Apple to automatically cram macOS Sierra into Macs – 'cos that worked well for Windows 10 Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's Windows 10 playbook and will push out its latest macOS (ex-OS X) update as an automatic download. The Cupertino maker of the Performa 275 has confirmed to El Reg that later this week it will begin to push macOS Sierra to Mac owners who have the "automatic update" function enabled on …
Typical rant by someone that didn't read the fcuking article.
Nothing in that article is Anti-Apple, actually its a straight down the line compliment if anything.
The only real problem (not mentioned) is the automatic updates pop-up is quite naggy on El Capitan and seem to get purposely activated by slipclicking.
"Typical rant by someone that didn't read the fcuking article."
Well here is the article.
"Cupertino's customers are conditioned to be extremely loyal to the brand and take whatever Tim Cook and co hand out."
AC, read it. think about it. Consider the deep and begrudging twisted of logic that produces reasoning like that. Stop being an El Reg sheep.
> "Cupertino's customers are conditioned to be extremely loyal to the brand and take whatever Tim Cook and co hand out."
Since when is reporting the truth "anti-apple"n or "apple bashing"?
Apple products aren't magical, innovative, or unique, they're just bog-stock items, often with less features than their competitors, packaged in a pretty she'll, and emblazoned with fruity logo. They appeal to hipsters who want to be seen having "something different", whilst ignoring the fact they're want for something different means they all end up with the same bloody thing.
In the end, iTards will always bash any El Reg article about Apple, as El Reg tells it like it is, rather than slurping at the sphincter of Jobs just to get access to the next iShiney.
Apple announcement: The iPiss will go on sale tomorrow!
Apple drones: Must queue at nearest Apple store to buy one at 12:01 AM
I will report forthwith for reconditioning - mine seems to have worn off. I met news of the iPhone 7 with a "Meh, too big, just like the 6". Happy 5S user here. Steve would be disappointed in me (or possibly in Apple, who knows these days).
Windows 10 includes a ton of changes nobody wants in exchange for a small number of security improvements and a few nifty things for admins (if you're using the Enterprise Edition, which is the only one not that's completely appalling). Sierra so far has no such downsides, and so far has been pretty nice (Tabs! Tabs everywhere!). Being able to copy/paste from a cell phone and unlock with an Apple Watch seem like minor features, but nicely simplify common tasks.
Haven't found Sierra to be any improvement on El Crapitan.
Tried Sirri for ten minutes and went "meh"; can't even close an application like iTunes so nothing useful like "Siri - close all apps and shut down mac". And why does Sirri have to download your address book to Apple to dial a number? My old Motorola Razr was doing this by itself 10 years ago!
Also this version goes to sleep during a virus scan (left to run while I had lunch) which didn't happen previously.
So meh.
No downsides? I take it you aren't using it for software development then. Most IDE's inexplicably stopped being at all stable with Sierra. Which in a development environment is tantamount to worst nightmare, some of my compilers wouldn't even initialise, luckily i had the common sense to VM it before installing it on my main machine. 6 months is my usual time delay for upgrades, hell, I only started using EC 3 days before Sierra went live. Security updates never required installation of EC, so didn't bother. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
They broke video playback this time, that one is confirmed!
As of yet we do not know what else is broken.
Anyone using a Mac for work always needs to hold off for a few months at least, as so far every significant update - and many of the "minor" ones - has broken something important.
I am genuinely starting to think that there won't be any professional users of Macs in five years. Quite where new software will come from then is an open question.
Most Canon software doesn't work yet on Sierra. Canon reported that most of its printers, scanners and camera utilities have issues with Sierra, and recommend to delay the upgrade until a fix is available. See http://www.canon-europe.com/support/consumer_products/operating_system_information/?=j+e
Hint for the CUPS fans: when you buy a €3000 printer, you expect to use it within its full capabilities, usually delivered through the specific driver and software.
Most Canon software doesn't work yet on Sierra
Whereas my Epsons had no problem whatsoever. I've been running the beta for months and I haven't really come across any major problems other than with MplayerX, and that was easily countered by using VLC for a while (MplayerX has since been updated). Oh, and Onyx needed an update, but that's always been tied to the OS version because it goes rather deep.
Another functionally useless piece of blither amounting to: stop complaining and just buy different hardware/software/whatever else the upgrade broke.
Great Cthulhu's Aquatic Anus I'm so fucking tired of hearing that nonsense from fanboys of Linux/Apple/Windows who don't need a specific and usually expensive piece of kit to do their job.
Broke is broke. Broke with no warning is pitiful for the "it just works" shop.
"Tabs! Tabs everywhere!"
