I spent a week trying to figure out how the hell to get gdb working again because binaries now require code signing and there's this horrible new thing called System Integrity Protection that tries to protect me from myself. They also took away my Escape key and replaced it with this TouchBar nonsens just because I wanted an i7 CPU. To put this into perspective: I practically live inside vim.

CodeWriter23 9y ago
SIP is protecting you from rootkits. And it’s pretty trivial to turn off if you want to do that.
- robert_foss 9y ago
  And from being productive!
  - acdha 9y ago
    Details? Unless you’re developing malware or low-level system extensions SIP should have no impact on day to day work.
    - qhwudbebd 9y ago
      It breaks all sorts of things, even the version of py2app that Apple themselves ship - but are too lazy to test or read bug reports about for year after year.
      - acdha 9y ago
        “All sorts of things” is a broad statement to toss around without at least some links. I primarily work in python and had never even heard of the py2app issue since it’s not an incredibly common tool and most python developers I know use newer versions of python. That’s why I questioned the original broad claim: I know there are edge cases but most of the developers I know work on Macs and SIP just isn’t mentioned often enough for it to be anywhere near as bad in general as a few random commenters claim, not to mention that anyone I know who’s at all security savvy appreciates that it’s a trade off rather than a unilateral bad move.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wiredfool 9y ago

Snow Leopard was a boring release, but a very nice OS. This release feels like it might be similar.

phamilton 9y ago
Snow Leopard freed up something like 12 GB of space. I was impressed.

dkersten 9y ago

I've been finding the same with iOS updates lately. iOS 11 has some nice improvements, imho, but they're not any major advancements, just the usual incremental improvements. Could have just called it iOS 10.4 and be done with it. That wouldn't be PR-friendly enough though.

wlesieutre 9y ago
If you have an iPad the iOS 11 update is huge. Being able to run two apps side-by-side with drag and drop supported across the system is a fundamental change to how you interact with stuff. The new dock and changes to the multitasking interface and behavior take some getting used to, but my iPad feels like a much more powerful device than it did a week ago.
- dkersten 9y ago
  I do have an iPad on which I've been using the 11 beta for the past few months and I love the new multitasking support, but is it really big enough to warrant a major version bump? You already could run two apps side by side in iOS 10 (I was a pretty heavy user of that feature, which is incidentally also the primary reason I opted into the beta), it just wasn't quite as flexible. Drag and drop is new, for sure. I suppose I haven't used it much so haven't really noticed it. The dock seems like a small improvement over the old dock, added because of the better multitasking. They're great improvements for sure, but they still seem like incremental improvements to me.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    Everything Apple has done since iOS was first introduced (or arguably the initial iPad support in iOS 3.2 ) has been incremental improvements. But drag and drop is one of the bigger ones, IMO on-par with the initial multitasking support which incidentally was the update that finally convinced me to buy an iPad. For an example of where this smooths things out, I've been using Readdle's Documents as an approximation of a local filesystem for a while now. Saving an image to that before was tricky; iOS doesn't have a way to isolate an image out of a page, just copy or save to camera roll. So you could save to camera roll and then import it over, but you lose the filename in the process and replace it with something generic like "Image 10". Or you can do weird workarounds like using Workflow's "Get images from page", which pulls up a slideshow of all the images on the page, which you then get to scroll through and find the one you wanted. Now you just drag it and put it straight into the destination. You can also drag the URL bar over, which saves the URL as a new text file. And if I have data in Documents that I want to use elsewhere, there's no shenanigans required with piping it through share sheets, I just drag it out and use it. If you want something less permanent than a file manager, the popover multitasking is also a good platform for temporary "shelf" style data buckets. I'm currently trying Scrawl Pouch, but I've seen a couple others that looked equally nice. It's basically intended as a drag-and-drop destination to temporarily store any type of data until you want to drag it back out somewhere else. This can be the obvious stuff like images and links from Safari, PDFs and other files out of Documents. You can also drop things like map pins, which can be shared via messages or email or dropped as links into Pages documents. I haven't experimented a lot with 3rd party apps, but presumably we'll see this show up in other ecosystems, maybe dropping things like audio effects between a family of media creation tools, or someone could make a 3rd party service for sharing paintbrush presets that you could drop into Procreate. They've also brought in the "spring-loaded folders" behavior from Finder for this. If you're dragging a URL and you want to add it as a Safari bookmark, you can hover it over the sidebar button to pop it open and then navigate to the folder where you want to drop and save it. Or after the sidebar opens, you can hover over the Reading List tab to put it there instead of bookmarks. It's integrated like that throughout the entire OS. A whole lot of things that just weren't possible on iOS are now a 2-second interaction.