macOS Sierra preview: Goodbye OS X, hello Siri

The 15-year-old OS X (née Mac OS X) is now macOS, bringing its name into line with descendants iOS, watchOS and tvOS – and in tune with the California place-name theme for updates, it’s called macOS Sierra.

macOS Sierra will be hitting the Macs of everyone who can run it in autumn, probably around the time of the release of the next iPhone. For developers, though, it’s already here, giving the most important people in the Mac ecosystem a few months to ready their breaking apps and build new ones.

Recently, we’ve got used to a “tick-tock” approach to OS X. One year’s release would see major updates, while the next would be more of a consolidation, with few big features and plenty of fixes, tweaks and optimisations.

This year feels like a consolidation rather than a revolutionary change. There’s one major feature – the arrival of Siri on the Mac – and a large number of changes designed to keep pace with new features in iOS 10. There are also a few smaller changes, all of which add up to a decent if unspectacular update.

Of course, this is a developer release. Some things are broken, some things are missing in action, and everything needs a fair bit of fine-tuning. But even at this stage, we can still get a flavour of where Apple is taking its oldest existing operating system. So what’s in it, and how is it looking?
macOS review: Which Macs will be able to install macOS Sierra?
For the first time since 2012, Macs are being dropped from the lineup of supported models for a new release. To run Sierra, you’ll need any of the following products:

MacBook (late 2009 and later)

iMac (late 2009 and later)

MacBook Air (2010 and later)

MacBook Pro (2010 and later)

Mac mini (2010 and later)

Mac Pro (2010 and later)

If you’re using a Mac that was released prior to 2009, you won’t be able to use Sierra, and you’ll be stuck with OS X El Capitan. However, Apple has tended in the past to release security and driver updates for older operating systems for quite some time – it’s still supporting Mavericks, released in 2013 – so if you’re still using a seven-year-old machine, you can expect to squeeze a couple more years out of it yet.

READ NEXT: Apple iOS 10 review (hands-on): “Biggest update ever”? We don’t think so

Siri

The headline feature is the arrival of Siri on the Mac, five years after its first appearance on iPhone. If you’ve used Siri on iOS devices, then you know what to expect. Invoke Siri, either by clicking on an icon in the Dock or menu bar, or via a keyboard shortcut, and the familiar colourful sound-wave pattern appears.

You then use natural language to ask it a question, and Siri responds. The types of questions you can ask have been expanded for the Mac. For example, you can now ask something like: “find me all the files I worked on yesterday”, which will return all the files you opened yesterday. “Find me the latest football results”, also works, although at the moment Siri appears confused about which kind of football you want – “soccer”, or the American version. And, once you’ve completed your search, you can pin it to Notification Centre, so you can revisit it again.

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Occasionally, Siri is annoyingly literal. Ask it to search for news about iOS 10, and it will happily tell you that everything you need to know about Apple products is on Apple’s website. Yes, it probably is – but at least make the effort to find it for me.

However, Siri is definitely getting smarter about finding and delivering information. In addition to searching Bing for news, it can now also search Twitter, and it uses your account (with your permission) to personalise the results it gives you. This is the fruit of Apple’s acquisition of Topsy, the Twitter search and analytics company, and it’s highly welcome.

The biggest problem with Siri is nothing to do with the technology, as such: it’s simply that in an office environment, talking to your computer still feels a bit weird. The plus point is that it allows to you to more effectively multitask, looking up information without breaking your flow in whatever application you’re in.

One other strange thing: Spotlight search still exists, and it’s separate to Siri. And Spotlight doesn’t get any of the natural-language searches that Siri is capable of. Surely it’s time for Siri to work via typed commands too.

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Integration and iCloud

One of the consistent themes of recent OS X releases has been ever-tighter integration between the Mac, iOS and Apple’s services, and macOS Sierra takes this further. There are additional features that make those users with iOS and watchOS devices lives easier, and also extra features around iCloud.

