> Safari now uses machine learning to identify advertisers and others who track your online behavior, and removes the cross‑site tracking data they leave behind

I'm starting to like the business model of buying the product more and more.

There was a recent thread somewhere (here, reddit, FB?) asking "What feature would it take for iPhone users to switch to Android?" - the answer for me is, Google changing its business model (or else completely open-sourcing all of Android and all of its core apps (mail, maps, browser).

Apple want me to buy relatively expensive devices on a regular basis and ideally a cloud subscription.

Microsoft want me to buy subscriptions to their cloud services and ideally devices running their OS.

In both cases the value for them is fairly clear and they have limited incentives to do anything that might jepordise those revenue flows.

Companies like Google who (IIRC) get over 90% of their revenue from advertising, need to make money by selling information about me to 3rd parties for advert targeting, which I'm not so keen on.

Personally I prefer to pay someone for a product/service directly.

In apple's case, they have a fairly small but dedicated marketshare that cares deeply about those issue. That's why I trust them to not sabotage their product. Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to care.

Microsoft: the OEM is the customer.

Google: advertisers are the customer and you are the product.

Linux: its own developers are the customers.

How so anymore? There are clear paths to NOT use anything Microsoft if you want to. Microsoft even now has Linux offerings its a new era.

For a lot of people there isn't.

Take my dad for example. He sells weight scales for retail (think butchers, greengrocers, cheese shops, etc). Those scales are pretty much embedded PC's nowadays, they connect to the internet and can be remotely accessed to update product prices, promotions, get the daily sales numbers but also things like changing the logos and text on the receipt and a million other things.

The manufacturers of those scales sell a piece of software to do that, but it's always a 100% Windows app, held together with all kinds of (outdated) MS technology like Visual FoxPro. Often they have licenses that require hardware dongles, have bizarre drivers to communicate with the hardware and it feels like it's al held together with spit and ducktape.

There is no Linux or OSS alternative, the protocols aren't even published and no one cares to reverse engineer them as the market is just tiny, and the target audience has no overlap with the techies that are interested in Linux and the like.

And that's just one example, there are tons of crappy, outdated, proprietary apps like that out there. Apps with tiny user bases no one cares about so no OSS options will ever emerge.

It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways. Yes it really is all held together with spit and tape, but nothing has forced them to change from it.

Which translates into a pretty large part of the small business market that doesn't have any de facto choice.

And WINE et al. aren't a scalable solution because invariably these things depend on odd Windows quirks and/or are generally terrible from a code/standards quality perspective. And there's functionally no way to address that because the historical-Windows-in-fact API is "every odd behavior every release of Windows has had over the years."

If they made a Linux version of Office and ported Direct3D to Linux, I'd be impressed. As such it's just embrace, extend extinguish again.

There are plenty of alternatives still. I only use Outlook due to work but I could also get around that through several ways.

Maybe we just have a different definition of monopoly?

Definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly

1 :exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

2 :exclusive possession or control

    no country has a monopoly on morality or truth —Helen M. Lynd 

    had a monopoly on flint from their quarries —Barbara A. Leitch 

    The government passed laws intended to break up monopolies.

Also Office 2003 and LibreOffice4/5 have way more in common than Office 2003 has with 2010/2013/2016.

None of this really matters - if you tell someone word ate a word document then they are sympathetic whereas if you tell them libreoffice ate a word document the reaction is much less favourable. I do not like this.

My solution - I just refuse to use any office software.

That said, a VM works wonders and people aren’t as confused by them as I would have expected!

Not sure what to do about pptx.

What can it not do that office can do?

Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is a spreadsheet. Excel is an extremely sophisticated development environment.

That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr...

One error cost $6 Billion in the "London Whale"

Could they be better? Sure. But don't knock it as not "programming" on that basis -- PHP is also bad.

It's not realistic to expect everyone in a company to learn python, and I'm not convinced that replacing shitty excel documents with shitty code would introduce less errors.

Also the concept of 'minimum viable product' in excel is typically adding a couple of columns and adding titles to them. To develop something for others to use in python will take much longer.

I'm sorry that the democratization of computing hurts you so, but Excel has done more for normal people who just need to push numbers around than perhaps any device since the pocket calculator. And it has exposed more people to functional programming than anything else has, ever.

COM and VBA scripting? Access database sourcing?

Google spreadsheets even has analogies to this functionality (albeit in Google flavors).

It's certainly not the formula and pivot table capabilities which Google spreadsheets has pretty good parity with. At one point in time you could argue that excel handled larger files better, but more recent versions of Google Spreadsheet seem to handle larger files pretty well.

[1] https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Using-structured-re...

PowerPivot. Database Access (JDBC to a handful of DBs isn't anywhere close to what Excel offers.)

I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.

PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features.

> As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets.

Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.

> You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.

You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.

The distinction isn't artificial: you can build upon excel as if it's a programming platform, but that doesn't make excel itself more powerful - all you've done is built yourself into a proprietary tech stack. With enough time you could do the same thing in Google sheets with Google's proprietary scripting interface. Comparing the two apps at baseline there is no difference in sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a plugin.

> You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.

Yeah, actually it does - you just won't be solving everything with an xls file and you might actually be using a more appropriate tool for the problem, but I guarantee Google has an equivalent offering.

Tell me something excel can do that Google spreadsheet can't.

For something brand new I would imagine Google Sheets can handle the vast majority of use cases.

1. user defined style definitions

2. citations / bibliography

3. anchoring

There are plugins that can help, but at least where I work using these is often banned to avoid the risk of leaking corp info.

Desktop/Laptops is now a 3-way split between MS, Apple and Google with chromebooks.

Mobile is a split between Apple and Google with MS out of it.

Cloud is Amazon out in front with MS in second place.

Office is the one area where MS could be considered to have a monopoly but even there I think cloud players are gaining ground and also (AFAIK) there's no advertising in paid for versions of MS Office.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

I guess the perception of whether or not Microsoft effectively has a monopoly in the gaming PC market segment really centers around the games you play.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. :)

Fortunately there's been a lot of great games coming out for Linux too recently, mostly thanks to cross-system frameworks like Unity, I assume. And that's great, but not really enough to threaten Windows' position in the PC game market.

Android dominates mobile OS usage, but iOS has equal profits if not greater than Android

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...

In the US maybe (and I doubt even there).

