Tom's initial review of macOS High Sierra: Read the Reviews and Look forward to the future. No need for hasty action

To start with, I read these three reviews of High Sierra:

 

Roman Loyola at Macworld.com This is a one page summary

Andrew Cunningham at Arestechnica.com  This gets into the details

Jason Snell at Sixcolors.com Jason knows the most about the Photos app, so read this if that’s your interest.

 

 To get to the meat of the matter, you don’t need to upgrade your Mac, particularly your production Mac, to 10.13 right this minute.

Oh, it has some features that will bear fruit in the future, but for now, install it on a second Mac or on a partition/hard drive that you can afford to erase later.

To begin:

 

Apple File System (APFS): Apple has work to do on this. Right now, it only works with SSDs. Now since Apple still sells the majority of desktops with spinning hard drives and the Fusion Drives, it needs to finish work on APFS so that it works with both spinning hard drives and those Fusion Drives. Look for that in a future update to 10.13. 

Photos: This is the reason to install 10.13 right now. Apple has significantly improved this app. 

Metal 2 graphics: This needs work. When it works, it’s great. But it’s still not ready for those nifty external GPU’s you’ve read about. Look for that in a future release. Besides, you’ll need a Mac that supports the Thunderbolt 3/USB-C interface and standards. That old Mac mini with Thunderbolt 1 or 2 won’t cut it.

Virtual Reality: See Metal 2. Coming soon to a ridiculous looking headset hear you. 

I’ll roll out more review of 10.13 High Sierra as time progresses. I’m particularly interested in how it supports answers to running old 32-bit software that future releases of MacOS won’[t support, but that you need to run for whatever reason.

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog