First impression: Apple macOS Sierra

Apple macOS Sierra is finally available to the masses as a free upgrade, through the Mac apps store, and from Apple’s website. The new operating system was initially announced in June, at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, and it promised a number of features, some of which have been long in the making.

While Apple CEO Tim Cook have been repeatedly firm in his stance that Mac OS X and iOS will not converge, it is clear that, at least from a branding perspective, renaming Mac OS X “macOS” does have an unmistakable iOS ring to it, especially when looking at the full range of iOS variations across devices, such as tvOS, and watchOS.

Siri, more or less

Apple macOS Sierra comes with Siri integration, and this means a number of advantages for users, and a relatively small number of caveats.

To anyone who has used a virtual assistant on a desktop, from Google Now to Microsoft Cortana, it’s easy to list the advantages of being able to use voice commands to open applications, find files, send emails and schedule appointments.

In that regard, Siri seems to be a bit more advanced and responsive than Cortana, with a tighter integration with apps than its Microsoft nemesis. With that said, Microsoft Windows 10 is an environment that is popularly host to a far greater number of third-party apps than Mac OS is, which makes it for a tougher environment for a virtual assistant to branch out.

With that said, according to a review by The Verge, there is a question of why Siri and Spotlight seems to diverge and work almost in parallel. It’s possible that as Siri continues to advance, the relevance of Spotlight could diminish, especially because most of the same information displayed on Spotlight can be summoned with Siri, just as fast, and in some cases even faster.

One more small caveat is that some features available in iOS, such as the ability to hail a Uber, or book airfare, are not available to Siri on macOS Sierra.

Auto unlock

Being able to unlock a Mac using an Apple Watch is rather neat, but it does come with a few hoops to jump through, particularly as before being able to do that, a setup process is required, to enable two-steps authorization, for the option to be available. Once the setup is complete, however, unlocking Sierra with an Apple Watch is quick and seamless.

Photos

Apple Photos on the Mac integrates image recognition, and allows to tag photos according to what they look like, which is pretty impressive. Photos uses a deep-learning algorithm, and is capable of recognizing faces, and label images accordingly, and organize them by time and location as well.

Also available from within Photos, is “Memories”, a feature that is capable of finding photos from certain time periods and locations, and stitch them together in an album, similarly to Google does with images in Drive.

iCloud

The Verge has compared iCloud to Dropbox, except that it is already baked into iOS and macOS Sierra, and requires no setup.

With that said, iCloud uses its own algorithm to move files and folders to offline or online locations, and it’s important to keep an eye on where exactly the file are, to make sure iCloud didn’t move something offline that should be available on iCloud, and vice versa.

Impressions

Apple macOS Sierra is by all means a sleek and well designed operating system that has the potential to grow into something a lot more sophisticated and user friendly, in the future, especially in regard to Siri, which needs to expand her capabilities a bit further in order to be truly useful.

Overall, the visual impact and responsiveness are every bit what a Mac user would expect. As The Verge pointed out, different types of user may find that using Siri makes things a little easier, especially for those with a limited knowledge of Macs.

Ready to shop?

If you are looking for the perfect Apple desktop, PortableOne has the best deals on the latest Apple iMac Retina.