Splendid recap. Apple's new AFS file system will bec something to take into consideration, I always liked how thryv used their best efforts to optimize speed and software into their OS.
Uhm… What do you mean? I'm 37 and I use emojis quite a lot. :-| Not that it's a big deal, but the emojis was a bit small in Messeges previously, so it's good they're increasing the size.
The new file system and improved Metal features seems cool. And that ”tabs” feature which seems to work even for current applications (not sure how, but that's what was said in the keynote).
Exactly. using emojis is all fine and great.. using emojis as a bullet point on what has improved with a new OS? Laughable. Alot of other things borrowed from other OS's too. From all appearances the biggest innovation on the iPhone 7 will be the deep blue color. With that said, the deep blue iPhones leaked online look really nice. But its just looks.
It's distasteful to Western eyes, but in Japan Line is huge just because of such features: they make so much money on “stickers” and other stuff that they have their own stores in malls. This is geared towards their markets in China and the rest of Asia.
But they didn't make a too big deal of the bigger emojis I think.
”To me the whole WWDC announcement stream was a big MEH.”
While not exactly awed I wouldn't say it was ”meh”, but it felt much more consumer focused than previous WWDC keynotes. Not much geeky ”under the hood” stuff mentioned like the new filesystem for macOS and the improvements to Metal. There's probably more new stuff… I'm glad Anandtech highlights the more technical aspects.
”Apple of 2016 has become the Apple of 1996. Slow and tired.”
Is it really that bad you think? Well, on the computer hardware side of things Apple feels slow nowadays – I agree on that.
Nothing earth-shattering here. I was more interested in hearing about any new Macbook Pros on the horizon. They seemed to spend (to me at least) more time on emojis and Mini mouse than on the new version of Xcode). It's a developer conference. Spend a bit more time on things that developers will really care about such as Xcode and integration APIs between macOS and iOS.
I liked the discussion on Maps update. I'm guessing that Siri will be even more integrated with maps where a user can speak to Siri and say something like: What is the best route to work today? or Locate nearby coffee shops. They didn't provide an example of that during the Keynote.
Well said. The Maps API opening was the only interesting thing for me.
Even the "Free Swift Playgroungs" felt like a last ditch effort to stop the declining sales of the overpriced iPad line.
I'm all for kids leaning through play the basics of coding, but I don't think Swift playgrounds is the solution for it and I have no confidence in Apple actually maintaining it and keeping it useful for more than 6-12 months.
Listen up, you morons. The point of the WWDC KEYNOTE is to be a PUBLIC announcement of Apple's new software features. It is NOT meant to be a product announcement arena. It is also not meant to be an announcement of technical details --- what do you think the rest of WWDC is for?
If you actually cared about learning what is new in OSX at the technical level, read the damn docs:
What I see that's interesting, at a low level, for example, is a new logging framework and some interesting security work to make "partially signed" code more robust. There's probably less to talk about at the absolute lowest levels of macOS because - much of that work is going into the new file system - much of that work is (my guess) going into modernizing frameworks for the new Swift. (Not just the Swift 3 cleanups being announced at WWDC, but conceptual ideas around how Swift 4 is going to handle concurrency) - much of that work is going onto tie all four Apple code bases together, both in the sense of interoperation (Continuity and such like), and in the sense of trying to grow the common code base and shrink the device specific code bases as much as possible - users have been grumbling for about two years that they wanted a macOS with fewer new features and a year taken off to fix bugs. Apple seems to have largely done that. So WTF is the complaint about --- this was certainly what I wanted, and some of the other release notes (like the AppKit notes) testify to substantial bug fixing.
Always enjoy your articles, especially the full reviews that dig into all the details.
I would be extremely interested in an article about the next gen file systems, comparing ZFS/ReFS/APFS (when more info on it is out) and possibly a primer on how NTFS/HFS+ compare and why we need a new generation.
File systems are some of the most important, and least widely understood, aspects of modern day computing and operating systems and I think a lot of people would be interested in learning more about the fundamentals of how they work.
