macOS 10.13 Wishlist: Features MacRumors Readers Hope to See in the Next Version of macOS

[happydude]

My library of over 16k+ images on my MacBook 2015 works fine without hickups or crashes. Maybe you have some photos that is "broken" and makes it crash. Go into Settings in Photos and see if it is writing to the cloud, it may be why it is slow.

thanks for suggestion. we don't back it up to the cloud (too expensive monthly, we just back up on duplicate externals). plus your MacBook 2015 is significantly newer than our iMac, which is hanging on by a thread waiting to be replaced.

 

[AxoNeuron]

Please Apple, please dear god allow a dark mode for Xcode. It's nice to be able to darken the text editor but the menu's themselves are too bright. It would be nice to be able to use a dark mode with Xcode.

 

[amegicfox]

0. search in mail doesn't work
1. enable root again
2. stop hiding the entire OS
3. night/black view in safari
4. let drag and drop from iPhotos to other apps
5. when you have lots of bookmark, safari booksmarks selection is so slow
6. when you have lots of iMessages, switching is so slow
7. sending movies through iMessage takes forever to compress
8. make AppleScript great again
9. stop transparency and skinny fonts non-sense
10. make quicktime great again
11. let Pages edit PDF directly

 

[agathezol]

I'd sure like to link my Apple ID to my wife's iCloud Photo Library so I can see all of our family photos on my devices as well.

I'd settle for an iCloud Photo Library specific login where I enter her creds on my devices. I shouldn't have to make her account the primary Apple ID on my own devices just to see the iCloud Photo Library.

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

- Expanded Dark Mode - macOS Sierra included a Dark Mode that darkens the dock and the drop down menus across the operating system, but several MacRumors readers would like to see an expanded Dark Mode that darkens all interface elements like Finder and Notification Center.​

Actually, it was Yosemite that introduced Dark Mode, not Sierra. I know it says "included", but it would be best to modify the writing to read as "macOS Yosemite introduced a Dark Mode..."

 

[yadmonkey]

TimeMachine on iCloud, I'm pretty sure is going to be one of the key features of the next Mac OS

I want this, but...

The depressing thing is Comcast's new data caps will make this impractical for many. Complete bull*** and in a total vacuum of viable competition they can get away with it, even though they are sitting on mountains of bandwidth. And they buy every other ad spot rather than upgrade infrastructure just to rub it in.

Lucky for me my town will be installing its own fiber optic internet service in the near future.

 

[Neepman]

Among the other suggestions listed here...

I recently wound up inheriting an old iMac that came To me with El Cap installed. Ran like a dog. An old dog. With three legs. But it had snow leopard discs in the box. Out of curiosity, I blew the machine away, installed a fresh image of snow leopard. Amazing. The machine is fast, stable, beautiful, and all the graphics are colorful, deep, gleaming, and rich. You've gotta try it and see how nice OS X can be. It's fantastic.

iTunes fires right up in under a second, doesn't beachball, is organized in an immediately comprehendable intuitive design laid out sensibly in a straightforward and consistent design language. It plays instantly, plays several kinds of videos just fine, and it hasn't crashed once. The miniplayer works and isn't broken three different ways. There aren't four kinds of UI controls operating in tandem like an MC Escher puzzle. And it has Front Row and a remote that can be operated in the dark by feel and never needs connecting or syncing or special network access bs.

I wouldn't have bought one of these before today, but I am definitely keeping this, if for nothing else than a better Apple TV. This machine has been running nonstop for over a month and hasn't slowed down or skipped a beat. Everything on it indeed just works. It's shocking how nice this old system is. And sad at how far OS X's UI has been allowed to slide.

Rebuild iTunes so it does what you want it to, and the Ui resembles iTunes a decade ago.
Add a Front Row widget because it's great.
But mostly bring the quality up to where it was a decade ago.
And quit trying to tur it into an iPhone accessory.

Also, try using your OS without an internet connection before publishing it, to see what hell your rural customers are going to be stuck in when whole parts of the system don't function and crash.

