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Apple Releases Second macOS Sierra 10.12.4 Public Beta for Public Beta Testers
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[doublepost=1486749067][/doublepost]it cause my brand new MacBook Pro to crash and not be able to be started
Apple today seeded the second beta of an upcoming macOS Sierra 10.12.4 update to public beta testers for testing purposes, two weeks after seeding the first public beta and one day after releasing the second 10.12.4 beta to developers.
Beta testers who have signed up for Apple's beta testing program will receive the second 10.12.4 macOS Sierra beta through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store.
Those who want to be a part of Apple's beta testing program can sign up to participate through the beta testing website, which gives users access to both iOS and macOS Sierra betas. Betas should not be installed on a primary machine due to the potential for instability.
macOS Sierra 10.12.4 brings iOS's popular Night Shift mode to the Mac, allowing users to cut down on blue light exposure in the evening. Believed to affect sleep by upsetting the body's circadian rhythm, blue light is thought to be more harmful than yellow light.
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With Night Shift, the Mac's display automatically shifts from cool to warm at sunset and then shifts back at sunrise. Users can also set custom times for the display's colors to shift, or toggle the effect on manually. A Toggle to turn Night Shift on is available in the Notification Center, and Siri can also be used to activate the feature.
macOS Sierra 10.12.4 also includes Shanghainese dictation support, cricket scores for Siri, improved PDFKit APIs, and iCloud Analytics options.
Article Link: Apple Releases Second macOS Sierra 10.12.4 Public Beta for Public Beta Testers
Battery life still not so great. Not sure what they added to make it such a battery hog. Very disappointed.
It's as if Apple deliberately goes out of their way to BREAK long time working things just to obsolete Macs to induce new sales. I see no valid reason to just break WIFI. Yet Apple's record of screwing up Bluetooth and WIFI is notorious. So it's hard to believe it's accidental or necessary for progress. And also don't buy the cost issue for just not breaking something that already works. There just not that much new that's so insanely great that basic networking has to fail.
Now, now, Henrik, what is it, then? Either Apple puts too much new features in an haphazard fashion and ends up dealing with tons of bugs and bloat, and people complain about it, or… they don't put that many, refine their operative systems instead, and you people still complain?
I am the first to criticise Apple for their egregious disregard for professionals and the products targeted at them, such as the Mac Pro or *even* the blatantly abandoned Aperture or the less than essential but nice-to-have Cinema Displays (yes, that whole EMI-shielding – or lack thereof – debacle on the 5K UltraFine displays caused by LG's incompetence is a damn shame, but I see it more as part of growing pains in a transition towards a consumer-geared business model – which I still hope won't be total – than anything else) but you should know that you can't have your cake and eat it too.
Seeing that you're a newbie here, I'm almost guessing that you never used them nor know that some of the most loved (and kept running way past their “expiry date” on many machines to this day) Mac OS X / OS X / macOS versions are precisely the least feature-rich and most refined ones, Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion.
For me, Sierra, which really only adds Siri, this newfangled Night Shift thing (which I unfortunately won't be using, as my Macs are too old for it, but I would otherwise, as I was already running f.lux even before it was booted from iOS – I guess I'll have to keep using it on macOS for a while – and now use Night Shift on my 5S) and that nifty window snapping feature, seems to be a serious candidate for a “refined macOS version” that I may even be forced to keep running for a while on my near-obsolete Late 2009 iMac, with no ill effects (apart from forcing me to buy a brand-new or newer second-hand machine in the long run, that is).
Let me guess, once Apple gets macOS 10.13 / 11.0 (I'm betting on the latter, as iOS *and* macOS may finally converge in version number *and* numbering scheme after converging in naming scheme) out of the door and makes the switch from HFS+ to APFS by default, half of you newbies (and veterans alike!!) will extoll its virtues while the other half will scream bloody murder because some inevitable bug caused you data loss, while complaining about feature bloat/feature scarcity…
Look at the big picture, you people! Don't mistake the forest for the trees.Yes, this whole 12-month cycle thing was probably a bad idea (or badly-executed) in the beginning for macOS development, as it probably forced Apple devs to rush things and cut corners (if not entire features) and iOS for both iPhones and iPads also sucked up a lot of resources in the olden days [*cough* Leopard delays *cough*], but seeing that Apple is now adding and testing features mid-cycle, with a sustained support by both developer *and* public betas instead of just developer previews given out at WWDC and that iOS is now extremely mature, I am figuring that macOS development can only improve again once they get (or regain?) the hang of it.
I still stand by what I said before: if Apple addresses a bug that only affects vintage/near-obsolete and near-vintage machines, even if already belatedly and only on 10.12.5, they will absolutely regain my full respect.
