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Apple Seeds Fifth Beta of macOS High Sierra to Developers

Monday August 7, 2017 10:02 am PDT by Juli Clover
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.

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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.

[ 83 comments ]


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Markoth
22 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.
Rating: 9 Votes
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mmomega
22 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.
Rating: 8 Votes
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StevieD100
22 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.
Rating: 7 Votes
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HBX
22 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.
Rating: 6 Votes
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Bacillus
22 months ago

Steve Jobs has been gone for almost 6 years.

No, Steve wll always be with us.
Rating: 5 Votes
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StevieD100
22 months ago

They should use the Windows 10 update model and keep the OS constantly fresh and updated to latest APIs and optimisations. macOS very rarely has updated driver optimisations after the beta stage and many months after. As for APIs..behind Linux.

The last thing we want is forced updates and lost work.
Sorry, but no, that is not what is needed.
Rating: 5 Votes
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rgeneral
22 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.
Rating: 5 Votes
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mdnz
22 months ago

Is there APFS support for Mac Pro 5,1 2010/2012 in this one? Can anyone confirm?


There is, it's stated in the release notes.
Rating: 4 Votes
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EnderBeta
22 months ago

They should use the Windows 10 update model and keep the OS constantly fresh and updated to latest APIs and optimisations. macOS very rarely has updated driver optimisations after the beta stage and many months after. As for APIs..behind Linux.

Oh dear lord please no! If they force updates I'll never update again and drop Mac entirely. I hate forced updates. I'll update when I'm ready and I know the updates will not break my programs on my machine or impede my work flow.

I despise Windows 10 for this very reason.
Rating: 4 Votes
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justperry
22 months ago

They should use the Windows 10 update model and keep the OS constantly fresh and updated to latest APIs and optimisations. macOS very rarely has updated driver optimisations after the beta stage and many months after. As for APIs..behind Linux.


Ugh, please No, windows update really sucks.

I think the way Apple Updates are done is not what it used to be, before I could manually install, it was faster and I could chose the exact time of a restart.
Rating: 4 Votes

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