Apple Seeds Fifth Beta of macOS High Sierra to Developers - MacRumors
Skip to Content

Apple Seeds Fifth Beta of macOS High Sierra to Developers

Apple today seeded the fifth beta of an upcoming macOS High Sierra update to developers for testing purposes, two weeks after seeding the fourth beta and two months after introducing the new software at the 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference.

The new macOS High Sierra beta can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Center or over-the-air using the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store.

Today's beta introduces a new option to capture Live Photos while using FaceTime. FaceTime Live Photos was first introduced in the iOS 11 beta.

macOS High Sierra builds on features introduced in macOS Sierra, focusing on new storage, video, and graphics technology. It introduces a new Apple File System (APFS), High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC), and an updated version of Metal with support for VR and external GPUs.


Several apps are gaining new features in macOS High Sierra. The Photos app is being updated with a new sidebar that makes it easier to access editing tools and albums, and there are new filters and editing options like Curves and Selective Color. Photos also supports external editing apps like Photoshop and Pixelmator, saving changes made in those apps, and it interfaces with new third-party printing services.

Safari is gaining speed enhancements, an option to prevent autoplay videos, and a new feature that puts a stop to cross-site data tracking. Siri in macOS High Sierra has expanded music capabilities and a new, more natural voice, and Spotlight supports flight status information. There are also improvements to iCloud, FaceTime, Messages, and Notes.

macOS High Sierra is available for both registered developers and public beta testers and will see several updates ahead of its expected fall public release.

For a complete overview of changes coming in macOS High Sierra, make sure to check out our dedicated macOS High Sierra roundup.

Related Forum: macOS High Sierra

Popular Stories

imac video apple feature

Apple Released Yet Another New Product Today

Friday March 20, 2026 2:39 pm PDT by
Apple has unveiled a whopping nine new products so far this March, including an iPhone 17e, iPad Air models with the M4 chip, MacBook Air models with the M5 chip, MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, the all-new MacBook Neo, an updated Studio Display, a higher-end Studio Display XDR, AirPods Max 2, and now the Nike Powerbeats Pro 2. iPhone 17e features the same overall design as...
iPhone 18 Pro Deep Red Feature

iPhone 18 Pro Launching Later This Year With These 12 New Features

Wednesday March 18, 2026 7:39 am PDT by
While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for another six months or so, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices. It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component...
ios 26 4 pastel

iOS 26.4: Top 10 New Features Coming to Your iPhone

Friday March 20, 2026 2:44 pm PDT by
iOS 26.4 isn't the major update with new Siri features that we hoped for, but there are some useful quality of life improvements, and a little bit of fun with an AI playlist generator and new emoji characters. Playlist Playground - Apple Music has a Playlist Playground option that lets you generate playlists from text-based descriptions. You can include moods, feelings, activities, or...

Top Rated Comments

Markoth Avatar
113 months ago
I wish there was more to the High Seirra update than eGPU support, APFS, and an updated Safari. I hope APFS is incredible!
Filesystems are only incredible to those of us geeky enough to know how they work, and appreciate them. APFS will be incredible to the average person in direct comparison with HFS+, but pretty soon most people won't notice it, and forget it's even there. You don't notice good filesystems.
Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)
mmomega Avatar
113 months ago
For all of the nifty new features of Photos when will Apple bring back the ability that iPhoto had to type in one Title field and then hit the tab key or arrow key to go to the next photo's title field? This is such a simple request and one I've been making since Photos was released. If I am importing dozens of photos and want go through them one by one to give them a name in the Title field why does Apple now make me use my mouse to select each new title box? That costs additional time and use of the keyboard and/or mouse when it should not be necessary. Apple has a bad habit of taking a perfectly good feature and getting rid of it for no apparent reason.

And I don't need to hear from all of the users that say I should be using other programs with my photos. Nothing was a simple as putting a SSD card in my iMac, opening iPhotos, selecting the photos I wanted to import and automatically putting them where I wanted them to go, then selecting the first photo to give it a name and then tabbing to the next and then the next and so on until I had labeled every photo. Now you have to first import your photos, then create a new Album then drag those photos into the album then follow the process I described above. It just makes no sense and should be corrected to make it a better user experience.

After all, I thought that is what Steve Jobs always wanted for his customers.
Steve Jobs has been gone for almost 6 years.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
StevieD100 Avatar
113 months ago
It hasn't hurt Windows 10 users. The slow ring and fast ring has very extensive testing.

ROFL and 'What are you smoking?"
I spent the last 20 years of my working life writing software for MS platforms.(and 20+ years before that on Mainframes, Unix and VMS). Microsoft do very little real testing. They rely on us poor users to do it for them. In 2015 had a whole Factory just two hours from going out of action due to their lack of testing. In one update to Server 2012 they missed a file that was critical to MSCS operations. Only our final testing found it before we rolled the update out to some 60 MSCS cluster pairs. It took MS two weeks to sort it out and re-issue the patch.
Then we had the foot in mouth about Paint.exe a week or so ago. They are forcing change on users. The majority of them don't want the latest shiny-shiny, oh dear it crashed bit of bling. They want it to work when they want it and consistently.
Oh, and the irritating habit that W10 has of replacing user installed Graphics drivers with out of date ones. The Windows forums have hundreds of complaints about this.
My stress levels and B.P. have both gone down considerably since I retired and stopped using Windows.
Their update model and the way that you can't refuse the update on W10 is not the way to go for Apple.
Even WSUS is not immune to major foopahs.
I've never had an OSX update fail on me but there again, I always wait a couple of weeks before applying it.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
HBX Avatar
113 months ago
That is not a quantifiable statement.

On several forums on his site people who installed Windows 10 have put it ahead of macOS on almost every aspect apart from 'interface uniformity' and font rendering.

I was the first person on this forum to install Win10 on a Mac and gave everyone a very thorough review, benchmark and feature test. I don't need to convince you of any of the above. There are thousands of posts by members highlighting that Windows outperformed macOS on:

- Interface speed, split screen feature, multi tasking animations
- video acceleration, HEVC 10bit 4K decoding on GPU. Not even High Sierra offers this.
- software decoding of HEVC 10bit 4K even on a crappy dual core Skylake Pentium. This isn't possible even on the best i7 with High Sierra
- Video encoding, 4x faster in Premiere due to native driver support for GPU encode.
- always up to date APIs such as OpenCL, OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenAl, etc.
- 3D performance in any game is faster
- CUDA and OpenCL based rendering is on average 15% faster
- Ever optimised drivers for just about any peripheral or hardware
- software for tuning CPUs, GPUs and SSDs
- Native support for eGPU, NVME, USB 3.1, Thunderbolt 3, and other next gen tech long before macOS
- True plug and play. Nice not needing to reboot every time a driver is installed.

Anyway I'm tired of stating the obvious. Objective observations are important otherwise might as well believe the earth is flat.
I love these posts. Tell that to the 1600 tickets sitting in my CRM all of them are escalated issues all running Windows 10.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Bacillus Avatar
113 months ago
Steve Jobs has been gone for almost 6 years.
No, Steve wll always be with us.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
113 months ago
The last thing we want is forced updates and lost work.
Sorry, but no, that is not what is needed.
I am with you there. The win10 update is causing lots of headaches for us.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)