The thing is that NTFS and HFS+ have been iterated upon in each new release, there's just not a lot of news about it since they still maintain backwards compatibility.
ReFS is interesting (I use it in my NAS), but until server 2016 it's still very limited in its use since it doesn't support many needed features that people depend on without knowing it.
HFS+ is due to be thrown out though. It's just based on such old architecture I'm afraid no amount of tweaks can fix it for modern systems.
I just wish Apple didn't go off an reinvent the wheel again in file systems. Linux has so many GPL'd and modern filesystems to choose from that do everything APFS hopes to do, and they are already tested and compatible with linux, and android, and even Windows in some cases.
Apple really doesn't like the GPL I guess. Even though all they would have to release is the changes they made to the GPL'd code and the interfaces with their kernel.
They could go steal UFS from BSD which has a more permissive license.
Apple - like any successful company or wealthy person - wants to control its own destiny. You cannot do that if you do not own the technology involved.
Just look at how successful Android phone makers and Windows PC makers are compared to Apple. They hardly make any profit compared to Apple. That is because they are totally dependent on another company for their future.
Apple has many utilities which are GPL licensed. But it uses such code only if it makes sense to itself.
When it comes to the file system, Apple does not have to be compatible with Linus, Windows and Android. It would be laughable to demand Apple do so.
GPL'd and other modern file systems do not obviously give Apple what it needs for its users.
For example, Apple's file systems traditionally made heavy use of metadata that is accessible to users which are missing in competing file systems. For example, to this day, Windows doesn't allow you to give colored labels or tags to files. Colored labels and tags are so convenient for organization on Macs that using a Windows PC is primitive in comparison.
Apple's new file system also makes heavy use of encryption - more so than current file systems.
Apple also emphasizes user privacy more than any other major company. So its products have this aspect built in mind compared to competing products.
Regarding dropped support, What does a 2009 Macbook do better than a 2009 Mac Pro? Sometimes I wish Apple would better explain their thought processes behind these decisions.
There were specific limits before like 32 bit UEFI or 32 bit graphics drivers, but what causes the cull this time? I guess few could complain about a 7 year support life, but considering that Windows 10 will chug along happily on an Athlon XP, if the user is patient enough...
Anyways, the Apple File System is the most exciting thing for me here, 1 second polling is an eternity with SSDs performing tens of thousands of IOPs or processors screaming away at billions of cycles per second, very much made for very old spinny disks, not even our modern still crappy spinny disks. NTFS was at least shoved forward more, with 100ns timestamps for instance.
@tipoo Tipoo: "Sometimes I wish Apple would better explain their thought processes behind these decisions."
Revenue and sales control. They do statistical analysis on upgrade cycles and force people to upgrade.
Sometimes the demarcation line between what to and not to support is clearly based on HW (RAM, CPU speed, etc).
Very often it is not.
And I agree, the file system (if it actually delivers on NVME PCIe SSDs the speed promised) is at least something very useful that everybody will be able to take advantage of (if they can upgrade).
Apple doesn't force people to upgrade. As a matter of fact, Apple devices have a much longer lifetime than competing devices. And Apple supports older hardware far longer than its competitors.
Apple does upgrade its devices to make them even better and more lust worthy. And it is consumer lust and prestige that drives Apple sales.
Apple users lust after the best. So if a better product comes along, they will upgrade. They won't complain because they are wealthy enough or save enough to buy Apple products in the first place.
Those who complain should never buy an Apple product. They would complain about the $500 minimum repair and maintenance bills from Mercedes Benz or the $30,000 oil change on an Aston Martin. If you have to look at the price, you cannot afford it.
"Though still distinct OSes, Apple has been slowly bringing over more and more iOS functionality to macOS over the years either for feature parity or interacting with iDevices, and macOS Sierra follows this trend."
This totally misunderstands the situation.
