Apple unveils macOS High Sierra

[Arthur]

Surely Apple could have come up with a better name?

 

Source: https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/05/apple-unveils-macos-high-sierra-w-safari-improvements-more

 

In addition to other announcements, Apple today has unveiled the latest version of macOS in form of macOS 10.13. The update will be available to the public later this year and includes new features, interface tweaks, performance improvements, and more.

 

macOS High Sierra cares a focus on deep technologies and refinements, according to Craig Federighi, with Apple working to refine macOS 10.12 Sierra with the update.

 

Safari

Apple introduced the latest version of macOS by outlining improvements to Siri that come as part of the update. The company touts that Safari is the fastest web browser there is, and High Sierra only improves that. Safari in macOS High Sierra includes auto-play blocking for video advertisements, as well as intelligent tracking protection to better protect user browsing and history data.

 

Mail

In addition to Safari improvements, macOS High Sierra also bring implements to the Apple Mail app. For instance, the app now supports Top Hits search, making it easier to find emails during search. There’s also finally support for Split View Mail Compose, meaning you can have a split window pain between the compose interface and other applications.

 

Photos

Federighi touts that the biggest updates with High Sierra come with Photos. This includes a persistent sidebar, as well as a new dropdown for filtering content. There are also new editing tools, including interface tweaks for more advanced editing capabilities.

 

Finally, Photos includes faces syncing across all Apple devices.

 

APFS

Apple is also bringing its Apple Filesystem to macOS. Federighi demonstrated the advanced capabilities for the new filesystem by instantly duplicating a file. Apple Filesystem first made an appearance earlier this year with iOS 10.3.

 

h.265

macOS High Sierra also migrates the operating system to h.265 from h.264. This upgrade brings 40 percent higher compression without compromising quality, which means video files will be smaller in size and easier to manage.

 

Metal 2+ VR

Finally, Apple says that macOS High Sierra brings a host of graphics improvements to the Mac as it doubles down on the Pro market. High Sierra includes the new Metal 2 graphics engine, bringing 10x improvement over Metal 1 in graphics.

 

High Sierra also includes spherical video support, VR engines from Unreal, and Metal integration with virtual reality. More on that later….

 

Availability

macOS High Sierra will be available to developers later today and to the public later this autumn.

 

https://arstechnica.co.uk/apple/2017/06/macos-high-sierra

 

 

macOS High Sierra will run on anything that supports macOS Sierra today

 

Apple has some good news for those of you who still use older Macs: the new release, macOS High Sierra, will run on any Mac hardware that currently runs Sierra. The full support list is as follows:

 

• MacBook (late 2009 and later)
  
• iMac (late 2009 and later)
  
• MacBook Air (2010 and later)
  
• MacBook Pro (2010 and later)
  
• Mac Mini (2010 and later)
  
• Mac Pro (2010 and later)
  

Last year, Sierra dropped support for many 2007, 2008, and 2009-era Macs, the first time Apple had changed its system requirements since releasing Mountain Lion in 2012. At the time, the company told us that it wanted to bring the Mac’s software support cycle more in line with its hardware support lifecycle. Apple considers hardware made between five and seven years ago to be “vintage,” and it limits the type of service it will provide for those machines. Anything made more than seven years ago is considered “obsolete,” and Apple and its authorized service providers will no longer offer to support or repair it if you bring it in.

 

Still, given that desktops and laptops improve at a slower rate and have a longer useful life than phones and tablets, it’s nice to see that Apple isn’t just heedlessly dropping support for older hardware based on its vintage rather than its capabilities. Not all Macs will support all of High Sierra's new features—some capabilities rely on hardware only included in newer Macs—but as long as your Mac runs Sierra, you’ll be able to get most of the new improvements if you want them.

Edited June 5, 2017 by Arthur

[Grey-gear]

They may not had the time to come up with a name after coming up with the apple HomePod.

[synaesthesia]

It's not like they're known for innovation so why start with names?

 

** Edit. Perhaps they should have called it Sierra Ghia. Paves the way for Sierra Cosworth.

[hardtailstar]

They may not had the time to come up with a name after coming up with the apple HomePod.

 

Just reminds me of a bargin shop that is in my town.

 

Homeplus. Whats more annoying is that Homepod fits into their jingle!

[luke1991]

It's not like they're known for innovation so why start with names?

 

** Edit. Perhaps they should have called it Sierra Ghia. Paves the way for Sierra Cosworth.

2020's release macOS Escort, before diving in to darker territory.

[2ilent8cho]

When they changed from cats to places in California for the MacOS names they often did joke videos in the keynote of a journey they went on and in a very subtle way gave you the impression of smoking something whilst on the journey. I think 'High' sierra is another play on the subtle joke.

[sted]

2020's release macOS Escort, before diving in to darker territory.

