NEW YORK—Siri evaded my question for what took Apple's voice assistant so long to get onto the Mac. “Who, me?” responds the voice familiar to anyone who uses an iPhone.
However tardy Siri's arrival, the debut of Apple’s loquacious personal helper on the company’s computers is arguably the most welcome new feature coming to Macs that will be running macOS Sierra.
Sierra is the latest iteration of Apple’s operating system for its PCs and is the first version in years without the OS X moniker. It was announced last week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), and will be available as a public beta in July.
The best advice for most consumers is to avoid the beta release altogether and wait until the formal release in the fall, unless you have a spare Mac to try it on. The upgrade will be free.
I’ve been previewing the Sierra beta on a loaner MacBook Pro from Apple for about a week now, long enough to draw a few impressions, though many of the features I’m eager to try are not yet available or incomplete. Consider this an early look.
The operating system carries the beta designation for a reason—the software is still buggy. Case in point: at times I had to reboot the computer just so Siri would hear me using the machine’s internal microphone.
SIRI HELPS FIND FILES
Still, you can envision how Siri on a Mac can lend a hand, um, voice. You might ask it to dig out files — “show me all the budget files I worked on in the last week” — or ask to lower the screen brightness. I also asked Siri to “show me tweets from NASA” and open USATODAY.com. Siri can search the Web or deliver the latest weather forecast, just as on the iPhone.
You can access Siri by clicking on icons in the Dock or menu bar. What you can’t do is summon the program via the verbal “Hey Siri” command that works on some iPhones. You can pin some of Siri’s search results to Notifications Center.
Expanding Siri’s role is an important strategic thrust for Apple, especially as other digital assistants from Google and Amazon (Alexa) assume a more prominent role. It is worth noting that Microsoft’s own vocal assistant Cortana has had a presence on Windows 10 PCs since its launch last July.
In contrast to Microsoft’s approach with Windows 10—essentially running the same operating system across PCs, phones and tablets—Apple has kept its operating system for the Mac separate and distinct from the iOS software used on the iPhone and iPad.
But iOS and (what had been) OS X have had many overlapping features. Adding Siri to the Mac only increases that overlap.
FLOATING VIDEOS
Also new to Sierra is a picture-in-picture feature already in use on some iPads that will let you watch video from Safari or iTunes on your Mac in a resizable window that floats over your desktop in either of the four corners of the display—at this stage, anyway, the feature didn’t work with all the videos I tried.
The biggest addition to the Photos app on the Mac is a feature called Memories. Leveraging what Apple refers to as advanced computer vision technology, the software pores through objects and scenes within your photo library identifying, people, places and so on. It then automatically creates collections or Memories from various events, perhaps a birthday party or wedding, with photos plotted on a map.
It’s too soon to tell how well Apple will pull this off, which appears to be a response to similar capabilities in Google Photos. A Memories collection built around a two-year business trip to San Francisco seemed arbitrary. Another collection was centered around the “best of last 3 months.” But again we’re talking beta software.
Other observations: Most of the changes coming to Apple Music and iTunes are cosmetic but the interface does feel fresher. I’d still like to better be able to determine which songs in my library I own outright and which I’m “renting” through an Apple Music subscription.
One tool I can see using is a tabs feature (borrowed from the Safari browser) that lets you open numerous tabs inside certain apps. In the Maps app it meant I could create tabs for two different Maps locations.
Apple spent time at WWDC hyping the improvements coming to its Messages app but most of fancy tricks on the sending side will be limited to iOS devices. From the Mac, I could receive dressed up messages sent from an iOS 10 device: featuring stickers, handwritten messages, and an "invisble ink" photo that was revealed only when I dragged the cursor across it. You cannot send such messages from the Mac, but you can respond with large-sized emojis, or with hearts, thumbs-ups or other symbols tacked onto conversation bubbles, through what Apple calls a Tapbacks feature.
It was not yet possible to test a feature that will let you unlock your Mac in lieu of a password, just by wearing an authenticated Apple Watch on your wrist and provided you’re within three feet of the computer. The feature requires a watch with not yet released software.
Same goes for using Apple Pay on the Web, which will also require updated software on an Apple Watch or on devices with iOS 10 software.
Yet another feature that I was unable to try is the universal clipboard that lets you copy stuff off one Mac running Sierra and paste it onto another—and/or an iOS device running iOS 10.
MacOS promises easier ways to help you free up and manage space on your computer, mainly by stashing stuff in the cloud. For instance, you can automatically save space by removing iTunes movies and TV shows that you’ve already watched from the Mac.
Since I heeded my own advice and didn’t install the beta on any of my personal Macs, how much space I’ll save on those machines remains to be seen. But there do appear to be a number of features that should please the Mac faithful. Starting with Siri.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
Baig is author of Macs For Dummies, an independent work published by Wiley.