At the macro level Apple has a single OS-proper, on top of which it has four UIs (and thus four sets of programming frameworks). The four UIs differ because they target very different user input devices and display devices; but they try to be as common as possible within the constraints of those differences. So there's an attempt at common visual design elements, common control behavior, common defaults. This is the case even when it is not obvious --- the watch and the iPhone look like they have different UI elements, but in fact for the most part clicking the crown (or double clicking or holding it down) behave like the home button on an iPhone --- the crown is like a home button with a wheel attached.
But they're not slaves to that. The side button on the watch is somewhat analogous to the power button (eg long press switches the device off, held down with the crown it performs a screen capture), but it was overloaded to handle Apple Pay (and soon to handle the dock) in a way that has no iPhone analog, because this divergence made sense for the watch.
So first: one OS, four UIs (each as similar as possible to the others, but no more so).
Second, as far as the APIs/frameworks are concerned, there's been (and will continue to be) elements of history and hardware performance that limit quite how closely they can converge. iOS began as a more modern set of UI frameworks, and various aspects of this more modern behavior have been backported to macOS. But iOS also began as a stripped down version of the macOS APIs because of limited hardware, and over time the need for this stripped down nature has dramatically diminished. So things like OpenCL/Core Image functionality have moved out to iOS, along with Color Sync, and an ever more powerful Spotlight each iOS release. I expect we will see the same evolution over the next ten years as parts of iOS move down to WatchOS.
Point is, to characterize this as iOS functionality moving to MacOS is incorrect. There is substantial two-way traffic between the two OSs, both for historical reasons, and because some things naturally are best debuted on one platform vs the other (eg it made far more sense to debut Apple Pay on the phone). Most of the very newest stuff debuts on both platforms (and as tvOS gets up to speed, probably all three platforms) simultaneously, with any delays primarily the result of time factors (ie the lead team, for whatever reason, prototypes and debugs on ioS or macOS, and can't get the port on the other OS fully debugged in time for a particular release). WatchOS for obvious reasons will lag in its own way, while also, perhaps, serving as a site for debuting some new programming models that can be tried with less backward compatibility concerns.
I think many of you that are criticizing Apple are missing the point of WWDC. Apple is iterating on a very complicated task, OS design. Apple doesn't shove feature after feature in the OS unless they think people will actually use that feature.
WWDC is about demonstrating the power of the OS (watch, tv, i, etc) and its meant to deliver a message to developers about what the OS is capable of. Emojis and stickers are markets in and of themselves. that feature alone is worth millions in sales to developers willing to build stickers out. So while Meh inducing from a wow perspective, its a huge benefit for developers who see that Apple is starting to EXTEND their OSes beyond what they were before. That same idea goes for Siri, homekit, and other APIs.
WWDC is not a product release party, its a developer feature party. Laptops, iPhones, key software releases, etc. are left for september.
Apple's core responsibility is stability in any OS release. So jamming hundreds of wonky features in at the expense of stability would kill Apple's reputation for developing stable and reliable platforms.
I welcome some of the feature parity between devices and I hope Apple continues to build that out to bring all of their platforms together in a meaningful way.
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zeeBomb - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Splendid recap. Apple's new AFS file system will bec something to take into consideration, I always liked how thryv used their best efforts to optimize speed and software into their OS.nils_ - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
I always found OS X lacking in substance, especially when it comes to performance.jessedegenerate - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
like your comment, (a drive by, with no explanations as to why:D) Very excited for apfs.whiteiphoneproblems - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
You may want to fix the 2nd sentence of the second paragraph; the grammatical error is glaring. ThxEden-K121D - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Mostly Meh except for the filesystem . macOS syria doesn't bring all that muchthesloth - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
"...along with a significant amount of graphical “fluff” such as larger emoji..."Couldn't have put it better myself. "Emoji"... are we all 14 years old again?!?
star-affinity - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Uhm… What do you mean? I'm 37 and I use emojis quite a lot. :-|Not that it's a big deal, but the emojis was a bit small in Messeges previously, so it's good they're increasing the size.
The new file system and improved Metal features seems cool. And that ”tabs” feature which seems to work even for current applications (not sure how, but that's what was said in the keynote).
halcyon - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Emojis may be fun and usable.But when you have to make point about growing the size of your emojis in the UI...
