Here are the headline features of Sierra, and my thoughts about them.
Siri
Don’t use it on the phone, won’t use it on the Mac. It would be nice if I could use it by typing, though.
Universal Clipboard
This seems like a massive security risk. It works via iCloud, so if someone (like my daughter) is using my iPad, then it will sync the clipboard to that, too. How do I turn it off?
Auto Unlock
I can’t use it, because “two-factor authentication” is apparently completely different from “two-step verification”, and they’re completely incompatible. I can switch to 2FA, but that means I have to logout and re-login to everything, right? Will that help my iMessages that are already not syncing between my Mac and my iPhone?
(Side rant: I can’t use any of the iMessage features because I’m completely on Telegram now, because of the aforementioned troubles with iMessages being unreliable. Sometimes they come to the Mac. Sometimes the iPhone. Sometimes both. Who knows! I need some kind of cloud forecast app to know. Or learn how to read the stars. Or something. Is this the kind of stuff they put in horoscopes?)
Apple Pay
Not available in Japan yet (but will be coming soon, to the “major” credit card brands: JCB and MasterCard. VISA isn’t “major”, I suppose).
Photos
For some reason, the photos themselves sync between machines, but the facial recognition metadata doesn’t? Progress is reducing the amount of things we want to babysit, not more. I don’t want to babysit my photos by correcting facial recognition guesses on both machines, over 5,000+ photos.
Messages
Hmm.
iCloud Drive
Is it better than Dropbox yet?
Optimized Storage
All of a sudden, the voice of one of my podcast panelists simply vanished from the mix. I quit and re-launched Logic, only to be told that the file in question was missing. Sure enough, a visit to Finder revealed that Sierra had “optimized” my storage and removed that file from my local drive.
No thanks.
Picture in Picture
Okay, this might be useful sometimes.
Tabs
“Finally”.
Conclusion
2/10
—
Look, I don’t mean to degrade the excellent work of the team of engineers responsible for macOS at Apple. They’re doing a good job. The upgrade process to Sierra was smooth. There are just a lot of features in this release that don’t excite me. I wish they had fixed other things, like that silly facial recognition sync thing. Maybe they will in the future. I really hope so.
Also: Don’t say “then just use Linux”, because I already do. It’s not as elegant as macOS, but it’s reliable for the work I do (web programming) and when something does go wrong, I know how to fix it.
If you want to get in to an argument with me about how I’m wrong, please make an App.net account and contact me there, I’m @keita.