What's New in macOS High Sierra: APFS, Metal 2, Photos Improvements, Safari Autoplay Blocking and More

Apple named its next-generation version of the Mac operating system High Sierra because it's designed to improve macOS Sierra through several major under-the-hood updates. While most of what's in High Sierra isn't outwardly visible, there are some refinements to existing features and apps like Safari, Photos, Siri, FaceTime, and more.

We went hands-on with the High Sierra beta to give MacRumors readers a quick idea of what changes and improvements to expect when the software comes out this fall. Check out the video below to see what's new.


Some of the biggest app changes are in Photos, which has a persistent side bar, editing tools for Curves and Selective Color, new filters, options for editing Live Photos, new Memories categories, improved third-party app integration, and improvements to facial recognition, with the People album now synced across all of your devices.

Safari is gaining a new autoplay blocking feature for videos, Intelligent Tracking Prevention to protect your privacy, and options for customizing your browsing experience site-by-site, while Mail improvements mean your messages take up 35 percent less storage space.

Siri has a more natural voice, just like on iOS 11, and can answer more music-related queries. iCloud Drive file sharing has been added, and in High Sierra and iOS 11, all of your iMessage conversations are saved in iCloud, saving more storage space.

When installing High Sierra, it will convert to a new, more modern file system called Apple File System or APFS. APFS is safe, secure, and optimized for modern storage systems like solid-state drives. Features like native encryption, crash protection, and safe document saves are built in, plus it is ultra responsive and will bring performance enhancements to Mac.

APFS is accompanied by High Efficiency Video Encoding (HEVC) which introduces much better video compression compared to H.264 without sacrificing quality. The other major under-the-hood update is Metal 2, which will bring smoother animations to macOS and will provide developers with tools to create incredible apps and games.

Metal 2 includes support for machine learning, external GPUs, and VR content creation, with Apple even providing an external GPU development kit for developers so they can get their apps ready for eGPU support that's coming to consumers this fall. Apple is also working with Valve, Unity, and Unreal to bring VR creation tools to the Mac.

macOS High Sierra will run on all Macs that are capable of running macOS Sierra. For a more detailed overview of what's included in the update, make sure to check out our macOS High Sierra roundup.

Related Forum: macOS High Sierra

Top Rated Comments

true god Avatar
85 months ago
Really excited about APFS.
Score: 40 Votes (Like | Disagree)
djcerla Avatar
85 months ago
The last few months made the Mac great again.
Score: 29 Votes (Like | Disagree)
HobeSoundDarryl Avatar
85 months ago
Wow that reads like it auto-converts HFS to APFS. I wonder how it does that? Create new APFS partition, copy from HFS to APFS, reformat HFS partition to APFS, delete partition to end up with one big APFS partition?

Similarly, I wonder about the relationship of this and Time Capsule? Does Time Capsule remain as is or would it be converted to APFS too?

Can external HFS drive be auto-updated to APFS using the same approach?

Lots of questions.

Edit: lots of people are pointing to this as answers: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/715/ Thanks to all.
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)
CmdrLaForge Avatar
85 months ago
Kind of a Snow Leopard release. Looking forward to this.
Score: 17 Votes (Like | Disagree)
CarlJ Avatar
85 months ago
Can you expand upon this? And if it is clearly better, why do you think Apple didn't adopt it after all? They were working on support for a long time.
I don't know if it's where the OP was going, but one of the things ZFS has that APFS noticeably doesn't, is baked-in error correction and/or checksumming. Having a background task in the kernel slowly (continually or periodically) reading through the entire filesystem and comparing blocks read off the disk with their associated checksums, is huge. If a block goes bad, you find out about it soon, rather than "uh oh", when you really need it. With a filesystem that uses "free" space to store spare copies of blocks, the kernel may be able to recover it on the fly, but even without redundancy, it can flag that the affected file needs to be reloaded from backup (you have those right?) before passing time increases the odds of the backup being overwritten, getting lost, etc. Some sort of systematic kernel-level data integrity checking is the one bit sorely missing from APFS.

(I recall stories of early ZFS builds actually unearthing long-standing 1-in-a-billion errors in device drivers, disk controllers and such - they were occasionally reading back blocks that didn't match the expected checksums, in cases where, say, a device driver managed to not write out an updated copy of a disk block because it got interrupted in an unexpected pattern.)