... it's a clear sign you are running out of really worthwhile ideas and innovations to talk about.
To me the whole WWDC announcement stream was a big MEH.
When did Apple slow down to 1/10th of its previous innovation and fast-copying speed?
Apple of 2016 has become the Apple of 1996. Slow and tired.
retrospooty - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Exactly. using emojis is all fine and great.. using emojis as a bullet point on what has improved with a new OS? Laughable. Alot of other things borrowed from other OS's too. From all appearances the biggest innovation on the iPhone 7 will be the deep blue color. With that said, the deep blue iPhones leaked online look really nice. But its just looks.OreoCookie - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
It's distasteful to Western eyes, but in Japan Line is huge just because of such features: they make so much money on “stickers” and other stuff that they have their own stores in malls. This is geared towards their markets in China and the rest of Asia.star-affinity - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
But they didn't make a too big deal of the bigger emojis I think.”To me the whole WWDC announcement stream was a big MEH.”
While not exactly awed I wouldn't say it was ”meh”, but it felt much more consumer focused than previous WWDC keynotes. Not much geeky ”under the hood” stuff mentioned like the new filesystem for macOS and the improvements to Metal. There's probably more new stuff… I'm glad Anandtech highlights the more technical aspects.
”Apple of 2016 has become the Apple of 1996. Slow and tired.”
Is it really that bad you think? Well, on the computer hardware side of things Apple feels slow nowadays – I agree on that.
theKwatcher68 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Nothing earth-shattering here. I was more interested in hearing about any new Macbook Pros on the horizon. They seemed to spend (to me at least) more time on emojis and Mini mouse than on the new version of Xcode). It's a developer conference. Spend a bit more time on things that developers will really care about such as Xcode and integration APIs between macOS and iOS.I liked the discussion on Maps update. I'm guessing that Siri will be even more integrated with maps where a user can speak to Siri and say something like: What is the best route to work today? or Locate nearby coffee shops. They didn't provide an example of that during the Keynote.
halcyon - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
@theKwatcher68Well said. The Maps API opening was the only interesting thing for me.
Even the "Free Swift Playgroungs" felt like a last ditch effort to stop the declining sales of the overpriced iPad line.
I'm all for kids leaning through play the basics of coding, but I don't think Swift playgrounds is the solution for it and I have no confidence in Apple actually maintaining it and keeping it useful for more than 6-12 months.
name99 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Listen up, you morons. The point of the WWDC KEYNOTE is to be a PUBLIC announcement of Apple's new software features. It is NOT meant to be a product announcement arena. It is also not meant to be an announcement of technical details --- what do you think the rest of WWDC is for?If you actually cared about learning what is new in OSX at the technical level, read the damn docs:
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/con...
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/con...
What I see that's interesting, at a low level, for example, is a new logging framework and some interesting security work to make "partially signed" code more robust. There's probably less to talk about at the absolute lowest levels of macOS because
- much of that work is going into the new file system
- much of that work is (my guess) going into modernizing frameworks for the new Swift. (Not just the Swift 3 cleanups being announced at WWDC, but conceptual ideas around how Swift 4 is going to handle concurrency)
- much of that work is going onto tie all four Apple code bases together, both in the sense of interoperation (Continuity and such like), and in the sense of trying to grow the common code base and shrink the device specific code bases as much as possible
- users have been grumbling for about two years that they wanted a macOS with fewer new features and a year taken off to fix bugs. Apple seems to have largely done that. So WTF is the complaint about --- this was certainly what I wanted, and some of the other release notes (like the AppKit notes) testify to substantial bug fixing.
star-affinity - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
Good points, name99. :)Murloc - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
yeah, 40 years old abusing emojis is typical. Them and 14 years olds.Schmov17 - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
Always enjoy your articles, especially the full reviews that dig into all the details.I would be extremely interested in an article about the next gen file systems, comparing ZFS/ReFS/APFS (when more info on it is out) and possibly a primer on how NTFS/HFS+ compare and why we need a new generation.
