A First Look At Apple's macOS Sierra

Final Words

By this point I've covered many of the tentpole features of macOS Sierra. Right now it's a bit difficult to test some of the other features announced at WWDC that relate to continuity between macOS, iOS, and watchOS due to the fact that all these platforms are in beta and, in the case of watchOS, a beta that you can't return from. Unfortunately, I feel that those features end up being the most interesting ones, because they're only made possible by Apple controlling the software and hardware stack across all their devices.

macOS Sierra has several tentpole features, with some being more subtle than others. Siri is the big feature for this release, but in my experience so far it certainly hasn't been the best. As the beta cycle moves onward it will be interesting to see how Siri improves. The improvements to Photos and iMessage are also significant, and for Photos it brings the service closer to parity with Google Photos. I think Apple could have tried harder with Messages, as you basically can't use any of the new features and just have support for receiving them. 

The features that I actually found most useful in Sierra are the subtle ones that improve existing functionality or add new features that work on their own in the background. Leveraging iCloud to provide local desktop and document syncing is exactly the kind of feature Apple should be building now that they have a usable cloud service and millions of users using millions of devices. Providing a way to have the system handle the transfer of older and lesser used files to iCloud will do a lot to alleviate storage pressure on Macs with 128GB and 256GB SSDs as well, which I would wager makes up a significant portion of Macs out there given what the starting storage tiers are. 

I think Apple choosing the name Sierra says a lot about this release. While OS X has been rebranded as macOS, Sierra is still an evolution of El Capitan, which was an evolution of the much larger overhaul that came with OS X Yosemite. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do wonder why certain parts of macOS like Finder and iTunes remain mostly unchanged with each release. It's possible that Apple doesn't feel there's anything that needs to be fixed there, and it's also possible that it's simply a large undertaking that just isn't ready. In any case, the trend is clearly toward making refinements to the existing system through new features like tab support in all multi-window apps, along with continuity features like Apple Pay and Auto Unlock on macOS that leverage the ability of Apple's many products to work together.

In the end, macOS Sierra seems to be a good improvement on OS X El Capitan. Users will feel right at home after they upgrade, and they'll be greeted with new features and small tweaks throughout the system that help make the experience better. If you've bought into Apple's device ecosystem you also get some features that don't really have any equivalent within Microsoft's or Google's device ecosystem, but that also means if you aren't fully within Apple's ecosystem you're missing out on a good chunk of Sierra's features. Sierra itself is fairly rough around the edges at this point, but it's available now as an open beta for users who want to want to install it and check out the new features for themselves.