Universal Clipboard and Auto Unlock

The first new feature – and one that made me go “hallelujah” when it was announced – is Universal Clipboard. What does this mean? Simply that when you copy something on your Mac, you’ll be able to instantly paste it into a document on your iPad or iPhone. You’ve been able to do this using clipboard managers such as Copied for some time now, but Universal Clipboard promises to be a little better integrated, if less powerful.

Like the Universal Clipboard, Auto Unlock is a fairly obvious idea that’s already been done by third-party applications. It’s also not present in this developer release, but the idea is that when you approach your Mac wearing an Apple Watch, your computer just signs you in, no password required.

iCloud Drive

The problem with iCloud storage has always been that it’s separate to the usual way the Mac stores things. Most users store their documents in one of two places: in the Documents folder, or on the Desktop (if they’re a little less organised). iCloud has always forced you to store things in a completely different place, the iCloud Drive.

Now, that’s changing. iCloud Drive still exists, and it’s still somewhere separate to your Documents and Desktop. But with Sierra, you can add those locations to what iCloud syncs across your devices, allowing you to work in a much more natural way. Once you’ve opted in, Desktop and Documents both appear under “iCloud” in the sidebar of every Finder window, and you use them just as you always have. It’s a big improvement.

Optimised storage

Historically, Apple has been somewhat miserly with its storage. Even today, several of its low-end laptops come with 128GB SSDs, which, which while adequate for some users, can quickly fill up, even if you’re storing music, movies and photos in the cloud.

Optimised Storage is an attempt to help ameliorate this in a sensible way. Essentially, it works like this: when your drive starts to fill up, it removes files you haven’t used in a while from your local drive, leaving a backup copy in the cloud instead. If you need to retrieve those files, they’re only a double-click away.

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There are two obvious problems with this approach. First, users have precisely zero control over this, other than to switch it on and off. You can’t do any kind of selective sync, which would allow you to choose files to always store locally. That important document you refer to once in a blue moon, but really need to have access to offline won’t be there when you need it.

The second flaw is simply that iCloud only gives you 5GB of storage for free by default, which means you have to pay extra if you want to make proper use of either Optimised Storage or iCloud Drive. Additional storage isn’t hugely expensive – one terabyte will cost you £7 per month. Given that premium that you’ll pay for a Mac in the first place, though, I’d love to see Apple at least match the internal storage of your Mac with iCloud Drive space.

Apple Pay on the web

Watch out PayPal, Apple is coming to get you. Apple Pay is going to be available to web developers, finally, allowing online stores to use it as a payment method for customers.

This won’t work using passwords. Instead, you’ll need to use either an Apple Watch or iPhone to authenticate the purchase. On an iPhone, this will mean using the fingerprint reader; on an Apple Watch, you just need to have the watch on your wrist and double-click the side button. It promises to be a smooth and secure experience.

However, what’s not clear at this point is whether Apple Pay will be usable on the web with browsers other than Safari. According to Apple’s documentation:

OS X v10.12 introduces the ApplePay JavaScript framework, which helps you incorporate Apple Pay directly into iOS and OS X Safari-based websites. When you support Apple Pay on your website, users can authorise payments using their iPhone or Apple Watch.

This certainly suggests Safari will be required. If so, this will be a disappointment to everyone who isn’t using Apple’s browser.

Apps

Increasingly over the past few years, new versions of OS X have concentrated on improving the applications bundled with the OS rather than the system itself. Sierra is no exception, with major and minor tweaks to the core apps.

Photos

Arguably the biggest addition in the Mac’s apps is Memories, which is a new feature in Photos. As with the version in iOS 10, Photos carries out smart image analysis to group together pictures into “memories”, based on location, faces and more. The idea is to resurface your best pictures, such as a set from your camping holiday to France last year, or a set of photos featuring a particular person.

I have to say that although this feature could be really good, at present it doesn’t really add up to much. The moments Photos surfaces don’t hang together particularly well. However, given that this feature is based on neural-network analysis of images, it should hopefully get better over time.