As to upgrade speeds, APFS was designed so that you can build all the metadata/overhead off in the free space on the disk, and simply point it at/into the existing file content of an HFS+ filesystem (I believe BTRFS has this same feature), and Craig Federighi said during the DaringFireball podcast from WWDC that during the iOS 10.1 and 10.2 upgrades, they actually "migrated" everyone's filesystems to APFS - that is, built the extra metadata/header blocks in the disk's free space - then ran filesystem checks on the result, and sent diagnostic reports back to Apple if anything was amiss, and then discarded the new blocks, leaving everyone with their unharmed HFS+ filesystems. This explains both why the upgrade is so fast, and why it went quite smoothly when iOS 10.3 rolled out.
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)
newyorksole Avatar
85 months ago
I think it's time to update this 2010 iMac of mine. High Sierra + iMac 2017 = Win

Then will supplement that with iPad 12.9" 2017 + iOS 11.
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Popular Stories

iOS 17

iOS 17.2 Will Add These 12 New Features to Your iPhone

Friday December 1, 2023 12:19 pm PST by
iOS 17.2 has been in beta testing for over a month, and it should be released to all users in a few more weeks. The software update includes many new features and changes for iPhones, including the dozen that we have highlighted below. iOS 17.2 is expected to be released to the public in mid-December. To learn about even more features coming in the update, check out our full list. Journal ...
iOS 16 4 Web Push

Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users

Wednesday December 6, 2023 5:06 am PST by
Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users by tracking push notifications that move through Google's and Apple's servers, a US senator warned on Wednesday (via Reuters). In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from the tech giants to track smartphones. The traffic flowing from apps that send push notifications...
airpods pro 2 pink

Apple Releases New AirPods Pro 2 Firmware

Tuesday December 5, 2023 11:28 am PST by
Apple today released new firmware update for both the Lightning and USB-C versions of the AirPods Pro 2. The new firmware is version 6B34, up from the 6B32 firmware introduced in November. Apple does not provide details on what features might be included in the refreshed firmware beyond "bug fixes and other improvements," so it is unclear what's new in the update, but prior software releases ...
magsafe blue 2

iOS 17.2 Brings Qi2 Support to iPhone 13 and iPhone 14 Models

Tuesday December 5, 2023 11:04 am PST by
The iOS 17.2 update that Apple is set to release to the public in the near future will bring support for the next-generation Qi2 wireless charging standard to the iPhone 13 and iPhone 14 models. Qi2 was mentioned in the release notes for the RC version of the update that came out today. With the addition of support for the new standard, iPhone 13 and iPhone 14 models will work with Qi2...
Beyond iPhone 13 Better Blue

'All-Screen' iPhone Under-Display Camera Enters Development

Wednesday December 6, 2023 2:03 am PST by
Apple's Korean suppliers have begun developing smartphone under-display cameras (UDC), paving the way for the first iPhone with a true "all-screen" appearance. According to The Elec, LG Innotek has entered the preliminary development of the UDC, which sits under the display and does not result in a visible hole in the panel when the camera is not in use. A UDC differs from a typical front ...
airpods pro bulbs

Black Friday Prices Return for AirPods Pro 2 With USB-C, iPad, and More

Tuesday December 5, 2023 7:30 am PST by
Today we're tracking a collection of deals that are matching - or nearly matching - the same all-time low discounts we saw during Black Friday. This includes the AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C, 9th generation iPad, and M1 MacBook Air. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the ...
iphone se 4 modified flag edges

iPhone SE 4 May Reuse Existing iPhone 14 Battery

Wednesday December 6, 2023 1:17 pm PST by
Recently, MacRumors has received details on the battery currently being tested on the upcoming fourth-generation iPhone SE, and the information corroborates previous findings in relation to the device. The iPhone SE 4, known by its device identifier D59, is expected to use the exact same battery found in the base model iPhone 14. Partially assembled prototypes of the next iPhone SE have been ...
instagram messenger

Instagram and Facebook Messenger Chats to Disconnect This Month

Tuesday December 5, 2023 1:57 am PST by
Meta has revealed plans to end Instagram users' ability to chat with Facebook accounts later this month, rolling back a feature that it introduced over three years ago. In September 2020, Meta (then Facebook) announced it was merging its Facebook Messenger service with Instagram direct messaging, allowing Instagram users to chat with Facebook users and vice versa using the same platform....