In the rest of the world it's 90% windows machines.

In certain markets like schools, windows is down to 22% in the US and 65% Worldwide (https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/02/apple-ios-market-share-k-12-e...)

These don't really feel like monopoly numbers like we used to see around the 1995-2005 timeframe when Microsoft were at their most monopolistic.

I won't be surprised if this gets challenged for anti-trust.

Using daily, only thing I've seen - notification about Edge (which came with the OS). what?

If you don't see them, you've likely disabled them.

Easy to turn off the live tiles and the suggested apps, and you can very quickly type to find any app so many people probably don't even look at the programs menu.

Heck, on iOS not only am I forced to look at apps that I don't want, I am also forced to use them! On the Macintosh OS, whenever I want to see what updates are available, I have to first look at the featured apps in their store. Even Ubuntu installs a shit-load of crappy programs that I don't want.

At least in Windows, you can disable them and pretty much never see them again. I've been on Windows 10 for years now and I think that I saw a Candy Crush launcher tile appear once and then it was gone forever.

Every OS has this ? I mean, this is literally windows putting ads on the equivalent of the IOS launcher. No OS does that !

I don't really care about the built-in crapware (well, I do, but let's save this for another debate). That the OS actively fights for the user's attention is ridiculous. I don't really mind "ads" for their built-in products. The Edge popup[0] was almost cute, the OneDrive explorer ad[1] was understandable. But this[2] or this[3] ? That's just corporate greed at its finest. Sorry.

[0] https://i.stack.imgur.com/l6JLb.jpg

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/File-...

[2] https://www.digitalcitizen.life/sites/default/files/gdrive/w...

[3] http://securitydaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/windows1...

Apple gives you no choice to even replace certain apps that they desperately want to force onto users!

And what does that have to do with ads?

I would be willing to send MS that information, but only as an opt-in.

Anyway, how many UWP apps are you running? Do you think every Win32 desktop app is now magically tracking you? Nope.

So, let's compare how many UWP apps that you actually want to run (I don't use any of them) and see if they're tracking you as much as all the mobile apps you're running. There's no contest here.

You are able to turn it down to "Basic" using the GUI, and if you are using the enterprise edition thru corporate volume licensing you can turn it down further to "Security" with admin tools.

There is no way to turn it off completely, and since its cranked up by default, that is where it will stay for the majority of installations.

As an anecdote, even Microsoft employees I've spoken with think it's overreaching and underhanded.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/confi...

edit : clarification on corporate option

Even if you don't want to do any of those for some reason, reading about the Basic level of telemetry - it's nothing. At least it's nothing that I care about.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/try

[1] https://winaero.com/blog/how-to-disable-telemetry-and-data-c...

[2] http://www.thewindowsclub.com/tools-tweak-privacy-settings-w...

The registry edit is specifically not honored for non-enteprise SKUs.

Bringing this back to the the story, one is assigned to a Mac Pro, where, per Microsoft’s bizarre licensing terms, it qualifies as an “upgrade” to the bundled copy of OS X (upon which I run it under VMware, permissible via further licensing gyrations).

Another option was Action Pack, where I would get 10 licenses for a very nice price, with a bunch of other products, but that would be only usable for development or testing, not for production (i.e. not for daily use while running the company).

Yes it is. I have multiple copies of it available to me with my MSDN subscription which only costs me about $800 per year.

Are you starting an app or search for document, using the windows shell? Your phrase goes to Bing. That's much harder to avoid than just not using an app.

So, the only tracking you're left with is the kind that comes packaged in UWP apps.

So much for "disabling".

So now I'm on Sierra, and I absolutely hate it. I thought it'd mostly just be uglier, but it bugs me with updates I don't want or need but am not allowed to ignore. And I hate their in-your-face notifications blocking an important part of my screen. (How about at the bottom next to the dock? Or in the menu bar? Just not over an active working window.)

(It's my least favourite notification too.)

"Umm, hey there...me again. You still haven't tried Safari? What's wrong? Want me to launch it for you?"

"Ok, this is getting a little awkward. We worked pretty hard making Safari, and you won't even try it? I'm trying to not be insulted here, but you're not making it easy."

"Listen motherfucker. You know that Keychain thing that you don't really pay much attention to. Well, I control that. If you want to see your Gmail password again, try motherfucking Safari. Clicky clicky, you lazy fuck."

And the "please use iCloud..."

On cars we used to call them "guilt buttons" for plastic shaped like buttons on the dashboard for options you didn't purchase.

I've found a way to get rid of the update notifications, though: click "details", which opens the app store with a list of your pending updates. As long as you leave that open, the notification won't reappear.

Still annoying, though.

Alternately, you can totally disable notification center via the terminal: http://osxdaily.com/2012/08/06/disable-notification-center-r...

I don't think there's a way to move them, unfortunately. Or to disable just the update notifications, beyond just disabling auto-download for them.

I also never get notifications about updates. No workarounds needed.

According to, which references an official looking SEC form: https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-Googles-revenue-comes-...

"86.5% of Alphabet’s revenue still comes from their advertising business, which is driven by searches in web browsers"

That's a hell of a lot.

I wonder how quickly their other revenue sources are growing? A ton of companies are using Google products in a paid capacity. They're really very good.

Check "other revenue" from the filing.

Maybe they also look through your Google photos to find faces with beards... or check your email for references to beards or amazon orders with razors... and to show extra ads to people who live in the Portland area

Some people are more okay with the facts (top paragraph) and the possibly exaggerated version (previous paragraph) and others.

The misleading part is saying that that personalization is done by selling your data to advertisers.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/14/8606925/candy-crush-saga-...

[2]https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-window...

You can.

Gapps for business. $5 a month. No scanning of your email, etc.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.ht...

Sure, but the vast majority of users do not want to pay for the vast majority of internet content.

Microsoft pretty clearly wants 100% telemetry about everything you do on your computer - to the point where they will explicitly override user settings to the contrary - so you are underestimating the scope of their motivation

For all the power we have expended, humankind could be so much further along than we are.

I wish the people who spent energy making terrible ad experiences would just quit their jobs and apply their talents to something of actual value.

i'm genuinely asking, because i'm genuinely curious. i'm lucky enough to get paid decently to work at a job that i believe in, and that's been true of the vast majority of my employment history. but i can think of an e-commerce gig i took that i did not particularly believe in (though i certainly didn't find it immoral), and what was essentially a classed up spam generation gig that i turned down a long time ago (more for the fact that i had a bit of trouble trusting the founder when i pressed him on what equity and future compensation might look like, though i was also rather hesitant to become a spammer, er, direct marketer).

