Tux, Say Hi To Apple's macOS "Sierra"

[techzilla]

Linux user since 96, using it professionally since 01.
Love individual freedom and capitalism (basically the same thing).
Read Ayn Rand and liked it, same with Vice at least up until a few years ago.
Contributed to several OSS projects.

Don't like macOS for its locked down nature.

There is no problem being capitalist and being part of a community, OSS or any other.
We just insist that said membership must be voluntary, and the group doesn't restrict other peoples freedom.

Your attempt at linking the linux/OSS community to socialism is not only not helpful, it's also wrong.

I was wrong about where we need to move, I wasn't wrong about where the problem was, it is you. Your "community" is a toxic cesspool of activist mediocrity.

[techzilla]

Go read what Tesla thought alternating currents, radio waves, ionizing radiation, and other stuff were.
It had weird ideas about things oscillating in other things, and the notion of "ether" and other non-scientific nonsense. No proof of jackshit of his theories.

He was a good inventor, one of the empyrical ones that tweaked things in secrecy very retro-style, those that are now obsolete in any known branch of advanced technology, which cannot live without some large support from scientific community behind.

Since when does being a genius mean you need to be correct about everything you ever thought? What kind of ridiculous standard is this?

[name99]

Yeah, it's completely ridicolous how they manage to take stuff there is out there already (siri personal assistant, various geotagging/image and face recognition, device-as-a-unlock-key as on Android, various assorted sharing features, and cloud storage, and so on and so forth) and by the magic of sane preconfiguration setup and captivating looks manage to turn it in an interesting thing for non-IT-literate users.

I mean, just look at this http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra-preview/

And then find a random Win10 features slideshow where you can find out it does barely more than Ubuntu.

Good, Good, very good. This is the Apple we all love.

Just FYI "device as an unlock key" exists on Apple today. I have a third party "app" (parts running on mac, on iPhone, and on Apple Watch) that does it.

[name99]

No wonder their HQ is on the Infinite Loop.

Also, does that mean that this is technically Mac OS 11?

Way to miss the point.
The point of this branding exercise is that (unlike some other OS's) Apple plans some elements of their strategy years in advance, so that the pieces fall into place in a way that looks effortless (but is, of course, the results of massive effort...)

IMHO the long term point of this branding exercise is to more or less unify the Apple OS stable. Right now they offer customers:
tvOS 10
macOS Sierra
watchOS 3
iOS 10
These are all essentially different UIs on top of the same underlying OS proper. (Same kernel, same dev tools, mostly the same frameworks and APIs, and becoming more unified every year).

The macOS branding makes this more clear (macOS looks like tvOS or watchOS in terms of "style"), but obviously one thing sticks out: Sierra vs a number.
I think the long term plan is that numbers will go away and the entire cluster will be updated each year like WWDC 2018 announces:
tvOS Joshua Tree
macOS Joshua Tree
watchOS Joshua Tree
iOS Joshua Tree

This naming makes it even more obvious that everything has been updated together, and that all these "skins" on the underlying AppleOS are a unity that plays well together across devices.

Why haven't they done this yet? I'd offer two theories
- the infrastructure isn't quite in place yet. They'd done a lot already to get all the OSs on the same timetable, but updating across multiple devices is still sub-optimal, and there ares till various rough edges where the different OSs don't play well together. They want to wait until these rough edges have been removed and the whole suite of OSs is much more of a single project. (This may, for example, mean a whole lot of refactoring and build integration within Apple, that will not be visible to the outside.)

- they're waiting for the release of the ARM Mac (maybe branded the [lowercase] mac?, maybe shipping with some substantial changes to macOS?) and when that happens they pull the trigger and make the pattern clear across all OSs?

Either way, to snigger about "silly branding changes" is to be willfully blind to one of the most interesting OS evolutions happening before our eyes. No-one else in the commercial OS world is doing things that are nearly as interesting in terms of getting a suite of very different compute devices to work together like a single unit. Cluster computing did this thirty years or so agin for workstations, but that was tying together very similar hardware; what Apple is doing in terms of tying together watches, phones, desktops, even TV boxes is unprecedented.
Mock it if you want to be an idiot; but just remember people like you were mocking the iPhone 9 years ago. The issue is NOT that Apple can do no wrong; it is simply the objective fact that I have described, that no-one else has the range of hardware that Apple has AND is working so hard to tie it all ever more tightly together. MS could have been in this space but they dropped the ball (why is for a different comment), so they're stuck with no mobile strategy, MS Band that's largely decoupled from their other offerings, and XBox where no-one has a clue quite what the integration story is or will be. Meanwhile Google (or even Amazon) may one day be in this space, but to get there they both have to first conquer the desktop. (And even the wrist. As far as I know Apple Watch total sales swamp all Android Wear sales so far, though maybe that will change as Android Wear figures out what it's trying to do, and as its hardware prices fall.)