File systems are some of the most important, and least widely understood, aspects of modern day computing and operating systems and I think a lot of people would be interested in learning more about the fundamentals of how they work.
minasnoldo - Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - link
^this please^Not a lot of articles on newer file systems:
From 2010:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3963/zfs-building-te...
And from 2014:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014...
Ranger1065 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Sadly, full reviews seem to be a thing of the past here.Eden-K121D - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
GTX 1080 review is not their and we keep getting reviews for overpriced underperforming SATA SSDsEden-K121D - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
*thereImpulses - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
Billy for GPU reviewer!You can now expect poor Billy to cringe in the background while recoiling with a sense of dread...
hechacker1 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
The thing is that NTFS and HFS+ have been iterated upon in each new release, there's just not a lot of news about it since they still maintain backwards compatibility.ReFS is interesting (I use it in my NAS), but until server 2016 it's still very limited in its use since it doesn't support many needed features that people depend on without knowing it.
HFS+ is due to be thrown out though. It's just based on such old architecture I'm afraid no amount of tweaks can fix it for modern systems.
I just wish Apple didn't go off an reinvent the wheel again in file systems. Linux has so many GPL'd and modern filesystems to choose from that do everything APFS hopes to do, and they are already tested and compatible with linux, and android, and even Windows in some cases.
Apple really doesn't like the GPL I guess. Even though all they would have to release is the changes they made to the GPL'd code and the interfaces with their kernel.
They could go steal UFS from BSD which has a more permissive license.
jameskatt - Friday, June 24, 2016 - link
Apple - like any successful company or wealthy person - wants to control its own destiny. You cannot do that if you do not own the technology involved.Just look at how successful Android phone makers and Windows PC makers are compared to Apple. They hardly make any profit compared to Apple. That is because they are totally dependent on another company for their future.
Apple has many utilities which are GPL licensed. But it uses such code only if it makes sense to itself.
When it comes to the file system, Apple does not have to be compatible with Linus, Windows and Android. It would be laughable to demand Apple do so.
GPL'd and other modern file systems do not obviously give Apple what it needs for its users.
For example, Apple's file systems traditionally made heavy use of metadata that is accessible to users which are missing in competing file systems. For example, to this day, Windows doesn't allow you to give colored labels or tags to files. Colored labels and tags are so convenient for organization on Macs that using a Windows PC is primitive in comparison.
Apple's new file system also makes heavy use of encryption - more so than current file systems.
Apple also emphasizes user privacy more than any other major company. So its products have this aspect built in mind compared to competing products.
tipoo - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Regarding dropped support, What does a 2009 Macbook do better than a 2009 Mac Pro? Sometimes I wish Apple would better explain their thought processes behind these decisions.There were specific limits before like 32 bit UEFI or 32 bit graphics drivers, but what causes the cull this time? I guess few could complain about a 7 year support life, but considering that Windows 10 will chug along happily on an Athlon XP, if the user is patient enough...
Anyways, the Apple File System is the most exciting thing for me here, 1 second polling is an eternity with SSDs performing tens of thousands of IOPs or processors screaming away at billions of cycles per second, very much made for very old spinny disks, not even our modern still crappy spinny disks. NTFS was at least shoved forward more, with 100ns timestamps for instance.
halcyon - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
@tipooTipoo: "Sometimes I wish Apple would better explain their thought processes behind these decisions."
Revenue and sales control. They do statistical analysis on upgrade cycles and force people to upgrade.
Sometimes the demarcation line between what to and not to support is clearly based on HW (RAM, CPU speed, etc).
Very often it is not.
And I agree, the file system (if it actually delivers on NVME PCIe SSDs the speed promised) is at least something very useful that everybody will be able to take advantage of (if they can upgrade).
Focher - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
Nope. The CPU is missing support for a function that's now relied upon.jameskatt - Friday, June 24, 2016 - link
Apple doesn't force people to upgrade. As a matter of fact, Apple devices have a much longer lifetime than competing devices. And Apple supports older hardware far longer than its competitors.Apple does upgrade its devices to make them even better and more lust worthy. And it is consumer lust and prestige that drives Apple sales.