That's noble thought, but if the pay is high enough, you'd be plain dumb not to do it. Especially when there is someone else willing to ponce on the opportunity if you turn it down.

"someone's gonna get paid, might as well be me" isn't, IMO, a reasonable way to make decisions. sometimes the morally correct thing to do is to pass up a payday, because you don't think the thing being done is the right thing for the world.

You're gonna have to do a pretty amazing job to convince people that ad tech qualifies as that.

This is why. Apple can use its influence to harm its competitors by frustrating the mechanisms used to promote their monetary interests, making a (legitimate) claim that doing so is beneficial to the user.

Microsoft articulated the goal well in its 1998 memos, the infamous "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". They want platform control because once you control user attention (and developer attention by extension), you can wedge your way in and do things that benefit your company over others.

Facebook controls the front-end library used by a large portion of all sites, not just facebook.com. If Apple's machine learning mechanism notices some common patterns between Facebook's code for React and Facebook's code for user tracking, either organically or because Facebook does a couple of nudges to make sure that happens, now Safari is broken, evidenced by its inability to correctly render a large portion of the web. If Facebook only had control over code running on facebook.com, then Facebook would be the apparent source of any user-facing breakage.

Note that users are not the customer being catered to. They are, rather, the resource being exploited to provide the energy necessary to undergird the MegaCorp's power expansion, in service to the other MegaCorps doing large-scale advertisement, endorsement, and censorship/speech control deals with them.

If removing these apps makes Android unusable for you, it means you are hooked on or locked-in to them. Asking for open-sourcing the client parts will not help you anyway, because the server parts are still running on Google servers and you won't be able to replace them.

Not sure to what degree replacement is actually possible today, but microG is heading in that direction.

https://microg.org/ - a free software clone of Google’s proprietary core libraries and applications

· Google Play Services or Google Maps Android API (v2)

· Google Cloud to Device Messaging

· Google’s network location provider

Further discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12864429 (Nov 2016) and other comments https://hn.algolia.com/?query=microg.org&sort=byDate&type=co...

It wouldn't be ideal, but a big improvement. Providing a clear API to Store, Maps, Mail, etc. would (1) allow developers to publish their own client for these services (that e.g. don't display ads, or don't track the user, or obfuscate/anonymise the information they send to the servers), and (2) allow competing backends to be developed and allow the users to choose between them without having to change the mobile OS.

The much better approach is bring your own backed. E.g. I'm using Sygic (because it is offline and the roaming fees were killing the online maps) and it works in the all places where the original Maps work. If I click in the Booking.com app to navigate to the hotel, for example, Sygic (and other alternate maps) work seamlessly in place of Google Maps. All that without having to use their back end. The APIs for doing that are already there since v1.

In other words, (1) developers could publish for years alternative implementations, with any back end that allows that in it's TOS (though Google's doesn't) and (2) this was always possible.

Yes I could, if the average android phone would allow me to do so. You can't go to the store, buy a phone, and remove google play services. At the very least you have to root the phone, which isn't possible on most devices.

What you can do, is to install apps or plugins for CalDAV/CardDAV-like services. The account system works with any generic account, not just with Google accounts; you can implement any service you want talking with any protocol you want. You don't need Google Play Services source for that.

Removing apks for android installation is cannon for sparrows. Remember, /system is not only for running the system, but also for factory reset/recovery too.

Do you have any proof to back up the claim?

The proof is easy obtainable on Google Maps location history.

No, location history is a _feature_, where saved datapoint set is submitted in batches, when the radio is active. And of course, you can turn it off (I did).

Instead, use alternatives:

https://f-droid.org/ https://www.amazon.com/getappstore http://shouji.baidu.com/ https://store.yandex.com/

or any other store, or just install your favorite apks.

You're confusing your cheap Android phone with an expensive iPhone. On the latter, you need an Apple account just to download apps, and their App Store tracks you exactly the same amount as Google's Play Store.

On iOS, I wouldn't have that choice.

iOS doesn't allow you to implement a JIT because Apple doesn't trust its OS to have working process isolation, so you actually can't have a real Firefox or Chrome on iOS.

This isn't really an excuse for MS. Really I'd just like both operating systems to not bug me.

> Automatically use Safari Reader for every web article that supports it, so you can view websites without ads, navigation, and other distractions.

This will come in handy since I hit the reader mode on articles as soon as the page loads and the reader option is enabled. On a side note, I like Firefox too because it has a reader mode built in. While Chrome has plugins to make this happen, having this feature as a first class citizen makes a difference. Of course Chrome has other strengths and I spend a lot of time in it, but I end up using Safari or Firefox for reading on the web.

Do my Safari Google searches still go via Apple by default though? I guess that's totally ok if you're in Team Apple? It's just sadly naive to believe a corporation has your privacy interests in mind in the absolute.

More info: https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

Can someone point to any situation in the past where the conclusion was "good thing the ads were less targeting to my interests!"

So, even if you think Google will always have your best interests at heart, the governments they work with certainly don't. China could exploit their knowledge to target dissidents. Would Google do that? Perhaps, just censoring internet was anathema to Google in their early days, now Google respects Chinese censorship.

To be honest, I'm not comfortable with my own government knowing what I want to read online or what I say to my friends, let alone authoritarian ones. The future is pretty much already here on that one though as government already does.

You should be thinking more about the future.

Your advice would lead to maps, gmail, etc be becoming worse but their hardware still not keeping up with apple.

This sounds like it _should_ be true, but unfortunately, Apple has a much much better track record of supporting its old devices that Google. So, yeah, the "service" might work, but what help is that if my 3-year old Android phone was hacked yesterday because Google (or OEMs) don't bother patching it any more?

In this blog post, we briefly discussed High Sierra's "Secure Kernel Extension Loading" (SKEL) and demonstrated a new 0day vulnerability that can be exploited to fully bypass this new `security' feature.

Unfortunately when such `security' features are introduced - even if done so with the noblest of intentions - they often just complicate the lives of 3rd-party developers and users without affecting the bad guys (who don't have to play `by the rules'). High Sierra's SKEL's flawed implementation is a perfect example of this. [There are many other examples.]

