Hello Fellow Technophiles,
As expected, Apple unveiled their new operating systems at this week’s Apple World Wide Developer Conference. There were also rumors that we would see hardware announcements, but this was not the case. The biggest change is that Apple will no longer be referring to the OS on the Mac as OS X. It will now be called macOS. This makes it conform with the other operating systems in the Apple family: iOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
The version of macOS that will be released in the the fall, 10.12, is nicknamed Sierra. The major change is that Siri, Apple’s voice activated assistant, is coming to the Mac for the first time. Siri will be able to find files, search the web, add items to your calendar and much more.
The next most interesting feature to me is the ability for the OS to automatically optimize your storage by automatically moving rarely used files to your iCloud drive. You will also have the option of setting your Desktop and Documents folders to automatically sync with iCloud. Additionally, it will remind you to delete installer files once a program is installed and will automatically remove “duplicate downloads, caches, logs, and other unnecessary stuff.” If you do upgrade to Sierra when it is first released, be sure to make local backups often. I am worried that something on my machine that Sierra decides is “unnecessary” is actually something that I will need. We will see how this goes in the fall.
See more details about all of the new features in Sierra here.
Apple also announced iOS 10, as well as updates to watchOS and tvOS, which we will cover in more detail in this Friday’s Kibbles & Bytes. If you just can’t wait, you can see all of the details at apple.com.
Thanks for reading!