Apple users lust after the best. So if a better product comes along, they will upgrade. They won't complain because they are wealthy enough or save enough to buy Apple products in the first place.
Those who complain should never buy an Apple product. They would complain about the $500 minimum repair and maintenance bills from Mercedes Benz or the $30,000 oil change on an Aston Martin. If you have to look at the price, you cannot afford it.
Murloc - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
*deprecated not depreciatedname99 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
"Though still distinct OSes, Apple has been slowly bringing over more and more iOS functionality to macOS over the years either for feature parity or interacting with iDevices, and macOS Sierra follows this trend."This totally misunderstands the situation.
At the macro level Apple has a single OS-proper, on top of which it has four UIs (and thus four sets of programming frameworks). The four UIs differ because they target very different user input devices and display devices; but they try to be as common as possible within the constraints of those differences. So there's an attempt at common visual design elements, common control behavior, common defaults. This is the case even when it is not obvious --- the watch and the iPhone look like they have different UI elements, but in fact for the most part clicking the crown (or double clicking or holding it down) behave like the home button on an iPhone --- the crown is like a home button with a wheel attached.
But they're not slaves to that. The side button on the watch is somewhat analogous to the power button (eg long press switches the device off, held down with the crown it performs a screen capture), but it was overloaded to handle Apple Pay (and soon to handle the dock) in a way that has no iPhone analog, because this divergence made sense for the watch.
So first: one OS, four UIs (each as similar as possible to the others, but no more so).
Second, as far as the APIs/frameworks are concerned, there's been (and will continue to be) elements of history and hardware performance that limit quite how closely they can converge. iOS began as a more modern set of UI frameworks, and various aspects of this more modern behavior have been backported to macOS. But iOS also began as a stripped down version of the macOS APIs because of limited hardware, and over time the need for this stripped down nature has dramatically diminished. So things like OpenCL/Core Image functionality have moved out to iOS, along with Color Sync, and an ever more powerful Spotlight each iOS release. I expect we will see the same evolution over the next ten years as parts of iOS move down to WatchOS.
Point is, to characterize this as iOS functionality moving to MacOS is incorrect. There is substantial two-way traffic between the two OSs, both for historical reasons, and because some things naturally are best debuted on one platform vs the other (eg it made far more sense to debut Apple Pay on the phone). Most of the very newest stuff debuts on both platforms (and as tvOS gets up to speed, probably all three platforms) simultaneously, with any delays primarily the result of time factors (ie the lead team, for whatever reason, prototypes and debugs on ioS or macOS, and can't get the port on the other OS fully debugged in time for a particular release). WatchOS for obvious reasons will lag in its own way, while also, perhaps, serving as a site for debuting some new programming models that can be tried with less backward compatibility concerns.
profssrfink - Thursday, June 23, 2016 - link
I think many of you that are criticizing Apple are missing the point of WWDC. Apple is iterating on a very complicated task, OS design. Apple doesn't shove feature after feature in the OS unless they think people will actually use that feature.WWDC is about demonstrating the power of the OS (watch, tv, i, etc) and its meant to deliver a message to developers about what the OS is capable of. Emojis and stickers are markets in and of themselves. that feature alone is worth millions in sales to developers willing to build stickers out. So while Meh inducing from a wow perspective, its a huge benefit for developers who see that Apple is starting to EXTEND their OSes beyond what they were before. That same idea goes for Siri, homekit, and other APIs.
WWDC is not a product release party, its a developer feature party. Laptops, iPhones, key software releases, etc. are left for september.
Apple's core responsibility is stability in any OS release. So jamming hundreds of wonky features in at the expense of stability would kill Apple's reputation for developing stable and reliable platforms.
I welcome some of the feature parity between devices and I hope Apple continues to build that out to bring all of their platforms together in a meaningful way.
jmartein - Friday, March 22, 2019 - link
Mac sierra is pretty awesome. Now one can get all apps and games for free on iOS devices from Topstore. Get it from https://topstorevip.com/