Sounds awful.
YES. I hate tabs. They've always seemed to me to be a cop-out for designers who can't figure out how to get relevant information in a single window.
Obviously, browser tabs are an exception to this, but applications with tabs are awful
> Sierra so far has no such downsides, and so far has been pretty nice
On my MBP 2013 the screen zoom feature has become pretty unusable.. (does nothing, then abruptly jumps).
Maybe it's just Apple's way of saying "You need a new MBP". If only they still did a 17" version - I'd buy one tomorrow!
[i]Sierra so far has no such downsides, and so far has been pretty nice[/]
There's *nothing* compelling about Sierra. There's never any use for Siri in an office - "Siri can you shut the fuck up"; nobody has an Apple watch toy; and a few minor tweaks here and there that are aimed completely at Millenials, children (messaging, photos) and fanbois. Then there's the constant all your datas are ours slurp...
The only reason to update is to keep on the prime branch of updates and get it over for the next year.
In all the years I've been using all computers, this is the most barren OS 'full update' ever - more along the lines of a service pack update TBH.
Windows 10 includes a ton of changes nobody wants in exchange for a small number of security improvements and a few nifty things for admins
Don't forget being able to use Ctrl-V at the command line!
I'm not sure the spyware and advertising counts as "security improvements"
Yeah, because I love being on the bleeding of testing Chef/Postgres/Django etc support for Sierra on my work machine.
Hint: on a serious machine it's not just your hardware and the quality of the OS (which is uncomfortably brand new here - did you see all the iOS10 gliches?). It's all the 3rd party stuff supporting the new shiny.
With posts like this, I can see why more than a few people think Apple customers lack judgment.
I'd rather keep my version of "blissful ignorance" and not risk installing Sierra until I am good and ready, txs.
And before wise Linux folk shake their head at such lame practices, I also haven't switched to Ubuntu 16.04. Same reason.
I'd rather keep my version of "blissful ignorance" and not risk installing Sierra until I am good and ready, txs.
And before wise Linux folk shake their head at such lame practices, I also haven't switched to Ubuntu 16.04. Same reason.
For us, it's never quite as black and white. We tend to look at what a new OS release provides, and if it contains features we see as indeed beneficial to work or to security in general we'll test it on a machine after making an extra backup (all machines are backed up via Time Machine as well as a daily Carbon Copy). If that works OK for a couple of months we'll switch all of the machines to keep management consistent.
When it comes to security point updates, it depends on what it is how long we wait. In general, there haven't really been that many INSTALL NOW updates that we abandoned the usual wait-a-day approach with forum monitoring see if an update didn't do a Microsoft and nuke a platform on install.
We follow the same process with iOS10 and Linux. For us, the only obligatory updates are security patches - the rest requires a balance between the cost of overhead and the benefits it brings (although you can't be TOO much out of date on either platform as stuff eventually starts to break).
Agreed.
I was quite happy with mavericks and my workflow for dragging photos straight out of iphoto into screenflow. One upgrade to EC later and I have the joyous piece of shit now named 'Photos' just to keep it in line with iOS (like anyone cares). Now my workflow is drag from photos into finder and then drag from finder to screenflow.
Photos only allows drag/drop with approved 3rd party apps (and finder), I can pay (again) for a major screenflow update for this feature.
I like (well did) Apple but their constant OS revisions are just like M$ now; completely pointless rehashes of the UI, keep changing/removing useful features while adding more bulk to the OS and features that nobody even asked for!
In other words dev teams working on these systems have completely lost their fucking minds.
@Andy Taylor
Agreed. Professionals who require an older OS, for whatever reason, will either not have Automatic Updates turned on, or will choose to decline the OS install when prompted. For everyone else this is a good way of ensuring that Macs have the latest patches - even for clueless users who wouldn't think to check the App Store, or understand the significance of a new OS if they did (Hi Mum!)
My only proviso is that the update doesn't get pushed out to Macs which aren't able to use it.
Security and bug fixes should not be confused with OS "upgrades". Companies have a legal obligation to provide fixes. Unfortunately, Apple often uses new releases to avoid providing fixes for older versions.
Experience has taught me to avoid such updates until the the first patch release. I also have a heap of stuff that might need compatibility updates.
It is more like going from Windows 7 to 7 SP1, or Windows 10 to whatever they are calling the Windows 10.1 that came out in August that's still named Windows 10 to confuse people.