Of course if Apple's ultimate goal is simply to _continue_ to wrestle control of the system away from it users, under the guise of `security', I'm not sure any of this even matters."

https://www.synack.com/2017/09/08/high-sierras-secure-kernel...

In 10.12 there is no obvious way on how to run unsigned binaries now. When you double click on an app multiple times, it refuses to run. If you go to security settings you cannot run the unsigned binary from there. You have to right click on the app and press open to get the old dialog that would allow you to run an unsigned binary like it's some sort of easter egg. In older versions you didn't have these restrictions.

AFAIK the only thing that's changed since Gatekeeper was introduced was the Security preferences lost the option to allow unsigned apps.

But, for comparison, life got considerably better for me. I fee much safer (but not safe, there's plenty to worry about with just access to my user files) knowing when something is requesting Admin privileges, and because of the UAC prompts it's actually possible for regular users to run as non-admin and still get stuff done.

The amount of windows boxes that aren't running email clients and web browsers with full privileges by default is a huge advance for the whole world. That people aren't as careful as they should be with allowing that access sucks, but I think it's probably an order of magnitude at least better than what came before with regard to how easy it was to gain full access on Windows boxes through simple exploits. To say that there's been no overall gain in security in windows completely ignores the absolutely horrid state of security on Windows a decade or more ago. There are reasons why Windows is much better with respect to security today, and UAC is definitely one of them.

It amazes me at the arrogance in assuming users are idiots, so it's not worth engineering features for them.

"Warning: This installer is attempting to replace core Windows files. Do you want to allow it to do this?" isn't hard but gives substantially more useful information than "Do you want to allow this installer to do stuff?" (Current UAC)

This better but in reality most users will still have no clue what it means.

http://i.imgur.com/H0uVqFe.jpg

Because as far as I can remember (Windows back to 95, MacOS back to the 6100), we (ie computer science professionals) have never done what I would even call an "acceptable" job at attempting this.

And the argument, for 20+ years now, has always been "Har har, users are too dumb to read. We'll just abstract all those decisions away from them."

Stupid dialogs and lazy UX begat stupid users, not the other way around.

(E.g., for starters: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/756/what-are-some-alt... )

I do a google search and click within 5 seconds the right link, even if the first couple are ads/irrelevant. When installing a program, I get through everything quickly, without wasting mental energy on the useless TOS and etc.

Whereas my grandma will see a TOS and think "oh my goodness, a contract! Do I need to sign this? What, should I read this?" Because she doesn't see many TOSs and doesn't get that they're not a legal document or whatever, and any actually interesting information is buried deep within swathes of legalize. She also doesn't have access to reddit/HN or whatever to quickly warn her if the TOS changes/contains heinous shit.

Anyway, I feel like this is why google and firefox buried their "untrusted website - go to it anyway" button in some clickies that even I have a hard time finding, to force people to actually consider the decision.

https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/912254053849079808

>on High Sierra (unsigned) apps can programmatically dump & exfil keychain (w/ your plaintext passwords) vid: https://player.vimeo.com/video/235313957 #smh

When you go to facebook.com, your device must surely decrypt the keychain to plaintext to prefill the password field so it can send your password to facebook.com - Thats how it works.

So this seems like normal functionality to me, someone has just put it in a command line. Someone has just reverse engineered the keychain decrypt that happens all the time.

Am I missing something?

When you go to facebook.com, safari requests access to the facebook.com password via the keychain api. At which point you are supposed to be prompted by the OS, and if you allow it, the keychain api returns the decrypted password only for facebook.com.

The vulnerability being demonstrated is able to decrypt every password in your keychain, without prompting the user in any way.

If "Always Allow" is chosen, then the app will have permanent permission to access _only_ that particular password in the keychain.

This vunerability appears to bypass that dialog entirely and dump the entire keychain in plaintext without requiring the users permisson.

    $ security find-internet-password -s www.facebook.com -g

Years ago I moved all of my important passwords to a secondary keychain that remains locked for precisely this reason.

Technically, if you can create another executable binary with the same name and digest, you can access the same keychain item.

The security framework uses some kind of digest / signature to verify that the app hasn't changed if the binary is not code signed. Apple's docs are scarce on details, see eg [1] which just says that the security framework makes sure the app wasn't altered.

But I am pretty sure the app name is ignored. Most macOS services use the bundle identifier.

However, if the app is code signed, the security framework automatically grants newer versions of the app permission if they have been signed with the same certificate.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/1400622-s...

But now APFS solves disk encryption on FS layer instead of going through CoreStorage. And I'm confused about the way forward for me.

Is there some documentation that explains 1) What happens to FileVault/Backups during initial conversion? 2) Am I better off to disable FileVault and then encrypt using APFS? 3) How does the APFS full disk encryption work? Does it have any problems, especially backup related? 4) Can I enable/disable FileVault after the conversion?

I experienced no issue during the conversion of Corestorage Filevault to APFS Filevault. The conversion to APFS was offered as an option to me during the Developer Beta series.

I am not sure whether this will be done automatically for the release version. However I do understand that the conversion will only be offered to systems with Flash Storage only, whereas Fusion Drive and Hard Disk equipped systems will not. (as per: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018 )

I found that the process required no interaction on my part and that my system came back up without issue. Likewise, there was no change with how Time Machine operated for me, in fact I don't believe that Time Machine backups are touched by the conversion process.

On another fusion drive equipped system I have, I was able to manually enable Filevault after filesystem conversion to APFS. You should be able to disable it after conversion too, though I've not yet tested this out.

Backups to an external disk are still done to HFS+. External disks formatted as APFS either do not show up as available disks to backup to or prompt to format the disk back to HFS+ (I encountered both cases as I was trying to put TM into submission on that one). Remote backups (over AFP) are unaffected and still use (optionally encrypted) sparse bundles. So Time Machine itself appears to have not changed much in that regard. Local snapshots do leverage APFS snapshots though and are browsable at /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots.

† A mistake on my part following a restore from Time Machine where I did not enable encryption.

https://macdaddy.io/apfs-backup-software-developers-perspect...

I’m sporting a Mac Pro mid-2010 and have a RAID-5 array that’ll need to upgrade.

For my two Thunderbolt SAS RAID arrays, however, System Information shows no "Medium Type" field at all. And Disk Utility reports "Solid state: No" for both, even though one is, in fact, all SSD.