I fully agree with you. Apart from the newbie statement
. I am new as a contributing member here, but have been a Mac user ever since the G3 days and OS 9, so I too have several pieces of 'vintage hardware' lurking around. I was also disappointed with the latest MacBook Pro's, since I hoped for a new powerfull workhorse for my everyday work as a developer, capable of running several virtual machines, database servers app servers and the like. Stuff that so far has killed many a Windows machine, but never a Mac.My hope for Sierra was, since it didn't have that many features, that it would be a new Snow Leopard. Focus on smashing bugs, getting rid of excess fat and making it into a worthy competitor for Snow Leopard, IMO, the best OS X version yet.
It seems to me that Sierra has many under the hood changes, for the purpose of aligning the code base between IOS and MacOS, and Apple is keeping the goodies for when the merge/alignment has been completed. Fingers crossed
Now that you mention APFS. I am looking forward to see how it will play out. Do we really need machines with 32GB's of RAM if we can get Optane "harddrives" and a filesystem that is built for Flash storage. A filesystem that makes the old divide between super fast RAM and super slow spinning disks a thing of the past?
Good things are surely coming our way
What is the deal with FileVault or Gatekeeper running a slow and lengthy "check" of every video file opened under Mac OS 10.12.4? No matter what video file from where, any format, the syststem refuses to open it without running this lengthy security check process. This has forced me to downgrade to 10.12.3, and now my Mail won't work because the Mail system is a "newer: version which is incompatible with this version of macos, once I downgrade. It left the 10.12.4 Mail system in place, ugh!
MacOS 10.12.4 public beta 2 build 16E154a causes panic on start... then reboots on my early 2011 MB Pro. Had to reinstall 10.12.3.
Update: This turned out to be a problem with Kaspersky for Mac. After removing it, MacOS came up just fine.
Update: This turned out to be a problem with Kaspersky for Mac. After removing it, MacOS came up just fine.
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You get nothing for Night Shift on the late 2011 MBP 17", someone needs to release a hack to enable it!!!
It is on my early 2011 MBP.
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I hope your not, because were are all downloading 10.4 Beta 2.
I fully agree with you. Apart from the newbie statement
My hope for Sierra was, since it didn't have that many features, that it would be a new Snow Leopard. Focus on smashing bugs, getting rid of excess fat and making it into a worthy competitor for Snow Leopard, IMO, the best OS X version yet.
It seems to me that Sierra has many under the hood changes, for the purpose of aligning the code base between IOS and MacOS, and Apple is keeping the goodies for when the merge/alignment has been completed. Fingers crossed
Now that you mention APFS. I am looking forward to see how it will play out. Do we really need machines with 32GB's of RAM if we can get Optane "harddrives" and a filesystem that is built for Flash storage. A filesystem that makes the old divide between super fast RAM and super slow spinning disks a thing of the past?
Good things are surely coming our way
Ah, well, then… Respect! [though I did say later on that some of us old-timers sometimes have our own biases
] I am a bit of a lurker myself, so I totally get where you're coming from. But the farthest back my experience goes is running Mac OS X Jaguar on my first USB 2 1.4 GHz iMac G4 for a few days (as it was bought in December the 1st it came with three Panther upgrade installation CDs, which I quickly put to good use, but I kinda missed – and sometimes still do! – those over-the-top, form-over-function, lickable translucent and excessively pin-striped titlebars with shaded text and traffic light buttons ), but I did run some OS 9 apps under Classic back in the day (including a cross-platform SimTower CD I had laying around… the memories!).Well, you mentioned the ultra-fast Flash storage and the lessening of system memory needs… But you mentioned VMs as well. So I ask you: why not both? The use cases you mention seem to benefit from as much memory as you can throw at them. And, like you, there are many pros out there dismayed at the 16GB limitation of these new MacBook Pros. For what it's worth, I believe my vintage 2009 iMac is still kicking thanks mainly to its 32 GB and Core i7 upgrades, *plus* its Fusion Drive. I really don't know which of the three contributes the most to its overall performance, but I believe they all work in tandem.
I mean, with a single-core result of 2801 and multi-core result of 8355 in Geekbench 4, it is basically on par with the 2010 models on single-core and with the 2011 models on multi-core, hence me wishing for Apple to fix that stupid bug. If not, I'll be forced to buy a second-hand 2011 model, upgrade its RAM and maybe even the processor, and sell this to an Android user that doesn't mind eschewing Safari and Mail and just using Chrome…
As for the rest, well, I'm very much wishing to see what performance, efficiency and security gains we can get from all those nifty technologies, especially APFS. Faster and more reliable Time Machine backups, for one, would be a great thing to have… Real pros don't rely just on off-site or on-site backups, but on both, and having them work reliably is a must. And better management of Flash and Fusion Drives alike, considering that any self-respecting vintage Mac user should have one in their system by now, would certainly lend them a few more years (even if we have to hack macOS 10.13/11+ onto them like I did with Mountain Lion on a late 2008 MacBook).
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