People wouldn't have complained so much about it if Microsoft had:
1) given people a way to permanently refuse the install
2) not later decided that closing the dialog box with the 'x' meant ACCEPTING the install
3) not added a bunch of Google like personal information collection
4) not offered strong hints that Windows would eventually become a subscription service, so updating to 10 now might mean having to pay to keep running it down the road
Apple isn't doing any of the things with Sierra that made people hate Windows 10 so much, and there's no hint they will.
"People wouldn't have complained so much about it if Microsoft had:"
5) NOT forced the '2D FLUGLY' down our throats beginning with 'Ape' (and THEN called it "modern"), and ALSO had NOT taken away MOST of our user customization preferences [aside from the obvious one, 'manual updates only'] and NOT forced their "updates" to ALSO remove them from time to time...
6) had NOT assumed that we're all content consumers using our PCs as if they were PHONES or SLABS
this list can get LONG, so I'll stop now.
"[blah blah] '2D FLUGLY' [blah blah]"
Pardon me but I'm having difficulty working out if you're 12 or 102? You keep banging on about Windows 10 being '2D FLUGLY', at every tenuous opportunity, but what I think you actually mean is that its not to your taste. Skeuomorphic design has, I'm afraid, served its purpose and its day is done. It made sense when computers were just emerging into the home and there were whole generations who needed an illustration of a button to know something was a button and could be clicked upon, but we've moved way beyond that now.
Kids, even toddlers, pick up on how tablets and phones work with ease and after being shown a few things it doesn't take them long to suss out how to navigate their way around a phone/tablet to their favourite games or get to their favourite websites on their own. Similarly, my grandparents, both in their 80s, have Android phones and barring showing them how to get to a few settings I've never had to show them how to use their phones. Granted this is probably due, in part, to things like the skeuomorphic interface of Windows 7, but I'm fairly confident that they could now switch from Windows 7 to 10 on their computers and, conversely due to Android, have no problems doing the stuff they currently do.
For what its worth I think skeuomorphic interfaces are awful (I actively avoided Windows 7 because of Aero) but I've never felt the need to keep banging on and on (and on and on and on) about it being "flugly". I quietly avoided it (Windows 7), merrily got on with my day and didn't sound like I haven't progressed beyond having a tantrum simply because something isn't to my taste. Its not as though there aren't solutions to your "complaint" either. Pick one of them and get on with the more important things in life before you give yourself an ulcer or something!
By the way, I think your caps-lock key has an intermittent fault.
Skeuomorphic design has, I'm afraid, served its purpose and its day is done.
IMHO Skeuomorphic design makes the user interface more comfortable for the eye. The new "modern" interfaces feel like a return to the bad old times of 8bit processors and low-res graphics with severely limited color space. Something most of us happily left behind in the past where it belongs to.
Of course for millennials it might look fresh and fancy, but for most others the new-old flat interfaces are just an eyesore.
"IMHO Skeuomorphic design makes the user interface more comfortable for the eye. "
This; I don't mind interfaces changing but the 'flat ribbon' bullshit MS have been producing for the last ten years is horrible. I also think Apple's interfaces (which is what MS were trying to copy) are horrible too, tbh - and some of the latest offerings for Linux, too - but that's mostly because they're all following the same damn design principles.
Designers of all stripes are terribly susceptible to groupthink and will mindlessly copy whatever is presently fashionable for years at a time regardless of how awful everyone else thinks it looks, leading to everything looking embarrassingly dated a few years down the line.
Skeuomorphic design has, I'm afraid, served its purpose and its day is done.
An opinion. Nothing more.
IMHO Skeuomorphic design makes the user interface more comfortable for the eye. The new "modern" interfaces feel like a return to the bad old times of 8bit processors and low-res graphics with severely limited color space. Something most of us happily left behind in the past where it belongs to.
Also an opinion.
Of course for millennials it might look fresh and fancy, but for most others the new-old flat interfaces are just an eyesore.
My own opinion is that Microsoft worked to put an interface together for Windows XP that allowed you to skin the desktop in whatever manner you preferred. Generally speaking, therefore, if that skinnable interface was still there, then we would probably not have this argument as we could, as was the case on XP, Vista and 7, change the desktop design as we wanted, Aero notwithstanding.
I prefer the skeuomorphic look, indeed I'm still using KDE3 as I type this having had little love for its immediate successor, and still run Windows 7 on all my Windows boxen with Aero switched on, but I know that tastes differ and change. That's the choice I made and it's the main issue here rather than whether you like your buttons flat or puffed up - you should have that choice.
But that's my opinion.
"For what its worth I think skeuomorphic interfaces are awful (I actively avoided Windows 7 because of Aero)"
Ah, but here's the rub - you could turn Aero off and have a Windows 10-esque version of Windows 7/8. Similarly you could turn off teletubby mode in Win XP and see have a Win 2K/9x interface. With 10, it's harsh square edges all over. You could argue it's "clean", and that it's a matter of taste, but it's yet again another forced change.
