macOS 10.12 Sierra Notes
The first impression of downloading a major OS update is still discouraging.
Fujitsu (a TidBITS sponsor) is warning users of the company’s ScanSnap document scanners and accompanying software to avoid upgrading to macOS 10.12 Sierra at this point. Fujitsu has identified a variety of problems associated with its ScanSnap software when running in Sierra.
People have been blaming Fujitsu for this, but I wonder whether the issues are instead caused by bugs from Apple’s rewrite of its PDF subsystem, which has also been affecting EagleFiler. (I’ve also updated DropDMG and SpamSieve for Sierra.)
Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson (Hacker News):
It has been a long time since the Mac was Apple’s favorite child, and there are places in Sierra (like the Messages app) where it clearly feels like Mac users are getting a second-tier experience compared to people on iOS. Add in the Mac’s stale, aging hardware lineup and Apple’s total lack of communication about it, and there seems to be real problems for the Mac as a platform.
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When Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion dropped older Macs, there were clear reasons why the hardware that went unsupported was being left behind (PowerPC CPUs, 32-bit Intel CPUs, and 32-bit EFI and driver limitations, respectively). In Sierra, aging hardware and drivers are a factor—drivers especially, since a lot of the GPUs, networking hardware, and chipsets in those older machines have long since been forgotten by the hardware companies that made them—but there are no hard-and-fast hardware cutoffs. I’ve seen many attempts to define a strictly hardware-related cutoff, but none of them quite work.
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If you don’t want universal clipboard to work, you can head into the General preference pane and disable Handoff. As best we can tell, there’s no way to keep Handoff but not the universal clipboard.
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The main change in Notes is a real-time collaboration option. Hit the button at the top of the screen and enter some Apple IDs to invite others to view and edit the note with you. You can send anyone you’ve invited a link via one of many different apps or services, including Mail, Messages, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, and more.
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The Gatekeeper options in System Preferences will no longer let you choose to allow any and all apps by default. The only two options are to allow signed apps and Mac App Store apps (still the default in Sierra, as it always has been), or just those from the Mac App Store.
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In discussing APFS checksumming directly with Apple, the company told Ars that user data integrity is a top priority, and that the decision to checksum metadata but not file data (and other major architectural decisions made around Sierra) are driven by decades of data on what does and does not work well with file system design.
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One tack Apple didn’t take is writing multiple copies of an object’s metadata to disk. The reasoning given is simply that solid state disks offer no real way for the operating system to ensure that the multiple copies would be written to different physical NAND cells—and that concurrent writes are in fact often grouped into the same cell. Writing two redundant copies to the same physical location kind of defeats the purpose of having two redundant copies.
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Disk Utility was redesigned with El Capitan, and the few tweaks Apple has made are unlikely to appease you if you miss the old version.
There is one big difference between these sets of results worth pointing out. Spotlight can surface email attachments, while Siri can just show what’s in my user folder.
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Lastly, shared clipboard content is only available for two minutes. This helps make Universal Clipboard feel much more intentional. In my month or so of using it, I’ve never once felt surprised at my devices doing the “wrong” thing.
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This does screw with clipboard managers on the Mac. I use Alfred for this, and it only sees Universal Clipboard content after I paste it somewhere on the Mac. In short, I can’t use Alfred as a running clipboard history for my iPhone or iPad when they are in range of my Mac. This isn’t a big deal, but something to be aware of if you use a clipboard manager.
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This is one of the features Apple ships that feels like it was designed in a bubble. Universal Clipboard is great if you work in a very intentional way. If you’re at your Mac and go to pick up your iPad to finish a task, it’s great. If you share your tablet with someone else in the house, however, you can very be quickly in the situation where devices in the same location are over-riding each other’s clipboards.
To use Universal Clipboard, you copy from your Mac or iOS device just as you normally would. Then go to your recipient device, and perform a paste. If you’re pasting on a Mac, you may see a progress bar indicator. On iOS, you see a message window stating the device your paste is coming from.