Therefore, on this one particular Areca controller at least, I'd be willing to bet that SSD boot volumes would look just like rotational hard drives to APFS and the installer, and therefore would not have been auto-converted at installation time.

With that said, on the GM candidate, converting the volumes on these RAID arrays to APFS after the fact was as simple as right-clicking each in Disk Utility and selecting "Convert to APFS...". And it the week or so since I did so, I've had no problems or regrets.

All volumes on this system are FileVault-encrypted, and APFS conversion did nothing to change this.

This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. I remember the 10.2-10.6 releases and just how significant they were and it feels like rearranging deck chairs in comparison nowadays.

Amazing days.

Lately I only upgrade when forced. I ran 10.8 until earlier this year when I finally upgraded my machine. Then I spent a week trying to figure out how the hell to get gdb working again because binaries now require code signing and there's this horrible new thing called System Integrity Protection that tries to protect me from myself. They also took away my Escape key and replaced it with this TouchBar nonsens just because I wanted an i7 CPU. To put this into perspective: I practically live inside vim.

I'm doing this on Ubuntu, but there are ways to get it done on OSX too.

1. Wait a half-second after typing the "j". That causes the mapping to time out and you can type the "k" without a problem.

2. Type something like Dijj<del>kstra.

once installed, open the app, and go to the "complex modifications" tab. then click "add rule". then click "import more rules from the internet". on the web site that opens, expand "Modifier Keys". import "Change caps_lock key".

that'll give you a rule to do what you want in karabiner. (the rule is "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone".)

That’s why I questioned the original broad claim: I know there are edge cases but most of the developers I know work on Macs and SIP just isn’t mentioned often enough for it to be anywhere near as bad in general as a few random commenters claim, not to mention that anyone I know who’s at all security savvy appreciates that it’s a trade off rather than a unilateral bad move.

1) Too many packages/servers/etc. I've tried to install under OS X over the years just didn't quite work right. That's probably not the case so much any more, but I have experienced it recently.

2) Developing against a macOS localhost can mask problems associated with my code running in the deployment environment. So to avoid those surprises, I develop against the deployment environment.

If I need root for package install or other server deployments, I log into the VM and do it there. I rarely need to install stuff on my macOS workstation.

There's a whole new FS that went into production in something like 4-5 years (unheard of) among lots of over things...

Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.

The new dock and changes to the multitasking interface and behavior take some getting used to, but my iPad feels like a much more powerful device than it did a week ago.

You already could run two apps side by side in iOS 10 (I was a pretty heavy user of that feature, which is incidentally also the primary reason I opted into the beta), it just wasn't quite as flexible. Drag and drop is new, for sure. I suppose I haven't used it much so haven't really noticed it.

The dock seems like a small improvement over the old dock, added because of the better multitasking.

They're great improvements for sure, but they still seem like incremental improvements to me.

For an example of where this smooths things out, I've been using Readdle's Documents as an approximation of a local filesystem for a while now. Saving an image to that before was tricky; iOS doesn't have a way to isolate an image out of a page, just copy or save to camera roll. So you could save to camera roll and then import it over, but you lose the filename in the process and replace it with something generic like "Image 10". Or you can do weird workarounds like using Workflow's "Get images from page", which pulls up a slideshow of all the images on the page, which you then get to scroll through and find the one you wanted.

Now you just drag it and put it straight into the destination. You can also drag the URL bar over, which saves the URL as a new text file.

And if I have data in Documents that I want to use elsewhere, there's no shenanigans required with piping it through share sheets, I just drag it out and use it.

If you want something less permanent than a file manager, the popover multitasking is also a good platform for temporary "shelf" style data buckets. I'm currently trying Scrawl Pouch, but I've seen a couple others that looked equally nice. It's basically intended as a drag-and-drop destination to temporarily store any type of data until you want to drag it back out somewhere else.

This can be the obvious stuff like images and links from Safari, PDFs and other files out of Documents. You can also drop things like map pins, which can be shared via messages or email or dropped as links into Pages documents. I haven't experimented a lot with 3rd party apps, but presumably we'll see this show up in other ecosystems, maybe dropping things like audio effects between a family of media creation tools, or someone could make a 3rd party service for sharing paintbrush presets that you could drop into Procreate.

They've also brought in the "spring-loaded folders" behavior from Finder for this. If you're dragging a URL and you want to add it as a Safari bookmark, you can hover it over the sidebar button to pop it open and then navigate to the folder where you want to drop and save it. Or after the sidebar opens, you can hover over the Reading List tab to put it there instead of bookmarks. It's integrated like that throughout the entire OS.

A whole lot of things that just weren't possible on iOS are now a 2-second interaction.

As a downside, the interface for picking up multiple objects feels a bit weird and is probably one of the bigger learning curves that iOS has gotten.

Another example I just found - you can drag an email (or several) from Mail over to Documents where they're saved as .eml files. Documents doesn't know how to render these so you see the full markup, but I can imagine that would be a useful feature for something.

Maybe a utility app to view full email headers? I don't think Mail.app has a way to get into those.

iCloud Photos is frustratingly bad, but I don't want to buy into other cloud ecosystem, like Google's. Does anybody know if it's possible to replicate the integration with Photos on both iOS and macOS, so I could write my own sync thing?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786

Some highlights:

> When shared, photos taken with standard point-and-shoot cameras, SLR cameras, or iOS devices have up to 2048 pixels on the long edge.

> Videos can be up to five minutes in length and are delivered at up to 720p resolution.

> Maximum shared albums an owner can share: 100

> Maximum shared albums a user can subscribe to: 100

> Maximum number of photos and videos from a single contributor across all shared albums, per hour: 1000

I was horrified when I learned that Google wasn’t going to save full resolution by default. Had no idea Apple would do something similar.

It's kind of a nice feature, but at the same time it makes doing things like collecting photos from my wife for a photo book annoying.

You still have full resolution originals without any recompression in iCloud Photo Library.

Agree with you on the time ordering. If people want a particular order, they could upload in that order. If they want time ordered, they could tap a button to refresh sort by time taken.

However, and this is a big gotcha -- you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones, or out of order by minutes for individual devices.

What Apple could do is recognize contributors and devices in a shared album and let you assign an offset to each contributor plus device pairing, then sequence these all sensibly.