We are used to different objects with 3D surfaces and different colours and textures. Slabs of flat white on white is just confusing and slows people down.
The address bar on Edge is invisible and if you don't know it's there you'd go straight to the Bing search bar. But that's probably by design.
Sticking to proper UI style guides don't allow the kind of random per-app confusing behaviour that seems to be increasingly common on desktop software these days. Is it text? Is it a link? Is it a textbox? Who knows? All I know is it's flat.
What I see with people using tablets and phones with flat interfaces is people swiping and poking at everything to discover what does what. On a small(ish) touch screen this makes sense as there isn't much screen real-estate to have 3D borders etc. On a laptop/desktop however, having 3D controls allows you to see exactly what is or what is not a clickable button without having to flaming well click on it.
The big thing you're missing here is "choice".
If you avoided Windows 7 because of Aero then you're a bit of a numpty, as there were numerous flat and transparent-less none-Aero themes available. Heck, you could make it look almost like Windows 2000 if you wanted to by dropping it to a classic theme and tweaking the task bar settings.
With Windows 10, MS have increasingly gone down the "our way or the highway" route. If you don't like flat, lifeless, solid-colour boxes, you're SOL, because that's all you get. By all means make the default theme a rather bland and dreary one, but give us some choice. At least they've added back the window shadows that they stupidly removed in Windows 8.
There is a big difference with the way Apple and Slurp approach customers. Apple tries to foster retail customer loyalty with a fair degree of success. Slurp tends to treat retail customers as morons who have no clue why they even have a computer. Slurp's treatment of retail customers risks serious alienation of them. Retail customers are often also corporate users and angry customers will make their opinions known were it hurts - sales.
Apple collects just as much of this from search, Siri, et al. as Google does. It just hasn't entered the advertising business. Yet.
Apple doesn't make a profit of personal information - as a matter of fact, it has firmly tied its wagon to privacy protection. That said, I'd agree with you that there's no predicting what would happen when personal information suddenly became far more profitable for Apple than privacy. After all, it IS a US company..
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>can't you still use CUPS on a Mac ?
Apparently, yes--at least on this kit, which is more than a decade old, and running 10.5.8. Installed CUPS last night to get a long-idle instance of Apple's own StyleWriter 1500 working with a USB-to-serial dongle I found somewhere . For shits'n'giggles, of course, as I haven't needed to print anything since the last millennium. Surprisingly, the test page printed using the cartridge that was abandoned with(in) the printer.
can't you still use CUPS on a Mac ?
CUPS is the OSX print system (just looked in MacOS 10.12 and that's still the case). The only difference is that its setup lives in /private/etc/cups rather than /etc/cups and it's a tad harder to change (you need root privilege and must kill off the daemon before you go change files), but if you want to mess with the basic mechanics it's all there.
That's what I like in general about OSX/MacOS/whatever-it'll-be-called-tomorrow: it's close enough to regular Linux/BSD to lift up the hood and mess with the wiring if you want to, but you don't HAVE to.
This is all pretty benign. You can even refuse and keep going. At least you have some options. The Microsoft fiasco didn't leave much choice in what to do.
For a Mac, having updates downloaded is a nice feature. You get the option of installing it at a later time. What is not to like.
If only Microsoft were as seamless, which I have doubts that they will ever be!
For a Mac, having updates downloaded is a nice feature. You get the option of installing it at a later time. What is not to like.
They're taking something which has been under my control - if and when to update - and giving that control to themselves.
I normally wait until a version of OSX is just about EoL. On purpose.
If they actually do pull this shit, it's not going to be welcome.
They' ve been doing this for ages.
Automatic updates have been downloaded in the background and stored and you are then told that they are available.
Nothing happens until you click 'Install' or 'Update' and you can choose to ignore updates you don't want.
For those people with slow connections it can be a boon. Having said that - it could also take some folks over their data cap.
Automatic download is hideous.
A lot of people are on slow connections and charged by the MB, so they get a double hit of being charged for it and having a slower browsing.
Most people have a data cap (Also known as a "fair use policy") and either get throttled to near nothing or charged through the nose if they hit it.
Tell me the update exists, tell me how big it is and an estimate of how long it'll take to install.
The I'll decide whether I want it at all, when it's convenient to start downloading, and when it's a good time to install.
They' ve been doing this for ages.
None of my OSX desktops have been automatically downloading updates.
