from Hacker News

MacOS Sierra Beta

by gregmolnar on 8/1/16, 7:36 PM with 70 comments

• by Udo on 8/1/16, 9:22 PM

  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 The hardware is outdated, underperforming, and overpriced - and what's worse is Macs are now completely user-unservicable.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.

• by Haul4ss on 8/1/16, 8:33 PM

  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.

• by JulienSchmidt on 8/1/16, 8:54 PM

  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.

• by orky56 on 8/1/16, 8:19 PM

  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.

• by sdfjkl on 8/1/16, 8:56 PM

  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?

• by wlesieutre on 8/1/16, 8:16 PM

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

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

• by microcolonel on 8/1/16, 8:36 PM

  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.

• by eknkc on 8/1/16, 8:27 PM

  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.

• by rrggrr on 8/1/16, 9:17 PM

  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.

• by okket on 8/1/16, 8:30 PM

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

• by berberous on 8/1/16, 8:37 PM

  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?