Apple announced a new version of the software powering their Macs (v 10.13) last night at their WWDC 2017, alongside updates for tvOS and watchOS as well. The desktop OS being called macOS High Sierra, the update brings some great new features to the Mac. Here’s a quick look at them all.
Safari
- Apple says Safari has been improved by leaps and bounds for macOS High Sierra. Calling it the “World’s fastest desktop browser”, they claim that Safari is now “80% faster than Chrome”!
- Autoplay blocking has been built into Safari to stop those annoying pop-up videos from playing by default. Of course, you can choose to play it.
- Intelligent Tracking Prevention — Safari integrates into its code new Machine Learning algorithms to keep you safe online. Privacy protection has been enhanced across the software.
Mail:
- Better Search with Spotlight enables you to get search results faster inside of Mail app. Again, like Spotlight, Mail search now supports natural language.
- Mail on macOS High Sierra now supports full screen split view. Meaning that within Mail, you can open two windows that can go on split view (in full screen).
- Mail now uses 35% less disk space to store your content. Data management (attachments, repeat mails, etc) are in general managed more efficiently.
Photos:
- Better sorting in Photos gives you more intelligent groupings of photos from your library.
- Better facial recognition will allow Photos on macOS High Sierra to sort through your photos in a much more efficient way.
- Apple has brought in some incredible editing features to Photos. They claim to have introduced “Adobe Lightroom like tools”. More importantly, Photos now syncs seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop. So any changes you make ‘here’ will appear on ‘there,’ and vice-versa.
- Printed Books — Apple’s premium photo album printing service now opens to third-party players. Doesn’t matter much to us here in India, as the service isn’t available to us.
Data:
- Apple officially introduced the all new Apple File System (APFS) with macOS High Sierra. This new filing system is more safe and secure, highly responsive, and incredibly fast.
We have already done a detailed post about APFS, and you can read it by clicking here:
Everything You Need to Know About APFS
And last, but not the least…
Graphics:
- macOS High Sierra is seeing some incredible GPU enhancement with Metal 2, which is Apple’s specialised tool that handles graphics on their Mac devices.
- With Metal 2, Apple claims the new OS is capable of achieving “10 times improvement in rendering and display”.
- Machine Learning was a recurring theme throughout the event and it made an appearance here as well. Metal 2 is now capable of machine learning and allocate resources more efficiently to graphics as per user.
- Metal 2 also comes fully capable of handling VR.
When’s it coming out?
As of today, only the Developer Beta is available. Apple said that the Public Beta will come out later this month. The final public release will be in the fall, i.e., around September or October.