Each time after I've finished reviewing a potential update (before agreeing to install it), I then click the update button and it then proceeds to download.
iTunes (for example) is running a much older version, which isn't going to be updated.
Oh...... and FUCK YOU apple for locking out older OSX computers,
whilst NOT updating your current range.
Expect people to clear out the current range of iCRAP, just so they can use the new OS?
Stop fucking about with your Dildo shaped top of the range, and bring back the old aluminum box with expansion & upgradability and I will gladly stump up 3-4K
I'm Chief Engineer of a Web dev shop that do a lot of Ruby and Elixir development; we're almost exclusively a Mac shop. In the last year, we've brought up Docker as a core piece of our technology stacks. We're not, as an organisation, progress-hostile; in fact, I've lost jobs, plural, before for being too far in the opposite direction.
Sierra is the first Mac OS upgrade *since Puma* (10.1; 2001) that the shop I worked for at the time hasn't been standardised on across the board within a fortnight of GM release. We don't anticipate moving to Sierra before what will probably be the 10.12.2 timeframe.
A small number of teething problems on a new release are unavoidable, but Sierra has been extreme in the number, severity, and breadth of problems reported through the channels I follow. The number of reports of Macs becoming partially or completely unusable after the update dwarfs anything I have seen before, probably collectively. Apple have had issues before; have had OS updates that just didn't seem worthwhile (we skipped Mavericks and went directly from Mountain Lion to Yosemite); and so on. Never in our experience, however, have Apple dropped the ball so spectacularly while clearly believing they had dropped a mic instead.
The market is ripe for true disruption. Many Mac shops are sticking with Apple but gnashing their teeth and looking about anxiously while doing so. Windows is almost mind-blowingly better than it was 5-10 years ago, but it still seems to lack the consistency and unobtrusiveness that have been traditional hallmarks of the Mac. No other OS besides OS X/macOS and Windows exists that has anything resembling the end-user-friendly interface, business-friendly licensing and support, and third-party application support of those two systems. (The Year of the Linux Desktop was circa 2003; it's gone off in a radically different, more successful direction since then.) Apple are focussed on their iOS platform (their current herd of cash cows) and simply haven't paid the same attention to Macs as in years past; witness the all-but-official demise of the Mac Pro and Mac mini.
There's nothing else out there for us, or for lots of other shops. Some say "Apple shouldn't take us (Mac users) for granted as much as they are now". Others say "Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence"; Tim Cook and Jony Ive are brilliant in the supporting roles they held for years, but their unfettered leadership is proving a problem for the platform.
Where do we go?
"The market is ripe for true disruption. Many Mac shops are sticking with Apple but gnashing their teeth and looking about anxiously while doing so. "
What Apple seem to have forgotten is that the development platform for iOS is the Mac. If folks get dissatisfied with that, where are the iOS apps going to come from?
"Where do we go?"
That is the problem. I know I'm looking for an alternative.
"Mac owners who have the "automatic update" function enabled" ??
Automatic updates have been there for a while. No new tale to tell... Either you know how to turn them off, or suffer an upgrade.
TBH, most of my Apple hardware won't run Sierra. I'm curious if Apple's Appstore is smart enough to tell?
The only reason I ever update my Mac's OS is to get security fixes.
There hasn't been a new feature I've actually wanted in years. If it wasn't abandoned, I'd still be happily running Snow Leopard.
When I went from Snow Leopard to Yosemite the only thing I really considered an improvement was 'you can turn off the transparency effects all the way'. Everything else just felt like 'change for the sake of change'.
I have a Mac I never use. So take all this with a grain of salt. But I never had a problem using my old HP 6P printer. Other's mileage could vary. But that printer is 20 years old. Even Win7 has to check with windows update to find a driver. The Mac worked with it out of the box. I always update the OS. I always expect it to brick the machine. It never does. Those i-tards with their phones are irritating. And easy to poke fun of. But I've been impressed by the Mac. As soon as I put an SSD in it I might switch to using it instead of my PC. It's a suitable replacement besides gaming of course. I highly recommend people check out how the touch interface works with the trackpad gestures. It's a completely ignored platform. I sympathize with the poster who complained about the compiler not working with Sierra. But you know that pales in comparison to moving all your apps to the Microsoft store version. And all the $ problems that go with that scheme.
Microsoft has long promoted what I call the 'Ecktosketch Feature'. You can recognize it by the little shake the screen makes just before everything disappears. Having used both Apple and Windows products for over 25 years my opinion is that Apple's Product Development methodology stands heads above MS, and while there's always room for improvement, Apple's platform stability and lack of bizarre 'gotchas' that MS seems to revel in has made them easier to support and develop.
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