New technologies at the heart of the system make your Mac more reliable, capable, and responsive — and lay the foundation for future innovations. macOS High Sierra also refines the features and apps you use every day. It’s macOS at its highest level yet.
Coming later this year.
macOS High Sierra introduces new core technologies that improve the most important functions of your Mac. From rearchitecting how it stores your data to improving how you watch videos to unleashing the full power of the graphics processors, it’s all central to today’s Mac experience.
Your documents. Your photos. Your mail. Your apps. To your Mac, everything you care about is data. And a file system is what organizes all that data into files and folders you can access with a click. Our current file system was designed in the early days of Mac, and it has performed beautifully ever since. But today’s flash‑based Mac opens up new possibilities for innovation, so it’s time to lay a new foundation. With macOS High Sierra, we’re introducing the Apple File System to Mac, with an advanced architecture that brings a new level of security and responsiveness.
Advanced. A new 64‑bit architecture is designed for today’s flash technology and ready for tomorrow’s new storage capabilities.
Responsive. Designed to make common tasks like duplicating a file and finding the size of a folder’s contents happen instantly.
Safe and secure. Enjoy even more peace of mind with built‑in encryption, crash‑safe protections, and simplified data backup on the go.
With the rising popularity of 4K video, a new industry standard arrives on Mac — HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding, also known as H.265).1 It can compress video up to 40 percent more than H.264, the current standard for video compression. Using HEVC, videos stream better and take up less space on your Mac, while preserving the same visual quality.2
macOS High Sierra lets developers create interactive virtual reality experiences on Mac for the first time, using the new iMac with Retina 5K display, the new iMac Pro coming in late 2017, or any supported Mac paired with an external GPU.3 Along with key peripherals like the HTC Vive VR headset and apps like Final Cut Pro X, SteamVR, Epic Unreal 4 Editor, and Unity Editor, developers will have everything they need to create immersive new worlds for you to explore.
Navigate, organize, and edit your photos like never before with new features in the Photos app. Tailor your web browsing experience in Safari. Find what you’re looking for even faster in your Mail inbox. macOS High Sierra makes a great experience even greater.
People love working with their photos on a Mac. So for macOS High Sierra, we focused on giving you new tools that make using your library more efficient and fun.
Instantly filter photo collections by your favorite criteria. A new selection counter keeps track of what you’ve selected, and lets you drag and drop collected images into an album or export them to the desktop. You can also rotate and favorite batches of images right from the toolbar.
Easily make sophisticated contrast and color adjustments to your photos with powerful tools like Curves for fine‑tuning and Selective Color to make any color more saturated. And new, professionally inspired filters let you quickly give your pictures a distinctive look.
When editing a Live Photo, try the new Loop effect to turn it into a looping video that you can experience again and again. Try Bounce to play the action forward and backward. Or choose Long Exposure for a beautiful DSLR‑like effect to blur water or extend light trails. You can also trim, mute, and select a key photo for each Live Photo.
macOS High Sierra introduces more than a dozen new Memories categories — including pets, babies, outdoor activities, performances, weddings, birthdays, and sporting events — for even more personal and meaningful moments.
Easily find your favorite subjects in the People album with larger image thumbnails and more accurate groupings. And when you use iCloud Photo Library, your album stays up to date on all your devices.
Open a picture in a third‑party photo editing app like Photoshop or Pixelmator directly from Photos, and your edits will automatically be saved in your Photos library. You can also download third‑party projects extensions from the Mac App Store that let you order framed prints, create web pages, and more, right from the Photos app.
Remember when you looked at that green mountain bike online? And then saw annoying green mountain bike ads everywhere you browsed? 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. So your browsing stays your business.
Now Safari keeps unexpected and unwanted videos with audio from playing in the first place, so you can browse in peace. Have a favorite site where you always want videos to play? Use new per‑site settings in Safari to enable media autoplay.
Automatically use Safari Reader for every web article that supports it, so you can view websites without ads, navigation, and other distractions.
Personalize your browsing experience in Safari by enabling settings for individual websites, like page zoom level, location services, notifications, and content blockers. So each website appears just how you like it.
Easily share any file stored in iCloud Drive with a link. The people you invite can simply click the link and get to work — no creating copies, sending attachments, or managing versions.
Now Spotlight does even more. Enter your flight number to see arrival and departure times, terminals, gates, delays — even maps. Looking for info about constellations? Musicians born in San Francisco? Former heads of state? Spotlight now shows multiple Wikipedia results when there’s more than one answer to your inquiry.
Mail search is now faster and easier with Top Hits, which puts the messages most relevant to your search right at the top of the list. Top Hits reflects the mail you’ve read, the senders you reply to, your VIPs, and more. And the more you search, the smarter it gets.
Pin your most used notes, like grocery lists, to‑do lists, and meeting agendas, to the top of Notes so you can easily find them when you need them. Your thoughts have never been so organized.
macOS High Sierra lets you save a special moment in a FaceTime call as a Live Photo. Both participants receive a notification that the photo was taken, and the Live Photo goes into your Photos library.
Now you can share an iCloud storage plan with your entire family. Choose 200GB or 2TB and give everyone enough space to store photos, videos, documents, and more.
Need to organize a potluck? Keep track of Little League stats? Track expenses on a business trip? Keep everything organized in a table, right in Notes.