I did find one hiccup involving Microsoft Word. When copying text from a Word document, it pasted in iOS 10 Notes as Chinese text.
What I’m saying is, the Universal Clipboard feature is really cool and clever when it works, and I wish it worked more reliably. I’ll keep trying to use it. I hope it becomes more reliable as time goes by.
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Still, I gave it a whirl. I turned on iCloud syncing for my Desktop and Documents folder (you have to sync them both), knowing I’d be watching a few gigabyte-sized audio projects slowly uploaded. What happened was a bit more disturbing: The entire contents of my iMac’s Desktop disappeared. This turned out to be a function of the fact that I’d already turned on syncing a MacBook Pro, and rather than merging the contents of the laptop’s Desktop with my iMacs, Sierra created a new folder and moved all the items on my Desktop into it. (The same happened to my Documents folder.) So my files were still there and uploading, but I had to drag them back out onto the proper Desktop and restore them to their proper positions.
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Sierra also offers a feature that lets your Mac arbitrarily delete any of the items in your Desktop and Documents folders that have been stored in iCloud. […] Here’s what happened: I was editing a podcast in Apple’s Logic Pro X, and my project was stored on the Desktop. All of a sudden, the voice of one of my podcast panelists simply vanished from the mix. I quit and re-launched Logic, only to be told that the file in question was missing. Sure enough, a visit to Finder revealed that Sierra had “optimized” my storage and removed that file from my local drive. I’ll grant you, the file was a couple of weeks old, and very large as most audio files are. But I was also actively using it within a Logic project. Apparently that didn’t count for anything?
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To add insult to injury, at the time my files were deleted, my hard drive had approximately 80GB of free space. Why were the files deleted? I have no idea, but I suspect a bug in how Sierra was viewing the stock internal SSD of my iMac, because it’s also warned me that it didn’t have enough space to back up a 64GB iPhone with more than 100GB free, and gave me a “you’re about to run out of disk space” warning with 60GB free. So not only did Sierra remove files that I was using, it did so without any necessity.
For those struggling to free up space, particularly on a notebook Mac with relatively little internal flash storage, Optimized Storage sounded great, at least if you don’t mind paying for online storage in iCloud Drive. And while it could be a great boon for such people, it turns out to be a somewhat confusing collection of seemingly unrelated features, burdened by one of the stranger interfaces that Apple has produced in recent years.
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Amusingly, Microsoft Windows has been capable of automatically deleting files from its Recycle Bin at least since Windows 98, although back then it deleted older files when adding a newer file to the Recycle Bin caused it to exceed a user-specified size. I’m surprised it took Apple this long to get to the point of taking the trash out for the user.
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My second warning is that turning off Desktop and Documents folder syncing is stressful. When you do this, in System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Options, Sierra tells you that all your files will be available only in iCloud, which seems wrong: if you’re turning off syncing, you’re doing so because you want them locally. However, that dialog is followed immediately by another that tells you that you can recover your files from iCloud Drive.
This is a great concept, designed to save space on your SSD-based Macs that are very definitely space constrained, but there are pitfalls. I am glad that Rich Trouton has made available his configuration profile that blocks this setting for organizations to use on their computers. I’m not interested in turning this feature on any time soon.
Siri is a welcome addition to macOS Sierra, but in certain environments it’s a service which needs to be disabled. For those Mac admins who need to do this, here are the relevant keys.
On macOS Sierra, when you click the play/pause button on attached headphones and Siri is Off, an alert comes up asking you whether you want to enable Siri. Every. Single. Time. No matter what you do.
With the macOS Sierra update Siri finally makes it onto the Mac.
However, did you know about the following Mac-specific tricks?
It’s a little frustrating that this kind of stuff is gated behind a spoken Siri command. Not only does this require talking to your computer — a task which I still find a little bit weird — it also means that the computer must interpret what you’re saying absolutely perfectly for this feature to be of any use.
