macOS Sierra new features: Auto Unlock with Apple Watch
Apple is putting several new features into the OS. The first announced on the night was Auto Unlock which allows you to unlock your Mac using your Apple Watch. No more typing in lengthy passwords after the screen goes off! A small addition, but no doubt will prove useful to those who have invested in the Watch.
macOS Sierra new features: Universal Clipboard
Universal Clipboard was slightly overlooked, but it is a new, great way to sync your copy and paste data between devices. This could be best put into practice with an iPad Pro and a Mac: drawing direct onto the iPad before intelligently copying and pasting on to Mac documents. This is a great way of syncing information between devices and will stop the brain-hurt of emailing yourself pictures or even sticking stuff in the cloud to download to another device.
macOS Sierra new features: Tapback in Messages app
While the macOS variant of the Messages app may be lacking in some areas (text animations and smileys aren’t available at the time of writing) it does have one very cool feature – tapbacks. Tapbacks, as introduced during the iOS 10 section at Apple’s WWDC conference, allow users to react to a text message without sending messages like ‘LOL’. In a Facebook Reactions-esque way, users can react to incoming messages by giving it a thumbs up (or down), Question mark, Heart and more.
macOS Sierra new features: iCloud Drive and Optimised Storage
iCloud Drive is also receiving a much needed update. For those of us familiar with sprinkling our Mac desktops with files that we need, rejoice – those files are mirrored on your other Macs (if you’re rich) and on your iPhone.
Optimised storage for iCloud will automatically back up older files, particularly those that you’ll never use again like cache files. It’ll make your storage go a lot further before you have to fork out for more, which is great news. It’s nice to see Apple thinking about the smaller nuances of its services.
macOS Sierra new features: Apple Pay
A further excellent feature coming to macOS Sierra is Apple Pay for Mac. Apple Pay icons will now appear on the buy pages of certain merchants – all you need do is verify your purchases with Touch ID on your iPhone or using your Apple Watch. This will be initially supported in nine countries.
Ahead of Apple’s keynote, rumours had suggested that at some point Apple will add a Touch ID fingerprint scanner to its Mac range. This more conservative way of introducing Apple Pay to the Mac still provides many of the benefits, and it’s still possible that Touch ID will eventually come to the Mac, too. However, the introduction of Auto Unlock mentioned above seems to be the solution to unlocking the Mac securely without the need for Touch ID.
macOS Sierra new features: Tabs
Tabs have also been lovingly reimagined – no longer restricted to Safari, those apps that allow for tabs now (with no developer work needed) will allow you to multi-tab.
macOS Sierra new features: Picture-in-Picture
Picture-in-Picture mode allows you to thumbnail view photos and, more impressively, videos from certain apps while doing other things. So long, productivity! Although, for those who work in video editing, features like this will be another Godsend.
macOS Sierra new features: Apple File System (APFS)
Now while this may not be as appealing as many of the other features of macOS Sierra, Apple’s new proprietary file system is worth a mention. Why? One of the most exciting features of the new file system is space sharing, which helps partitioned drives utilise space on the fly. Let’s say you had a 1TB drive with two 100GB partitions, with one nearly full and one almost empty. In this situation, space sharing wouldn’t limit the almost-full partition, and would instead note that there is 800GB of free space (the total free disk space) for both partitioned drives. Essentially, APFS treats the partition limits as containers that can be expanded when required.
Duplicated files won’t take up any extra space either – if you duplicate a 2GB drive it wouldn’t take up 4GB, instead the copy would access the original version. Then, if you make changes to the oriignal version, the new data is copied to a separate block preserving the original state.
Essentially, the new file system should make your macOS life a little easier behind the scenes.
macOS Sierra new features: Siri for Mac
After all the little bits and pieces, Apple showed us what we were hoping for – Siri on a Mac. A particularly useful and impressive feature that was demoed live on stage was searching through documents using Siri. The voice assistant will also let you be far more flexible with macOS Sierra – you’ll be able to image search online with Siri, and have the ability to drag and drop those images directly into a plethora of apps.
Siri is already on iPhone, iPad and even the Apple TV, so it was only a matter of time before Siri came to Mac too. After all, Microsoft already has Cortana in Windows (and has done since Windows 8.1) and Chrome has Google Now.
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