What I do is have a inbox type album for everyone during and following the trip, then import, sort and select and manually fix time offsets (if I remember, I have everyone take the same photo of the same phone clock at the same moment to make this easier), then re-order and curate to taste, then re-publish.

100 albums is nothing. Looking at my photo share history (on Google+, not iCloud as iCloud is useless) I have about 500 albums shared with friends and family over the last five years. And of course, there have been innumerably more albums shared with me, while iCloud limits that too to only 100 albums.

The best thing about these Google+ albums is that I don't even have to give them a name, unlike iCloud shared albums.

> and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour"

It's easy, I don't share photos every day, I share them e.g. at the end of a holiday, and then there are more than a thousand. In any case I might need to share even more, since I might share the same pictures to different people in different albums, and that counts multiple times.

Of course this is all moot, since the quality is degraded too much to use this service anyway.

> (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)?

It doesn't rate limit, is blocks you out and it tells you to try again in an hour. I have to remember to do that and I have to remember where it errored out. It takes forever to do something that should take seconds. They already have all my pictures stored in iCloud. They are already there! "Sharing" doesn't consume resources, it's just an entry in a database referencing data they already have. Which, btw, means that they should not have to reduce the photo quality. They already keep my high quality data, and I pay for this storage. Reencoding into lower quality actually increases the storage they have to use for my data.

I suspect iCloud Photos and iCloud Photo sharing are two completely disconnected services at Apple that don't communicate properly.

> you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones

Erm, no, because you sort by actual physical time keeping track of time zone and everything?

I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day). Good model, fast, and no artificial limitations. I wish Apple would keep up.

I attempted over the years to use the various incarnations of Google's photos but they consistently mangled pictures, canceled / renamed / migrated services, bungled who gets to see what under what Google Accounts, etc., until I was browbeaten into conceding defeat.

I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong. So unless you fix the metadata, the only sort you can have is manual.

Note: If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again? What's the use case? Throwaways? You're making on average a new album every 3 days, which still seems a little awkward. And innumerably more shared with you, means, what, 10 albums shared with you a day? It's amazing you have time for detailed and thoughtful HN comments. You should switch to pictures, they're worth a thousand words.

I am very happy to pay someone to take care of my problems and I am a big fan in general of paying for software and services. Not sure exactly how Flickr would help me though, but I will take a look at Flickr.

Does it integrate with the iOS/macOS photo library? Basically if I make an album in Photos on an iPhone, does it get synced up as an album by the flickr app, or does it just upload the pictures? Similarly, does it integrate with Photos on the mac, or do I need to use some other method to get my pictures that lives outside Apple Photos?

> I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong.

Why is the time "very probably wrong"? I don't understand this, everybody uses NTP or whatever the GSM/telecom equivalent is. I haven't seem a wrong time on a mobile device in probably over a decade.

> If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again?

I rarely search for specific albums, usually I prefer to view all the pictures and search by date. Albums are just a grouping mechanism for sharing. Sometimes "an album" contains just one picture.

When I go in vacation, etc, I might create a named album that I can reference later, but other than that, yeah, albums are throwaways that are just for grouping a set of pictures at a moment in time.

Not talking about mobile devices. Talking about cameras.

A dozen of us from work flew to have lunch at Noma in Denmark. We combined pictures after. There were nearly as many wrong times as there were people in the group. No software could have machine sorted these.

> Flickr

Flickr integrates with camera roll to upload originals in background but you manage albums and sharing in their app or web, and share via URLs or app. Only you have to be a member.

Personally I use cloud services like iCloud only for my iPhone pictures. For my "real" photography I just keep files on a NFS server (and Lightroom is a pain with NFS...), I don't import then in cloud services.

What problems do you have with Google Photos on iOS, macOS? I use it regularly with web (windows, macOS) and my android, iOS devices and have no major complaints. For me, it's by far the best photos solution there is.

Which is why we have UTC.

> The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones

See UTC.

> or out of order by minutes for individual devices.

which is alright, compared to the sort by time added to album.

And I'm invariably the only geek whose photos are timestamped in UTC because I set devices that way (except for phones which I can't), or who knows that the metadata doesn't even record the TZ until a recent EXIF standard update, 2.31 released last fall, added support.

Wikipedia still says "There is no way to record time-zone information along with the time, thus rendering the stored time ambiguous." It'll be a while for cameras to catch up.

Most of my friends and family take their photos with Android, iOS devices and Google Photos seems to have fixed this issue and all of my photos have a timezone field. Here is an example of a recent one: https://i.imgur.com/8AFgKs3.jpg

Apple Photos sorts photos by UTC, today, I assume by using the GPS information inside EXIF. There is no confusion between photos taken in different time zones.

I do a lot of photography from jets, and the photos are sorted just fine, while the time zone changes all the time.

Wow, what a deal breaker. I always felt like something was off quality-wise but never took the time to delve into that.

I think (but I am not sure) you can use iCloud Photo sharing even if you don't use iCloud Photo library, but that's a special case. Then you could limit the quality of those photos, I guess. But why degrade the quality of photos that you already have? Sharing doesn't use any extra space than non-sharing. They are in the cloud anyway.

[1] https://photos.google.com/

Granted, the 5S started at 4GB for 500 USD and the Nexus 5 started at 16GB for 350 USD.

Still, it's hard to support the "planned obsolescence" argument.

Edit: grammar.

Admittedly, I can't really speak to how older phones feel after some of the updates. The oldest iPhone I have is the original iPhone 6 and I haven't tried it on iOS 11 yet (currently using the iPhone SE, which _seems_ to run better on iOS 11).

I don't see how you can really say that sluggish is _worse_ than N/A. Worst case scenario, you just don't update, which is no worse than not getting the update in the first place.

Edit: clarity.

Edit2:

I realized I'm not really addressing your point.

I think there are some pretty big differences that make it hard to compare phone OS releases to computer OS releases.

Mobile devices have a much smaller margin for performance. They don't handle multitasking terribly well. These two things mean that the OS doesn't end up affecting the performance of a phone as much as apps and websites do.

One poorly developed app can destroy the performance of the entire phone (even without the app running in the foreground). None of this is true for a non-mobile device.

I definitely wish we would see more performance-focused iOS releases, but I don't think it has gotten to the "planned" obsolescence point as much as just "regular" obsolescence. Hard to say.