[chrisq]

Yup, Here I am.

Eff Apple, and eff their sick elitist ideology. You wanna be a capitalist, because that's just how you roll, at least do it Microsoft style. It's more honest about who it is, and far less disrespectful to the user. Apple is a hipster chic elitist, Ayn Rand-ian egoist, community destroying, neo-liberal threat to society. Basically the Vice magazine of technology.

... O and eff Jobs, he was innovative on marketing, and consumer money extraction, and pushing the limits of how far our economic system promotes sociopaths. He is the modern Edison, who ripped off real geniuses like Tesla, but we must worship him to maintain the myth of the Übermensch.

Linux user since 96, using it professionally since 01.
Love individual freedom and capitalism (basically the same thing).
Read Ayn Rand and liked it, same with Vice at least up until a few years ago.
Contributed to several OSS projects.

Don't like macOS for its locked down nature.

There is no problem being capitalist and being part of a community, OSS or any other.
We just insist that said membership must be voluntary, and the group doesn't restrict other peoples freedom.

Your attempt at linking the linux/OSS community to socialism is not only not helpful, it's also wrong.

[starshipeleven]

Even as an anti-Apple person, I am forced to admit that Apple is a genius where it comes to adding and layering usability features over their operating system, and there are many such features in Sierra that are just so ultra-polished and refined, they make their Windows or Linux equivalents (if they even exist) look impossibly primitive

Yeah, it's completely ridicolous how they manage to take stuff there is out there already (siri personal assistant, various geotagging/image and face recognition, device-as-a-unlock-key as on Android, various assorted sharing features, and cloud storage, and so on and so forth) and by the magic of sane preconfiguration setup and captivating looks manage to turn it in an interesting thing for non-IT-literate users.

I mean, just look at this http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra-preview/

And then find a random Win10 features slideshow where you can find out it does barely more than Ubuntu.

Good, Good, very good. This is the Apple we all love.

[Sonadow]

Even as an anti-Apple person, I am forced to admit that Apple is a genius where it comes to adding and layering usability features over their operating system, and there are many such features in Sierra that are just so ultra-polished and refined, they make their Windows or Linux equivalents (if they even exist) look impossibly primitive.

I'm actually getting interested in Sierra over these features despite being a hater. But it doesn't change the fact that the under-the-hood stuff in macOS is still a steaming pile of turd.

[gbudny]

One of the most important changes in this operating system are requirements:

OS X El Capitan :

• MacBook (Early 2015)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

"Full system requirements are not yet released; however, at the WWDC 2016 it was announced that macOS Sierra would run on the following Macs:

• iMac: Late 2009 or newer
• MacBook: Late 2009 or newer
• MacBook Air: Late 2010 or newer
• MacBook Pro: Mid 2010 or newer
• Mac Mini: Mid 2010 or newer
• Mac Pro: Mid 2010 or newer

Sierra is the first macOS since OS X 10.7, released in 2011, to no longer run on computers that the previous version supported. Non-supported models are about 12% of all Macs As of May 2016.^[1] It will be the first version of macOS to drop support for the Xserve, which was discontinued in 2011."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Sierra

In this case, I won't be able to install macOS sierra on my Mac Mini early 2009, and Mac mini from 2010 will be removed from this list in the near future. I think it is time to purchase Mac Pro from 2012, but there is always a risk that the new version of macOS won't support it in the near future.

I think it is horrible that Apple made a decision to remove Nvidia cards from Mac Pro and Mac Mini. For the perspective of the Linux user, I can not say anything good about iMac.

[devius]

Funny... I never stopped calling it mac os.

[starshipeleven]

Where do I begin to point out the flaws in these statements...

Go read what Tesla thought alternating currents, radio waves, ionizing radiation, and other stuff were.
It had weird ideas about things oscillating in other things, and the notion of "ether" and other non-scientific nonsense. No proof of jackshit of his theories.

He was a good inventor, one of the empyrical ones that tweaked things in secrecy very retro-style, those that are now obsolete in any known branch of advanced technology, which cannot live without some large support from scientific community behind.