[doublepost=1496184418][/doublepost]This times a billion zillion
Wanna bigger eye opener? Pull out that old 12" powerbook you couldn't bear to part with, fire it up and be amazed at how warm and elegant looking 10.2 was. And for the encore you get to experience what an actual good keyboard was like to type on.

 

[sudo1996]

What we DO need to see is a way to attach a Time Machine backup over the WAN, for offsite backups as reliable and easy to use as local backups. Don't drag iCloud into it, my clients want full control and ownership of their own backup hardware.

Use Back to my Mac ? I did do Time Machine over AFP over VPN, but I had to work around a bug (pretty sure) in Time Machine where it wasn't allocating a big enough disk image if I had more than 500GiB to back up. And it took forever anyway. I don't think it's optimized for low bandwidth.
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iCloud Backup for Mac.. (the same way our iPhones and iPads backup) duh... that dinosaur Time Machine app will finally get dragged to the cemetery.

Time Machine is the only backup solution that packs most of the necessary features without bothering or scaring the user, and Apple supports it well.
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It just works < it just needs more work
Can we please go back to "It just works"?

"It just doesn't work" for no ****ing reason when it comes to my stuff lately. Like how I made the grave mistake of enabling two-factor iCloud auth like everyone tells us to do, which broke everything. I keep getting randomly logged out. And Xcode got dropped on its head when they switched to Swift; code completion STILL crashes like 3/4 of the time, and now I don't want to do iPhone dev anymore. We have to go back!

 

[mrkapqa]

Dear Christ, i want Quicktime 7 + Plugin Back!

 

[florian.nikolaus]

Personally, I'd like to see a better Finder for accessing files/folders. Maybe I'm corrupted from years of Windows use, but I got hooked on an alphabetical folder view that listed folders at the top, followed by files. I'd also like to see Finder windows adjust the icon/thumbnail layout when the Finder window is resized.

Dude, thats already possible. Go to the Finder Preferences --> Extended --> Last Option to be checked... (see screenshot).

 

[potatis]

RTFM gets you out of a lot of tricky situations and until computers are smart enough to read your brain, people are always going to have to consult documentation to understand how a piece of technology works.

And you didn't read what I wrote. These people don't read manuals, and even if they did, they'd get into trouble.

 

[ChrisA]

The wish list sounds like what Henry Ford said his customers would ask for. He said his customers would have asked for a "faster horse". In other words the which list is just the tiniest small incremental changes. Most are just cosmetic tweaks or an app Apps are not the OS. They are bundled with the OS.

What is needed to keep Mac OS relevant are real changes and updates to the OS itself

#1 a new file system that does copy-on-write and then you have instant snapshots

#2 A storage manager the makes location go away. Just like when I add RAM to the Mac, I don't have to remember what SIMM stick each app is running on. The OS manages RAM as a pool. Way can't it do this with FLASH and hard drives and the network? I should not have to remember which physical location holds which files
#3 when the disk crashes I should not loose data, I should only loose performance. Certainly this can be done be combining flash and hard disks.

#4, would be great if one Mac that is doing some CPU intensive work like rendering video could make use of the CPU on my other Mac that is sitting there doing nothing. I'd like to see some kind of clustering. This way if my Mac is slow, I just power up a second Mac.

#5 Mac OS seriously needs a package manager. Most Linux distribution get this right. Mostly this is a developer tool and there are 3rd party package managers like "home-brew" but Apple should be leading this

#6 This is more of a product required. Apple needs to offer some kind of external storage that is REALLY fast. This could be a reason to buy an Apple Mac, because then you could use Apple's storage system. Currently the ONLYotions I can use on my iMac or MacPro are USB and Ethernet. Apple s removing Thunderbolt. Why is there not Apple brand 10 gig-bit NAS with iSCSI that uses idea #2 above? People want something like this. A big and fast big brick that you just plug in and all the macs in the house of office now have more stage and you don't have to know where files are.