Wow - thank you! I have a half-page of self-written documentation about turning an apple installer into a bootable USB that I hope to never have to use again ...

What's the benefit?

Perfect tool is a SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive with USB and USB-C.

It's only an opportunity to re-evaluate what autoruns at startup and what you want running in the background. This means people feel faster once they delete all of those things. You'd do just as well by removing them yourself.

It looks like the USB-C sticks already exist.

https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias...

Take notes from the copy introducing High Sierra. Apple starts with APFS and doesn’t really get to new end-user features until a few screens in.

With all this filesystem level changes, does High Sierra have more hardware requirements than Sierra?

___> ' Metal 2 Supported by the following Mac models: MacBook (Early 2015 or newer) MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer) MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer) Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer) iMac (Late 2012 or newer) Mac Pro (Late 2013) '

https://gpgtools.tenderapp.com/discussions/beta/2348-macos-h...

I deem that unusable.

It's just too slow a beast, all of that. GPG (and especially email integration) is dying. Let's hope it gets a new life one day in the future.

It did take a bit of extra time to replicate my Karabiner setup, however controllermate is much more capable and the overall result has been worth the effort.

My other suggestion is to actually replace keyboard. ErgoDox EZ and Ultimate Hacking Keyboard have almost all the features I need from Karabiner, but is saved to the firmware, so I can take the keyboard anywhere and it just works. Also, they're mechanical keyboard, so it's nice to type on.

This is interesting, how does a website signal that it's ok for you to block all its ads?

I've been actively looking into developing games for the Vive, anyone has tried doing that on a macbook pro?

Apple sells an enclosure (Sonnet's) with an RX 580. I thought this also came with a $100 Vive discount, but that promo must have ended.

https://developer.apple.com/development-kit/external-graphic...

Posted to HN over the weekend so few have probably seen it.

One user referred to this "feature" as "beyond creepy".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15326924

Tweets from the developer were quickly removed from Twitter.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170924180858/https://twitter.c...

"1. Xeno Kovah(<-) @XenoKovah 17m17 minutes ago More Copy link to Tweet Embed Tweet Replying to @XenoKovah @NikolajSchlej @coreykal

A design requirement we were given early on by Privacy was that we can't just scoop up everyone's firmware and send it back for analysis

1. Xeno Kovah(<-) @XenoKovah 15m15 minutes ago More Copy link to Tweet Embed Tweet Replying to @XenoKovah

In my perfect world we would have rolled this out way back in 10.12 as just a silent data collector"

Once again, remote, "silent data collect[ion]" from all users, in this case from a hidden partition on user-owned hardware, is on by default. Nor is user asked for consent.

This is not meant to be "alarmist".

EFI is an open specification. Anyone can write EFI applications and anyone can use EFI type partitions for whatever purposes they like, assuming that the computer belongs to them, i.e. they paid for it. EFI usage is not exclusively reserved for companies like Apple.

Perhaps if the remote check was on a more familiar partition type where more familiar files are stored, the privacy issue might be better illustrated.

It's simply ensuring the firmware (which is really part of the hardware--though nothing's "hard" until you get down to the microcode interpreter on the CPU) hasn't been altered.

The only "data" collected is: Has this Mac been compromised?

The APFS change really isn't something you are likely to hit, heck you'd have to go out of your way to make it a problem.

Deffo recommending it :) Speed ups are nice!

There are tons of small changes here and there!

>Responsive. Designed to make common tasks like duplicating a file and finding the size of a folder’s contents happen instantly.

So it looks like that the conversion does confuse VMware Fusion at the moment. Not aware of any other issues with Bootcamp.

One thing though, if you relied on some thing like Paragon or whatever to read your HFS drive, that will obviously not work anymore (not personally a problem, but could be a deal breaker for some).

Especially if you're a programmer, allow a little time for all the apps to catch up and update their versions.

High sierra comes with big changes like the Apple File System, and I'm sure there are a lot of stuff going on under the hood.

A large part of software in Homebrew is already pre-compiled (bottled) for High Sierra:

    % find Formula -name '*.rb' | wc -l
    4363
    % find Formula -name '*.rb' -exec grep "sha.*:high_sierra" {} \; | wc -l
    3634

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208018

  APFS and file sharing
  - Volumes formatted as APFS can't offer share points over the network using AFP. 
  - APFS supports SMB and NFS, with the option to enforce only SMB-encrypted share points.

I don't think your conclusion is supported by the snippet you quoted.

Not quite. You can't share your drive over AFP if you've formatted it as APFS. Connecting to a remote AFP share is unchanged.

And the page linked still says, "Available 9.25".

Namely, try going to System Preferences -> App Store and press Check Now.

Might have something to do with the fact that APFS was designed explicitly with SSDs in mind.

> Your data is under new management.

Ok, should I expect it now finally to be case sensitive? Or is that still science fiction for MacOS?

No OpenGL 4.6 support (still at 4.1)

No Vulkan support

What do you personally find lacking or inefficient? What changes would you like to see?

[0]: https://cocoatech.com/#/

[1]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

At one point I looked at alternatives, but I wasn't ready to buy one. And since most editors and IDEs have "Show in Finder" options, that I use sometimes, I'd still have to augment my workflow to get around it.

If these are true sticking points for you, I'd suggest taking a look at the Finder alternatives again. I wouldn't be surprised if the Show in Finder feature isn't overridden in these environments. I can't imagine that the points you've listed are likely to be changed in Finder: they're behaviors that have existed across many, many versions.

So what sucks specifically, in your opinion?

- No cut (to paste) (so I have to have two windows open or go back and forth to perform a cut?)

- In tree view, pasting pastes to root folder, not selected folder.

- I think `enter/return` to `rename` instead of `open` is absurd.

- Have to memorize shortcut to open 'go to folder' path field, instead of toggling always enabling path field.

(Grew up using Windows, started using Mac 2 years ago)

Paste: Cmd + Alt + V

- In tree view, pasting pastes to root folder, not selected folder.

Hold the item over the folder and drop it after the folder is selected.

- I think `enter/return` to `rename` instead of `open` is absurd.

On the other hand it's easier to avoid accidentally opening thousands of files.

Huh. I know I googled this before and I just remember people saying that `cut` was jut not part of the mac philosophy. Thanks.

They blocked auto play video sounds just because some abusing the video tag? That is just going to push those scammy people finding the other way to annoy their users, such as, playing the audio separately in a audio tag or decoding and playing audio using javascript. Of course they can block those too to make it a even more backward browser, but indie web game makers are going to be suffered from that.