 

they may have refocused by then

[Brimstone]

I think the more important issue with macOS 10.13 is that you will no longer be able to image Macs because of ADFS...

 

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/imaging-will-be-dead-soon-ish/

[mavhc]

I think the more important issue with macOS 10.13 is that you will no longer be able to image Macs because of ADFS...

 

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/imaging-will-be-dead-soon-ish/

 

ADFS is Apple DOS File System, or Acorn's Advanced Disk File System, or MS's Active Directory Federation Services.

 

APFS however.... not to be confused with AFS or AFP of course.

 

That article doesn't say why disk imaging is incompatible with APFS though. I guess per machine encryption? Still, if there's demand someone will make it happen, unless Apple lock it down as much as iOS.

 

With snapshots in your FS you've fixed half the need for imaging.

[Brimstone]

ADFS is Apple DOS File System, or Acorn's Advanced Disk File System, or MS's Active Directory Federation Services.

 

APFS however.... not to be confused with AFS or AFP of course.

 

That article doesn't say why disk imaging is incompatible with APFS though. I guess per machine encryption? Still, if there's demand someone will make it happen, unless Apple lock it down as much as iOS.

 

With snapshots in your FS you've fixed half the need for imaging.

Sorry my bad with typing, the reason I know this? because it has come from the horses mouth as such (Apple).

 

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/10/mac_administrators_prep_for_change/

[Arthur]

That article doesn't say why disk imaging is incompatible with APFS though.

Imaging's demise has been greatly exaggerated...

 

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/79388

 

DEP / Deployment / General related:

 

• ASR restore on AFPS: it will be a Thing of some sort. The engineer spoken to hinted that they didn't even know internally exactly how it would work yet, but they fully expect to support asr restores in the future, even with APFS.
  
• System Image Utility: the team that writes it knows it is broken, and wants it to be fixed, and expect to have it resolved with APFS support, but maybe not until seed 3 at the earliest
  
• APFS on the Mac in general: they know it's still kinda broken. Not a single person I talked to sounded confident about using it for anything _right now_ and that it will likely take multiple seed iterations until it's in the state they feel like it should be. NOTE: This is my interpretation of the subtext of what they were saying. No one flat out stated that.
  
• NetBoot / NetInstall support (as well as SIU): they fully expect to support that as an option and it's not going away
  (By proxy, the Server.app team also confirmed they have no intentions of anything other than it continuing to work as expected - they hadn't heard anything about it going away and were surprised by the rumors)
  
• HFS+ will likely continue to be supported throughout all of 10.13's lifetime, but no one actually seemed to know for sure. I'd hazard a guess that 10.14 will be the cutoff point, although Apple has a penchant for surprises mid-upgrade-cycle.
  
• With today's announcement about DEP support for random devices, there's less internal concern about the rate at which they are offering DEP supported vendors in various countries (26 countries right now).
  
• I asked about the crazy idea we brought up to our rep about an in-house caching server / CDN / DEP activation endpoint that was, in some way, “owned by Apple” but still allowed devices internally to activate OSes / iOS / DEP without having traffic leaving the internal network.
  
  • They were blown away by this idea and were intrigued by the possibility, and wanted to bring it up to their manager, but there are several obvious caveats:
    
  • how do we guarantee that this “Apple CDN endpoint” never physically moves?
    
  • For security, they can't allow it to activate just anything; there has to be some kind of guarantee
    
  • File a feature request asking for this.
    

  [*]FILE FEATURE REQUESTS/BUG REPORTS / ENHANCEMENT REQUESTS FOR EVERYTHING. LITERALLY EVERYTHING. DUPLICATING RADARS IS FINE, ESPECIALLY FROM DIFFERENT COMPANIES. IF POSSIBLE WITH YOUR AGREEMENT, FILE BOTH A REGULAR APPLE BUG RADAR, AND FILE AN ENTERPRISE CASE.

  [*]MOST IMPORTANTLY, provide numbers. Provide numbers, impact data, sysdiagnoses, logs. The more you provide up front, the more they listen.

  [*]They do see 'numbers of people requesting' as a metric for importance. Not every team measures it the same way, but more shouting = more attention, in general.

 

ASR will support APFS soon and Netboot isn't being discontinued either so you will more than likely still be able to restore disk images with products such as Imagr in due course.

Edited July 19, 2017 by Arthur

[Brimstone]

Imaging's demise has been greatly exaggerated...

 

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/79388

 

 

 

ASR will support APFS soon and Netboot isn't being discontinued either so you will more than likely still be able to restore disk images with products such as Imagr in due course.

 

If you read other developers discussions and the whole of the thread you posted there are other people who have been talking to engineers at the labs at WWDC who have told them that imaging will be dead, system image util and NetBoot will be gone.

[Arthur]

Some new High Sierra articles from Apple.