#7 Just one tiny incremental change: When I have a lot of digital things" to store. Say iTubes music files or iBook book files or photos in the Photos apps. Why can't the user interface and basic concepts BE THE SAME. In iTunes a song and be in several different lists and I can add captions to photos and search on star rankings. Why can't I place an ePub book into more then one category.

#8 make it so that thought Mac OS a user can refer to a digital object (file, document, photo, song, speardsheet, drawing...) by CONTENT. Such that he says in effect "open Pages on that letter do John". No doing a search to find the filename then opening on that filename is NOT the same thing.

#9 Siri can listen, but why can't she read? Specifically I'd like to have her read over my shoulder, so to speak. She can make smarter suggestions than just spell check. Can look stuff up, could do 100 different things if she could watch my desktop in addition to just listing to the microphone.

My guess into way all this is not happening i that Apple is just not wanting to spend the money on the engineering work. It can't be for lack of good ideas or smart programmers.

PS, I still can't believe a which list has trivial stuff like "can we have two docks?" You are setting the bar way-low, pretty much a caulk line on the ground. All for stuff that NO ONE HAS DONE YET

 

[calaverasgrande]

Fix the multi monitor nonsense. It's a small peeve but I had better control over my multimonitor setup, including desktop wallpaper which spanned both displays, 15 years ago on Windows 2000!

Update AudioMidi. It looks like it's a leftover from System 9. And the inability to save multiple configurations is ridiculous. If I make an aggregate device, then restart my computer, I have to do it all over again. If I plug in a different device, then return to my original setup I have to rebuild my aggregate device. Its a god damned computer. I shouldn't be saddled with menial repetitive tasks. That is what the computer is supposed to liberate me from.
I've got a way to do this that is kind of kludgy, but it would be super helpful to have password protected encrypted folders. With increasing concerns about privacy and security this would be a very good thing.
Encrypting the entire disk with Filevault has a performance impact. So I will not do that. Besides, once I am logged in, any hacker that is able to ride my coattails has gotten around that encryption.
A password protected folder would still be secure.

Allow us to easily get rid of Apple bloatware like Siri and Maps from our desktop. I resent apps that are running in the background and cannot be killed. Yet are not intrinsic components of the system. Ditto for Photos.
Bring back raid support in Disk Utility.
Don't dumb down or feature strip anything else.
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tweaking current osX is not the point.
developing and releasing an iOS for a combined tablet/PC is what is needed.
i am spending more and more time on my iPhone these days as the preferred device.
but input method prevents doing more on it.

This is kind of silly.
Just get one of those cheap iPad case/keyboard things.
Or use a bluetooth Mac keyboard.
Changing the OS to be more mobile like in order to cater to twitter mashing mobile users is pointless.
Please go to Windows 10.

 

[chucker23n1]

Uhm...I guess your mileage may vary, because not every SE is the same (parts are sourced from different manufactors).
In my case it feels slighly slower, but I got used to it.
https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apfs-speed-ios/

Well, that article is, shall we say, a little flawed.

Starting with a headline that doesn't make any sense: "APFS in iOS Isn’t Any Faster Than on the Mac" (huh?)

Then with relying on questionable third-party benchmarking tools.

Not giving any information on how busy the operating system was when the test was conducted (was it perhaps doing Spotlight indexing? were other apps running in the background? why aren't the phones in airplane mode?).

Then, to top it all off, the iPhone 5 is tested, which doesn't even get APFS at all, so whatever conclusions the author tries to draw are based on a wrong assumption.

 

[Kr15]

Window snapping is such a useful tool especially with displays at any size above 1080p, if they cannot provide such a simple to implement thing to there users, then they truly do not care about MacOS.

Magnet.app from the AppStore works a treat.

 

[DesterWallaboo]

Mac OS 10.13 absolutely needs full OpenGL and Vulkan implementation.

 

[Aaron Priven]

1) option to turn the menu bar on all the time in full screen mode

As a joke I was going to put this as every other item in the list, but that got overwhelming with so many items. Just imagine all the odd numbers say "option to turn the menu bar on all the time in full screen mode."