Siri on the Mac—that is really big. Siri is far more complete and powerful than Cortana is on Windows, and having voice control of your computer is a game-changer.
Unlike the past 3 or 4 releases, macOS Sierra is probably safe to go ahead with right away. Finally, relief from the Apple quality failure onslaught.
Clicking on my Sent mailbox (and others) results in delays of up to 30 seconds in showing the mailbox, along with multiple rainbow beach balls. The system has had ample time to do whatever it is it does after a system upgrade. Then trying to open one message may take another 20 seconds. Apple mail pins a CPU or more during this time.
TIL that Icon Composer uses Garbage Collection and thus can’t run on Sierra. Dammit, I was still using that, mostly for quick scaling.
See also: Alex Guyot and Rene Ritchie.
Previously: Testing for macOS 10.12 Sierra.
Update (2016-09-23): Andrew Abernathy:
Well, Aperture is pretty broken in Sierra. Just switching to the Info tab gets an uncaught exception; “continue in an inconsistent state?”
Update (2016-09-24): I continue to run into PDF and Preview issues. I’m also having problems with new application windows being added in tabs despite disabling that in the preferences.
When I did that everything disappeared. So all the files on my Desktop were gone. All the files in my Documents folder were gone.
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The guy on the line explained to me that the system was really more intended for users who had a single desktop and iOS devices rather than trying to use this syncing function on more than one desktop.
Update (2016-09-27): Benjamin Mayo:
I’ve barely used macOS Siri and I already have a list of niggles and unfinished edges. I’m even ignoring things that are potentially debatable and just focusing on things that are unequivocally wrong.
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There is nowhere to check Universal Clipboard connectivity so I’m basically left in the dark about how to fix this because it fails silently. If it was done properly, it would flag up a ‘Universal Clipboard Failed’ alert with details of the error. As it is, I have no recourse apart from crossing my fingers and hoping it sorts itself out.
Update (2016-09-28): Keir Thomas:
We’ve already described macOS Sierra’s new window-snapping feature but we didn’t realize Sierra also introduces a new feature that lets you ultra-quickly expand windows to the edge of the screen.
9 Comments RSS · Twitter
I had nearly forgotten about the universal tab support for NSDocument-based apps, mostly because there's no obvious way of activating it. Thanks to TidBITS for finding the relevant menu command: Window → Merge All Windows.
The greatest disappointment for me is the lack of data integrity in APFS. Perhaps it would have been difficult/impossible to implement on non-ECC systems? Still, it would be nice to at least have a command-line flag for Mac Pros...
@Roy There should also be a Show Tab Bar command in the View menu, and you can set the global default in the Dock pane of System Preferences.
@michael The "Show Tab Bar" menu item will either be in the View or Window menu:
- if you have a View menu, it will be here
- if you don't have a View menu, it will be in the Window menu.
@roy The universal tab support is not limited to NSDocument-based apps. That's the issue with this option which should have been opt-in in the first place. If you have an application with just a NSWindowController, you can be impacted by this undesired feature as soon as you have a View or Window menu. And there's also a common problem for NSDocument based applications having secondary windows (even Apple's own system applications)
@stephane Yeah, Apple did not really go through all their apps. For example, the only way to get tabbed viewer windows in Mail is to merge existing windows; the + button doesn’t appear.
[…] to macOS 10.12 yet, principally because of the many PDF bugs, which go way beyond what I’ve documented. It looks to me like a discoveryd-type situation. One developer e-mailed me to […]
[…] year, perhaps the most galling is the state of the Mac. From a software standpoint, many of the consumer-facing changes in MacOS Sierra are so modest as to be perfunctory. Sierra’s most obvious new feature, Siri, is ported from […]
[…] ran into a lot of PDF bugs in macOS 10.12.0. None have been fixed, as far as I can tell, and I’ve already filed two Radars for new issues […]
