macOS 10.13 High Sierra Shipping Soon
macOS High Sierra, the new version of the macOS operating systems for Macs, will be released to the public on Monday, September 25, according to Apple’s macOS High Sierra website.
That’s nearly a week after the iOS 11 and watchOS 4 release date, with those software updates coming on Tuesday, September 19.
Still, there’s a lot of useful stuff. Here’s what you can look forward to.
I cannot understand why Apple wants to make High Sierra so unattractive at this late stage. Failure to offer APFS on Fusion Drives and hard disks indicates that High Sierra is being released before it is ready for much of the desktop Mac market. During the summer Apple recognised that APFS was not yet ready for use on hard disks, but has pressed ahead with its release regardless.
Accordingly, MPG hereby raises that 3 month ‘wait’ recommendation to a full six months from here on in. That’s because (a) a change in file system is a major change with repercussions and (b) Apple cannot be trusted to respect users or their data or their workflow, with poor judgment seem repeatedly many times over in recent years. The name for this macOS release is apt.
Remember, Apple ships on a calendar basis. Not when requisite software quality is achieved—if the bar is too high, the bar is lowered and the software ships on schedule. This has been going on for years and now with iOS and macOS tied together with APFS and iCloud, it won’t stop—the iPhone drives all.
Update (2017-09-19): John Gruber:
I have all-flash drives in both my MacBook Pro and iMac, but I’m not in any hurry to switch to APFS. And since drives that can be updated are automatically updated to APFS when you update to High Sierra, I’m in no rush to update to High Sierra.
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Is there anyone who believes that b9 is of GM quality?
Considering there are still big bugs (WiFi, GPU Drivers, SKEL security flaw, Metal2 bugs, etc.), it would have been wiser to wait for mid October at least.
I don't understand why people think a filesystem will break things from an application standpoint. Let's look at the filesystems OS X already supports:
-HFS
-SMB
-AFP
-NFS
-XSan
-ISO9660/Joliet
-UDF
-FAT16
-FAT32
-exFAT
-NTFS read
How often do you test whether your app can open a file from a CD?
@Sam One simple example is that APFS stores dates differently than HFS+, so this can potentially break any app that compares dates for syncing or indexing purposes. APFS also returns directory listings in a different order, which could break apps that were incorrectly relying on the HFS+ order. There are also the Unicode issues that I previously discussed.
Also, that list of filesystems contains mostly filesystems that are old and have been long-supported (so, in theory, all of the bugs in the filesystem support have long been fixed, which is why no one tests to make sure they can open files from a CD—and also that CDs are going extinct), whereas APFS is brand-new and just coming to Mac OS X. I seem to recall a period of concern a few years ago when Apple switched SMB implementations and versions, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to be concerned about AFPS (especially since Apple is wishy-washily only offering it to SSD-only volumes).
@sam Try /usr/bin/Splitforks on a APFS volume. Last time I checked, this Apple's tool did not work with APFS volumes. Yet APFS still supports Resource Forks via Extended Attributes.
Anyone else using the GM and have an issue with apps (mostly first-party but also some third-party) appending the com.apple.quarantine extended attribute to every file they open?
I first noticed this when opening a video shot with my iPhone in QuickTIme Player. Opened fine the first time, but every time after that, it showed the Gatekeeper 'Verifying' pop-up, as if the .mov file were an app I downloaded that needed to be checked. Needless to say, this greatly increases the time it takes to open a large video file.
An easy way to check if this is happening on your system: Create a screenshot with the standard ⌘⇧3 shortcut, then open it in Preview. Then run "xattr -p com.apple.quarantine' with the screenshot's file path. If the quarantine was applied, it should output a string that mentions Preview.