2) Separate iTunes into Music app, a Videos app, an iOS Store app, a Podcasts app and a separate app that handles syncing
4) Complete documentation on Terminal.app including all escape codes supported; also ability to change background color through an escape code
6) Perl for Automation; updated PerlObjCBridge and support for Perl 5.26 in XCode (I know, this will never happen)
8) option to use vim keyboard mappings in XCode (like vrapper for Eclipse)
10) Fix the bug in Safari that makes it impossible for me to log into my agency's Office 365 account with it
12) Support for displaying custom shapes, points, etc. in Apple Maps (KML or GeoJSON)
14) Better support for Magic Mouse controls so I stop accidentally moving the screen around when I accidentally brush it with my hand, which I do all the time, and providing a useful middle-click
16) not really a Mac feature, but support for tags in iCloud Drive on iOS
18) More intuitive font management
20) Have the POSIX level understand Mac OS aliases as though they were symlinks
22) Have the built in PDF rendering not ignore layers, so that it when layers are hidden from Illustrator, etc., it shows up the same way in Quick Look and Preview
24) Source Code Pro font built in and used in place of Menlo
26) Automatic Applescript-to-something-that-doesn't-suck-so-bad translation (Javascript, Swift, anything would be better than Applescript)
28) Wider range of AppleEvent standard objects, so that application developers can more easily use these objects to make the same kinds of things work the same way in different applications
30) Restore dock pinning; offer other Dock display options in place of the shelf of icons, like a list
32) Consistent iCloud syncing of user pictures
34) for those of us who use our mice left handed, make both left-click and right-click work in the user login window as a primary click

Finally, for a name, if we're continuing with the California theme I suggest "Pinnacles," the newest US national park, and which sounds uplifting. Other alternatives would be "Redwood", "Emerald Bay", "Humboldt," or "Eureka."

 

[outsider_glenn]

Personally, I'd like to see a better Finder for accessing files/folders. Maybe I'm corrupted from years of Windows use, but I got hooked on an alphabetical folder view that listed folders at the top, followed by files. I'd also like to see Finder windows adjust the icon/thumbnail layout when the Finder window is resized.

In icon view, right click in free space within the finder window and select "view options". Choose to arrange by name, and sort by type. This will give you a responsive thumbnail view ordered alphabetically with folders first.

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

*sigh* Can they make the dock not look like trash? For no reason, they went back to a 2D interface; only, it's not even as good as it looked in Tiger and earlier. If they wanted something sleek and simplistic, they should have just stuck with the Mountain Lion/Mavericks dock.

I hate this solid rectangle of grey (or black). So bad - especially with transparency off.

 

[oliversl]

I suspect there's an agreement between MS and Apple to freeze iWork in exchange for guaranteed support of Mac in MS Office. To be honest, it would make sense, because the iWork team simply doesn't have enough resources to ever catch up to Office. At the same time, MS has finally realized that Office for Mac should provide the same experience as on Windows. Even though powertools are still missing on Mac, I've heard MS is actually working on including them in the future one by one.

You have a point, but Apple have more money in the bank than Microsoft, so its only a bad executive decision.

 

[iop]

You have a point, but Apple have more money in the bank than Microsoft, so its only a bad executive decision.

Apple tries to set priorities based on predictions of financial outcome. They can't invest in the iWork product unless they can be sure that it will pay off. Since iWork runs only on Mac, and not every mac user will choose to use iWork, it's difficult to profit. From the financial point of view it make more sense to stop competing with MS Office.

 

[PowerMac G4 MDD]

Apple tries to set priorities based on predictions of financial outcome. They can't invest in the iWork product unless they can be sure that it will pay off. Since iWork runs only on Mac, and not every mac user will choose to use iWork, it's difficult to profit. From the financial point of view it make more sense to stop competing with MS Office.

TBH, iWork '09 is better than any version of Office that there has been. It's too bad that Apple scrapped iWork and removed literally a page-worth of features.