 

• Prepare your institution for iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, or macOS Server 5.4
   
  
   
   
  
• Prepare for APFS in macOS High Sierra
   
  

  When you upgrade to macOS High Sierra, systems with all flash storage configurations are converted automatically. Systems with hard disk drives (HDD) and Fusion drives won't be converted to APFS. You can't opt-out of the transition to APFS.

   
   
  
• Prepare for changes to Content Caching in macOS High Sierra
   
  

  After you upgrade to macOS High Sierra, tethered caching is now available in the Content Caching setting of the Sharing pane in System Preferences. This service allows a Mac to share its Internet connection with many iOS devices connected via USB and cache specific types of content as they are installed on each connected device.
  macOS High Sierra introduces Parents, which allows you to select a Mac that will serve all of its cached content to your Mac. Parents can also be children hosting caching services, making tiered caching configuration possible.
   
  For example, if you have a district office, you may make an iMac your parent for the caching service. Locations throughout the city could use the district office as their parent caching service, allowing potential updates to flow from the district office to each location.

   
  
• Prepare for changes to kernel extensions in macOS High Sierra
   
  

  To improve security on the Mac, kernel extensions installed with or after the installation of macOS High Sierra require additional authorization. This is known as Secure Kernel Extension Loading (SKEL). Any user can approve the authorization, even if they don’t have administrator privileges.
   
  Kernel extensions don't require authorization if they:
   
  

  • Were on the Mac before the upgrade to macOS High Sierra.
    
  • Are replacing previously approved extensions.
    

  If you want to disable SKEL, boot into macOS Recovery and use the spctl command. Run the command by itself to get more information about how to use the spctl command.

   

  If you reset NVRAM your Mac will revert to its default state with SKEL enabled. You can set a firmware password on your Mac to prevent unauthorized changes to NVRAM.

   

  In macOS High Sierra, enrolling in Mobile Device Management (MDM) automatically disables SKEL. The behavior for loading kernel extensions will be the same as macOS Sierra.

   

  In a future update to macOS High Sierra, you will be able to use MDM to enable or disable SKEL and to manage the list of kernel extensions which are allowed to load without user consent.

   

   

  [*]Upgrade macOS on a Mac at your institution

   

  About monolithic system imaging

  Apple doesn't recommend or support monolithic system imaging when upgrading or updating macOS.

   

  Monolithic system imaging can only be used to re-install macOS, not to upgrade to a new macOS version.

   

  If you try to use a monolithic system image, required firmware updates will be missing from the installation. This causes the Mac to operate in an unsupported and unstable state. You can use system images to re-install the existing operating system on a Mac.

   

  If you need to create an image of an APFS container, use one of these supported methods:

  • Disk Utility
    
  • diskutil
    
  • System Image Utility
    

  NetRestore in System Image Utility

  If you want to create a NetRestore image that you can use to re-install macOS High Sierra on a Mac with all flash storage, don't create the image from the macOS Installer. Instead, connect another Mac with macOS High Sierra via Target Disk Mode, and use it as the image source. The resulting NetRestore image will be APFS, and is only supported to re-install macOS High Sierra on a Mac with all flash storage.

 

If you read other developers discussions and the whole of the thread you posted there are other people who have been talking to engineers at the labs at WWDC who have told them that imaging will be dead, system image util and NetBoot will be gone.

According Apple (see the last article I linked to above) imaging is not completely dead yet.

Edited August 22, 2017 by Arthur

[Arthur]

www.jamf.com/blog/whats-next-with-apfs-weve-got-answers

 

The ecosystem of imaging technologies (a set of technologies used in a variety of deployment scenarios to prepare machines for end users) are impacted by the advent of APFS. Traditional system imaging is being replaced with Device Enrollment Program (DEP) workflows, which automatically configure systems by loading a mobile device management (MDM) profile on to the computers.

 

Let’s look at the ways IT has used imaging up until this point and how each will be impacted:

 

• Monolithic imaging: Erasing an entire hard drive or volume and re-writing with entirely new data, including the operating system, customizations and applications. With macOS High Sierra, Apple does not recommend or support monolithic imaging for upgrades or updates.
  
• Modular imaging: Similar to monolithic imaging, the entire hard drive is erased. However, a known good operating system is applied first, then components such as configurations and applications are applied on top of it.
  
• Thin imaging: Deploying an agent for a management tool as the only change made in an otherwise clean system. The tool installs customizations, applications and other requirements. This workflow has been completely replaced by DEP.
  

A new era with APFS and DEP

It’s clear to see that Apple is pushing IT admins away from imaging and towards the more automated and secure process of DEP workflows. And, with the shift to APFS, DEP offers a solution to standardize certain settings (Wi-Fi), meet security compliance (enforce a passcode) and further enable end users (customized app set). It’s time to imagine (or re-imagine) the possibilities for your environment.

[Arthur]

High Sierra is now available to download...

 

https://itunes.apple.com/app/macos-high-sierra/id1246284741?mt=12