Apple Seeds Fifth Beta of macOS Sierra 10.12.4 to Developers [Update: Public Beta Available Too]

[slimothy]

Hopefully in an hour.
Don't worry, I just installed it and I couldn't really find anything new on the surface. It seems that most changes are internal.
It does feel a little faster overall.

UPDATE:
Settings now have a nice breakdown of iCloud storage usage, and you can manage it in a very granular way. You are now able to delete individual files or folders from iCloud from the Settings App.
I'm sure there's more to discover.

Ah, I hope so!

Damn that's a nice feature actually.

 

[Twimfy]

In all my years of beta testing this was the most terrifying install I've ever done. On my 17" 2011 MBP it displayed what looked like a firmware update bar and then restarted itself about 6 times in quick succession and seems to have reset my SMC.

However a strange graphical glitch many 17" users were getting on boot whereby the screen showed a garbled strip seems to have gone. This was usually a symptom that appeared after the logic board had been replaced under recall due to the AMD GPU issues and was said by Apple to be a software error.

Whatever it was they seem to have finally fixed it but I'm fascinated to know exactly what it is they've changed. I should have made a note of my SMC/Bootrom etc numbers to compare to a .3 user.

 

[dotnet]

Has anybody noticed a change of colour calibration in the latest beta (16E183b)?

I upgraded this morning and was greeted with a new colour experience, that resembled what I felt when I first saw the wide-gamut iPhone 7+ screen. Mind you, this is on a mid-2014 MBP which clearly doesn't have a wide-gamut display. I wonder whether Apple tweaked the colour profile of the older MBP screen to match the aesthetics of the newer displays.

The default colour profile ("Color LCD") is now dated 23 Feb 2017, so it seems fairly new.

 

[haddy]

My view is El Cap and Sierra are much more complex, disk intensive OS versions than the older OS X releases ( such as 10.6 Snow Leopard ), so they REQUIRE an SSD to even be tolerable. As a Mac developer, I often boot 10.6 from a hard drive and the boot time is FASTER than my boot time of El Cap/Sierra with an SSD ( both on the same iMac ).

My point is all this "El Cap was designed for SSD" might have some truth to it but in my view the OS's complexity and increased size was saved by SSD's speed and the "planning" is mostly marketing spin.

Umm..... after booting and application use the drive only matters if you don't have much RAM, and you get frequent page outs. The new 27' iMacs can take 64 gigs. I have mine loaded with 32. And everything gets pretty quickly loaded int RAM.

 

[Twimfy]

Has anybody noticed a change of colour calibration in the latest beta (16E183b)?

I upgraded this morning and was greeted with a new colour experience, that resembled what I felt when I first saw the wide-gamut iPhone 7+ screen. Mind you, this is on a mid-2014 MBP which clearly doesn't have a wide-gamut display. I wonder whether Apple tweaked the colour profile of the older MBP screen to match the aesthetics of the newer displays.

The default colour profile ("Color LCD") is now dated 23 Feb 2017, so it seems fairly new.

Just checked and my Color LCD profile is dated at 8th March 2017 (21:59) which is pretty much the exact time the machine came back up after updating, so it seems they have made changes to the profile. Although for what reason I'm not sure, Nightshift doesn't appear to be supported on my machine so I can't see the point.

 

[dotnet]

Hm, on closer inspection the new profile appears to be identical to the one dated 5th Jan 2016, apart from a few metadata fields. Maybe I'm just imagining things...

 

[jdmachogg]

Night Shift, Shanghainese and cricket scores? This is about the least exciting macOS update I can remember.

Night shift is pretty important for people way up North where the sun goes down at 4pm and we generally work late.

 

[Caesar_091]

Are AMD drivers for RX 480 back in this new build build?

 

[BlandUsername]

EL Cap and Sierra are design for Solid State Hard Drives (SSD) so you should change your hard drive in order to have a much better performance out of your old machine

Well, That means they should have never released to a lot of their products. Given you cannot upgrade to SSD in any of them.

 

[Pablo.A.Pucci]

Well, That means they should have never released to a lot of their products. Given you cannot upgrade to SSD in any of them.

All the computers that Apple have made since 2012 come with standard SSD´s.

 

[svendobbelaere]

All the computers that Apple have made since 2012 come with standard SSD´s.

incorrect. For instance the current Mac mini and the current iMac would like to have a word, at least. And maybe the "classic" MacBook Pro non-retina too, since that came with a hard drive and was sold until last year or something.

 

[albebaubles]

anything about APFS?

 

[Pruus]

I do have some problems with bluetooth. Mouse and keyboard flipps out sometimes....

 

[Calby]

Just let's hope that they can fix all of the little bugs in macOS - I'm currently waiting for the GM I can't take the risk of installing a beta on my only machine.

Anyone with MBP 2016 that runs it?
Hows the battery life? Speed?

 

[wallaby]

For anyone who wants blue light filtering at night, F.lux has been around a long time (and is freely available).

I'm still dreading the day I finally get the gumption to re-install El Capitan on my MBA. I miss Karabiner and XtraFinder, but it's a pain to back up files and clear your hard drive.