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Apple macOS High Sierra Review

editors choice horizontal
4.5
Outstanding
Updated September 26, 2017

The Bottom Line

macOS High Sierra is a mature, powerful, and easy-to-use operating system. Its biggest improvement this year is under the hood, with a new file system, but it gets plenty of visible improvements too, including major updates to the Photos app.

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Pros

  • Apple File System (APFS) adds speed, reliability, and flexibility.
  • Effortless upgrade from macOS Sierra.
  • Safari blocks intrusive tracking by advertisers and silences noisy web pages.
  • Powerful new Photos app features.

Cons

  • New file system doesn't yet update Fusion or HDDs.
  • Siri produces different results from the results of queries typed into macOS's keyboard-based Spotlight.
  • Limited gaming options compared with Windows.
  • Some apps not yet updated for compatibility.

High Sierra, Apple's newest version of the macOS desktop operating system does exactly what an operating system upgrade should do: It makes your system faster, safer, and more reliable, while adding some welcome but unobtrusive conveniences. It lets you use your system exactly as you did before, without climbing a learning curve. The biggest changes from macOS Sierra are invisible technical changes that go to the heart of your system—the file system that underlies everything on your disk. Apple does a superb job of making its new APFS file system fully compatible with the old one, so any app that can run on an HFS+ disk will also run on an APFS disk. That said, there are plenty of changes you can see too, most notably in the substantially updated Photos app.

Diving Into High Sierra

I tested High Sierra on a new 13-inch MacBook Pro and on my workhorse machine, a 13-inch MacBook Air, complete with all the apps I've accumulated over the past few years. I am surprised and impressed by how well everything runs, even on the older machine. Visible improvements in High Sierra include (as mentioned) major enhancements to the Photos app, such as seamless integration with third-party apps for advanced photo editing, and minor but significant enhancements to Mail, including a Top Hits display of searched messages and split-view message-composing when Mail is running full-screen. The Notes app adds tables and notes you can pin to the top of the list.

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The macOS clipboard now lets you copy and paste between any two Macs that you're signed into. You can now share files by sending links directly from your iCloud drive, so you won't need to copy files to Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive when you give other people access to the same version of a file that you have on your disk.

Sharing in iCloud Drive

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Even better than the upgrades you can see in other parts of High Sierra are the improvements in Safari that involve things that you won't see and sounds that you won't hear. Safari's new controls over browser tracking mean that you're less likely to see ads urging you to buy a product you looked at on a different site a few days ago—or urging you to buy something that you already bought.

Safari instantly becomes my favorite browser on any platform with its by-default muting of all sound from any web page you visit, so that if you're listening to some quiet guitar music on iTunes, a strident announcer won't interrupt it when you visit a news site. A drop-down on any webpage, or a menu in Safari's Preferences pane, lets you switch off these options either everywhere or for specific sites. You get similar fine control over page zoom, Reader mode, and notifications.

Apple shared some test results showing Safari as the fastest browser. Safari under High Sierra certainly feels very fast, and in some quick-and-dirty runs of the Sunspider benchmark, it took about half the time to run compared with Chrome and Firefox—remarkable. On HTML5 compatibility, Apple's browser still trails Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on the HTML5Test site, but I haven't run into any site incompatibilities, as many of those HTML5 features aren't yet widely used. Bottom line: When I can choose between Edge, Chrome, or Firefox on a Windows machine or Safari on a Mac, I always choose Safari.

Other invisible low-level enhancements won't be evident in consumer software until developers make use of the new Metal 2 technology that produces faster graphics on modern hardware or new virtual-reality support that will bring the same kind of high-powered VR hardware and software to the Mac that's now available for Windows.

A Faster File System

When you upgrade an existing system to High Sierra, and your system uses modern flash-based storage, your old HFS+ system is automatically transformed to APFS. The entirely new system produces obvious improvements in speed and invisible improvements in reliability and backup technology. You'll see the benefits of APFS as soon as you make a copy of a large file. Under HPFS, whenever I duplicated a file larger than, say, 1 GB, I found myself tapping my fingers impatiently until the copy eventually got made. Under APFS, the same file-copying takes a second or less.

New Apple File System

Under the hood, APFS enables snapshot copies of the kind long used for making backups on Windows. These are now available for faster and more reliable backups with Time Machine and third-party software. APFS has built-in encryption technologies, rather than the added-on encryption used in earlier systems. I hoped that Apple's long-established FileVault encryption would now encrypt a disk at a faster pace than the hours typically required under earlier macOS versions, but FileVault still gets applied slowly. But, as before, it encrypts in the background so you can continue working while it gets itself installed. Security-obsessed users might want to reformat their disks as encrypted APFS volumes and install High Sierra on the encrypted disk, but Apple says there's no speed advantage to this procedure over letting FileVault install in the background on a unencrypted disk.