Aperture might or might not run on HS (not sure), but holding to it until Photos catches up is not very good strategy, at some point it will just stop working (and it's not getting any new fixes, updates, etc).

Better move to Lightroom or something similar.

I don't want to rent software, and I don't want to install the dreaded Adobe installer. What other good alternatives are there? Darktable doesn't pass the test.

You either take the feature-set hit and switch to Apple Photos ( which does a great job with basic tweaks ), or you switch to Lightroom. Everything else is way below par. Your photos just won't anywhere near as good.

Basically I want a GUI version of ImageMagick.

Plus non-destructive editing does not preclude a non-IDE, non-library based workflow.

So, basically Lightroom.

They've gone from "here are five colors you can chose from" to, in some cases, something almost approaching an lwn article.

Still a good release though.

Many millions of those devices out there.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018

We'll probably see it later, but I haven't seen a clear statement either way.

I have a script that installs all my settings, brew packages, etc, even App Store apps, from external backup disk -- I'm up and running in 2-3 hours after the base install.

I keep all my documents in a single folder called ~/AAA (so it lists on top) with subfolders like /WORK, /PHOTOS /CODE (e.g. /CODE/GO), /MUSIC etc, so I can just rsync that and be totally backuped.

Inside ~/AAA I also have a folder called SYSTEM_FILES, where I keep stuff like bashrc, vim directory etc. My ~/.bashrc etc are just symlinks to ~/AAA/SYSTEM_FILES/bashrc.

So I start with a script that rsyncs the AAA folder from the backup disk to ~ on the Mac, and then creates the appropriate symlinks for .bashrc, .vimrc etc.

Now all my documents are on my Mac and I have a working shell.

Then the script does:

  # install brew
  /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

  # a number of brew related installs
  brew install rsync
  brew install mercurial
  brew install watchman
  brew install binutils
  ..

  # some brew-driven font installs
  brew tap caskroom/fonts 
  brew cask install font-roboto-mono
  ..

  # install various linter-related stuff for my ST3
  brew install -g node
  sudo npm install -g eslint
  sudo npm install -g eslint-plugin-import
  sudo npm install -g eslint-plugin-react
  sudo npm install -g babel-eslint
  pip install flake8
  pip install requests
  ..

  # install various big packages from casks
  brew cask install vagrant

  # install mas -- a mac app store cli client
  brew install mas

  # use a wrapper script that extracts mas ids from the apps I want
  ~/mas_install.py Pixelmator
  ~/mas_install.py Skitch
  ~/mas_install.py Evernote
  ...

  # use a shell script to copy .bashrc and co
  # create symbolic links etc
  ~/prepare_environment.sh

  # configure the Mac with various "defaults" options
  defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool false
  ...

  # finally the script sets up Mail.app, copies my Sublime Text packages to the ~/Library/Application Support etc.

Are you thinking of the reformatting to APFS? That's kind of done like this. Aside from this, the OS upgrade is the same as it always is: install the new system-level packages over the existing files & reboot.

By doing it this way, they make the dangerous part of the process as small as possible. They actually did a dry-run to collect success/failure metrics before APFS was released to iOS devices:

https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apple-dry-run-apfs-prio...

:extremely pedantic voice: ITYM your data is not moved. Your inodes are.

:normal voice: thank you for taking the time to explain clearly this in more detail.

I cant be the only one who want a Retina Mac but need bigger fonts and Icons because i am getting old.

See HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15329527

Their page for the new iPhone had the same issues. In my opinion their web designs has gone down hill this year.

I'd also like metric time, but abolishing timezones and daylight saving would be more than good enough.

That is definitely also my preferred format, everything just sorts naturally then. Not so in love with the 2017-09-25T12:00 format as it does not work for filenames on my OS.

ISO8601 is very nice.

I like American dates for sorting though :)

And you're right. I've seen some pretty strange stuff.

Sometimes, when forced to use ancient enterprise data systems, desperate staff use abandoned fields for new purposes.

2017-09-25

2017-09-25-0929

2017-09-25-09290000000000

I don't believe that's an international style?

"Since 1996-05-01, the international format yyyy-mm-dd has become the official standard date format, but the handwritten form d. 'month name' yyyy is also accepted (see DIN 5008)."

(ISO8601)

Given that I read from left to right, I mean.

Jan 11 2016

if you accept that premise, it doesn't matter (much) what order you put the elements in, because none of them can be confused with any other. a word is a month, a one- or two-digit number is the day of the month, a four-digit number is the year.

i feel the same way about websites that expect me to input phone numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc without punctuation or spaces. why are you making this my problem? if your backend requires that, then strip out everything i typed that wasn't a digit and do your own formatting. geez.

the real problem is displaying both the month and the day of the month as one- or two-digit numbers, which leads to ambiguity. display the month as a three-character string, and the year as a four-digit number, and we are all on the same page again.

YYYY-MM-DD

DD.MM.YYYY

MM/DD/YYYY

Notice the separators. Except for parts of Japan and Australia, these are international standards and used everywhere.

i am talking about an ad hoc, fairly simple thing one can do, if one is writing user-facing code. it's a rule i follow, and i offered it up as something other people might want to try as well.

https://www.apple.com/itunes/ and https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/

The main changes are :

- JS triggered animation (webagencies do love this ). - San Francisco instead of Myriad as a font

I'm convinced they don't bother to visit the site on anything but Safari anymore.

Apple is using 'backdrop-filter' in its CSS. Safari's the only browser to support it ATM, but it degrades gracefully. If you have that flag set, though, chrome lets you see their half-finished implementation.

Some might even argue the software is pretty good, too!

Anyways, it's definitely stable, honestly I feel like it's the most stable .0 release I've been on (have been going beta -> GM on almost all releases).

There was no lagging on iOS 10.

Basic things like swiping across home screens lags and feel jittery. Also when you unlock and the apps come into view it's annoying laggy.

I'm having this problem on both my iPad (which is newer than my phone) and with my laptops. Old pictures are not there unless I view then, although new pictures seem to be pushed to all my devices. And even if I view then, they are downloaded only at medium quality, unless I view them for more than 1.5 seconds or I zoom into them. This means I can't even scroll quickly through them, as this won't get me the original quality I want.