Though most of macOS Sierra’s features were revealed at WWDC, there are still a handful of discoveries to look for. On August 29th, Apple released the eighth beta of macOS Sierra to developers and the seventh beta version to public testers. It’s optimized for Flash/SSD storage and features strong encryption, copy-on-write metadata, space sharing, cloning of files and directories, snapshots, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives and improved file system fundamentals. One of the most exciting announcements was Apple’s new file system APFS, which is already available to Apple developers in a pre-release macOS Sierra beta version and is scheduled to ship in 2017. A public beta, released on July 7, brought Siri, the picture-in-picture mode and a bunch of new Continuity features, like an Auto Unlock option for unlocking a Mac with an Apple Wtch and a Universal Clipboard for copying and pasting text from one Apple device to another.
We saw the reveal of macOS Sierra at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2016, with a private beta issued to developers at the same time. When it comes to announcing new software, Apple gets into an annual cycle.