One impressive benefit of APFS is its ability to resize partitions dynamically. This makes possible third-party enhancements like Paragon Software's new $19.95 Paragon CampTune, which lets you redistribute space between macOS and BootCamp-based Windows partitions simply by moving a slider.

By the way, if you upgrade an older system that uses a spinning-platter hard disk, High Sierra won't convert your file system from HFS+ to APFS, because APFS is optimized for flash storage. However, you can boot to the Recovery partition and reformat your spinning-platter disk as an APFS disk (destroying any existing data in the process), and then install High Sierra on the reformatted disk. I did exactly this with an old MacBook during the beta period. I didn't, however, see enough performance improvements to recommend that anyone with a spinning-platter disk should do the same.

Windows users already have a high-end file system in Microsoft's NTFS, and NTFS supported shadow copies long before APFS arrived. But NTFS, despite continuous updates since its first release in 1993, wasn't built from the ground up for modern flash storage like APFS, and NTFS's sometimes painfully slow file-copying procedures seem decades behind APFS's startling speed.

More of Everything in Photos

Apple's Photos app has the most extensive set of visible changes of any part of the new version of the operating system. The sidebar displays all imports, so you don't have to search for an older one. New and redesigned filters add impressive-looking black-and-white and dramatizing warm or cool effects. Best of all, you can access third-party photo editing apps like Photoshop directly from the menu of any photo, and the changes you make in the third-party app get added as a removable (or nondestructive) layer in the Photos app, ready for any further changes you might make in Photos itself.

Apple Photos Editing Tools

Photos also lets you install third-party extensions from photo-printing services like Shutterfly, so that you can order printed books or mounted images directly from Photos' File menu. Other added features are designed to appeal to your inner teenager—like the looping and bouncing effects that you can apply to the Live Photos that you take on an iPhone. (If you don't have a recent iPhone, a Live Photo is essentially a 3-second video.) FaceTime now gets the ability to take Live Photos from the Mac or iPhone camera of the person you're talking with. For more on Live Photos, please read PCMag's review of iOS 11.

Windows' Photos app is lucid, fairly powerful, and attractive, but doesn't include Apple's people tagging, and doesn't integrate in the same way with third-party apps. The Windows app still gives you more control over auto-created online Albums based on events and locations. Both OSes' Photos apps have this capability, with Apple's dubbed Memories, but the Windows auto-albums actually let you add and remove included photos and add captions and titles. Windows Photos also simply lets you view image files wherever they are on disk or in the cloud, while Apple Photos requires you to import them.

Of course, those who are really into digital photography will opt for more powerful photo editing software like Adobe's Lightroom, Corel's PaintShop Pro, DxO Optics Pro, or ACDSee Pro. Some of these are available on both platforms. Still, the great majority of users should be able to do most of what they need—for free—in Photos.

Search Better

Spotlight and Siri continue to provide slightly different results for the same search, which Apple says is intentional and based on the different ways you access them, via text for Spotlight and by voice with Siri. Spotlight now follows Cortana in displaying detailed flight status information. Siri gets a more natural-sounding voice and a Personal DJ feature which lets you speak requests for types of music or performers—as long as you're signed up for Apple Music ($10.99 Per Month at Apple Music) . It won't work well with your non-Apple Music iTunes library or a competitor like Spotify.

Fly With Spotlight

No one chooses an OS for the quality of its voice assistant, and neither Windows' Cortana nor Apple's Siri is anywhere near perfect. In purely subjective testing, Cortana seems slightly more informative. For example, if I ask Cortana where a restaurant is, it tells me the distance as well as the location, while Siri only shows me a map. I can launch Cortana by saying "Hey Cortana," but I can't launch Siri on a Mac by saying "Hey Siri" as I can with my iPhone. You can find an elaborate workaround that uses High Sierra's advanced dictation options to create a spoken shortcut for Siri, but it's more trouble than it's worth. Incidentally, if Siri doesn't understand you, as in earlier macOS versions, you can find a Type to Siri option in the System Preferences app that lets you type your questions.

If you have a Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pro (like the one I tested on), the control strip at the top of the keyboard gets multiple enhancements, among them the ability to adjust brightness on secondary displays and enable or disable the Night Shift feature that changes color tone to reduce the blue light that disrupts your circadian rhythms.

Speaking of touch interfaces, macOS continues to keep its iOS touch-screen interface completely separate from its macOS keyboard based interface, even while working to make them look more alike and adding similar features—including features that let you answer a phone call on your Mac. Some of my PCMag.com colleagues disagree, but I think Apple gets this right, and that Microsoft's effort to make Windows 10 work as both a touch- and keyboard-enabled OS led Microsoft to produce overly minimal apps that should have remained full-featured old-style applications, and a touch interface that can feel awkward. Apple's separate-OS solution avoids these problems, though it also means that Apple is also having to reinvent laptop-style productivity within iOS 11 for its iPad Pros.

Should You Upgrade?

Apple specializes in smooth OS upgrades, and High Sierra, despite its brand-new file system, is one of the smoothest—but that may not be the case for everyone. If you have a Mac with a Fusion drive (one that divides data between a small solid-state drive and a larger spinning-platter disk) and you installed the public beta that Apple made available during the summer, the beta probably updated your drive to the new file system. But the release version won't support Fusion drives until Apple releases an update at some unspecified future time. In the meantime, you'll have to restore your drive to its original HFS+ formatting, and the procedure requires multiple steps and a full Time Machine backup. (Backups made by third-party software like Carbon Copy Cloner should also work, but Apple only supports its own backup software.) You can find detailed instructions on Apple's APFS Fusion page.

Desktop

If you use a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar (the narrow horizontal screen that takes the place of function keys), and you don't like the distraction of the ever-changing Touch Bar icons, then you should upgrade immediately to High Sierra. It finally adds an option to make the Touch Bar display the traditional function keys by default. When you want the distracting Touch Bar features, just press Fn to display them. The lack of this option in Sierra was enough to keep me from buying a high-end MacBook Pro, because the animated Touch Bar made it impossible to concentrate on work.

Last year, when Sierra was released, I had to update some of the Applescript apps I've written as wrappers for emulation software, but the versions that I updated for Sierra ran perfectly out of the box in High Sierra. I use the superb Wineskin Winery app to create wrappers for some old Windows apps that I rely on, and some of these didn't run under High Sierra, but I was able to create new wrappers that worked. Other Wineskin-based apps worked perfectly, and there seems to be no easy way to predict which ones work and which ones won't.

One glitch I noticed was that my favorite secure-notes app, the open-source CiphSafe app, which hasn't been updated in years, sometimes—not always—crashed when exiting. Apple explained that this occurred because the app uses out-of-date Secure Socket Layers (SSL) features that might compromise security, and that it was time to find something newer. I can't argue with that. My favorite maintenance utility, the freeware Onyx, won't be updated to High Sierra for a while, but that's standard procedure for any new macOS version.

A very few developers and other users who sometimes boot to older version of macOS may want to run High Sierra on an HFS+ disk instead of upgrading the file system to AFPS. When I booted my APFS-formatted machine to an external disk running OS X El Capitan—the version before Sierra—my APFS disk and all its contents were completely invisible to the El Capitan system. However, when I booted to an external disk running Sierra, the new APFS disk was completely visible. In short, you can read an APFS disk from a system running Sierra, but not from systems running earlier OS X versions.

One minor peeve about macOS, and it's the same complaint I've made about the last few versions: The built-in folder icons are blindingly bright, and you can't change them by changing the display theme from the default theme to the optional darker them. Maybe Apple will fix this next time, but I won't get my hopes up. In Windows, by contrast, you can change a folder icon to any icon image you like.

That's a minor nit, however. To me macOS looks and feels more coherent than Windows 10. Windows' mixture of old-style apps and new Windows Store apps (now called Universal Windows Platform apps, since they can run on Xboxes and other Windows-based hardware) may confuse some users, and the same can be said about its two separate configuration tools, the Control Panel and the Settings app. But some classes of users—especially PC gamers and corporations who need to manage a set of work PCs—are still better served by Windows 10.

Cautious users typically wait until the first point-release of a new OS before upgrading, and I won't argue against caution. But I'm using High Sierra on my daily workhouse machine, and I'm delighted with it. In the course of the day, I use both Windows and macOS, and I admire the speed and technical prowess of both. Both are Editors' Choices, and both are mature, highly polished operating systems. But, for me at least, macOS remains more enjoyable to use, more coherent, more manageable.

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About Edward Mendelson

Edward Mendelson has been a contributing editor at PC Magazine since 1988, and writes extensively on Windows and Mac software, especially about office, internet, and utility applications.

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Apple macOS High Sierra