Everything you need to know about macOS High Sierra
Wait no more, the new macOS is finally here. And it's getting high.
Apple unveiled the latest version of its Mac operating system at the June 5 WWDC in San Jose, California, and there are plenty of updates to get excited about.
Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, told the crowd of gathered developers that the new macOS is the "fully baked" High Sierra.
He went on to address all the new updates and refinements coming with High Sierra, starting with the Safari web browser. The big news is that it will now come complete with auto-play blocking. That means the High Sierra native browser will stop videos from playing as soon as you open up a new web page.
Federighi also addressed privacy concerns, saying that "Intelligent Tracking Prevention" will come standard in the latest version of Safari. He clarified that this is not an ad blocker, which Google is planning to add to its Crome browser, but rather works to increase users' privacy as they surf around the web.
Mail also got some updates, with Federighi noting that search in Mail now uses Spotlight. What's more, there's now an option for full-screen split view in Mail. Oh, and Federighi also gleefully explained that going forward "Mail [will use] 35 percent less disc space for storing you mail."
Photos also got a big update, with the addition of neural networks capable of identifying and recognizing the faces of friends and family in your pics — which will then be synced across your devices. There's also a bunch of new editing tools inside of photos, and 3rd parties are going to offer printing services for photo books straight from Photos.
Apple Files System is coming to High Sierra as the new default file management system, hopefully making that pesky task of managing your files just a bit easier. Notably, AFS has built-in crash protection, and native encryption.
High Sierra is moving beyond the current video-compression standard of H.264 to a new standard of H.265. H.265 supports 4K, and is said to have 40 percent better compression than 264. This is a huge win for people with reams of video hoarding space on their hard drives.
Federighi dropped a new version of Metal, known as Metal 2, noting that "Metal is not just about graphics, we're also using it for machine learning." Metal 2 can now be used for external graphics, as well as for virtual reality.
In a nod to the gamers in the audience, Federighi announced both that Steam VR is coming to the Mac and that Unity and Unreal are bringing their engines to High Sierra.
MacOS High Sierra is available today as a developer beta, with a public beta coming later this month. It will be available to everyone later this fall.