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Apple Music

Apple Music has been completely redesigned – but it still forms part of iTunes, which remains a behemoth of an application that people love to hate. iTunes still includes far too much, but given the complexity of revamping the app in its entirety, it’s probably too much to hope at this point in its lifecycle to see the entire thing disassembled.

However, the redesign of the Apple Music part is definitely welcome. There’s a new “For You” section, which makes it easier to find stuff you might like, and a “Browse” section, which shows you new releases and charts. Finally, it also incorporates lyrics into the mini-player.

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Notes and Messages

Apple’s bid to make Notes more powerful continues apace. In this release, it gains the ability (along with iOS 10) to share notes with other people, allowing them to collaboratively edit them. Also, it’s now possible to change the default font size.

Of course, Apple needed to update Messages to support all the features it introduced in the iOS 10 version, so you will be able to send and receive big emoji, as well as receive the new mini-sketches and animations.

Other changes

Picture-in-picture

Matching the feature introduced in iOS 9, macOS Sierra now lets you use picture-in-picture on videos that support the feature. This detaches the video from its host application and places it in a smaller window in the corner of your screen.

Not all applications support this. For example, YouTube in Safari doesn’t give you the option for picture-in-picture unless you use a bit of trickery, but when it does work it’s a handy little feature.

Tabs everywhere

There are a few more minor interface changes. The most notable is system-wide support for tabs in applications. Any app that has multiple windows can now “dock” them together as tabs, without any redevelopment required, as long as the app uses the default Mac window code. Some applications don’t do this, most notably Microsoft Office, so sadly tab support won’t be quite as universal as it should be.

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Developer features are now more open

One small but very welcome update is that Apple has now opened up many of the APIs previously reserved for Mac App Store applications to all developer-signed apps. This means CloudKit, iCloud Drive, iCloud Keychain, MapKit and push notifications are all available to developers who choose not to distribute via the App Store.

This is great news. Previously, these APIs were effectively being used by Apple to push developers towards using the App Store. There were solid user-centred reasons for this. By their very nature, apps delivered by the App Store are more likely to be secure than direct downloads, but it always felt wrong, as it effectively made non-App Store applications second-class citizens in the Mac universe.

However, there’s a caveat: the option to enable unsigned applications has been removed, so it’s now harder for end users to install anything not created by a registered Apple developer. There are ways around this, but the direction Apple is going is now clearer than ever: if you want to develop for the Mac, you need to sign your apps.

Final thoughts

macOS Sierra is an interestingly mixed selection of updates. The addition of Siri is a major new feature, but it doesn’t feel like something we’ve all been crying out for. Universal Clipboard, Auto Unlock and the improvements to iCloud Drive are all good, useful pieces of integration that strengthen the entire Apple ecosystem, and picture-in-picture is a handy “borrow” from iOS. Maps has been strengthened considerably, Photos gets the cute “Moments” feature, and the redesign of Apple Music will be welcome, but will leave those demanding a complete redesign of iTunes disappointed.

It’s all good stuff, and there’s nothing here to dislike – when you’re getting the update for free anyway, this is undoubtedly a good thing. And that leaves me pondering something: perhaps, when a company decides that it won’t charge customers for an update, the pressure is off to create “headline” features, the kind people would happily plunk down £99 for. Instead, the company can focus on nice-but-not-flashy features, tweaking the core of the OS so it’s more reliable and better for building apps on, and optimising for speed and ease of use.

The question that any review of an update seeks to answer is a simple one: should you, the user, upgrade? The answer for a couple of generations of Mac OS has been “yeah, why not?” And Sierra does nothing to change the pattern. If you have a compatible Mac, there’s no reason not to upgrade it, unless you’re using some no-longer-supported piece of software, which is likely to break.

You might not use Siri much, but having the option to do more with your Mac via voice is a good thing. The other features Apple has introduced won’t shake your world, but they will make your life a little easier. What more can you expect?