Gadgetory

OS 10 has a new name it's called Mac OS and this version is called cierra the headline feature is that you can talk to Siri on your Mac now but there are a lot of little things that make your Mac way way better at talking to your iPhone your iPad and even your Apple watch now we've learned a lot from phones over the past 10 years and now Apple is applying a lot of that to the Mac let's start with Siri you can launch it one of several ways you can hit function space hey Siri how's it going you can also you don't want to do that you can click this icon on the dock or if you don't wanna do that you also got this icon up here it's basically everywhere it's a little confusing but stick with it and you can ask Siri Siri things like show me the weather in Utah here's the forecast for Salt Lake City Utah between today and June 29 2016 so you get this little interactive widget here and you can like save it as an image or if you want you can even add it to your notification area it's actually a lot more useful than spotlight overall which makes it even more frustrating that the two things just aren't combined I type on my computer and I really wish I could just type at Siri - so while Siri makes your computer feel a little bit more like your phone there's a whole pile of other features that make your computer better friends with your phone and the first and very best of them is called iCloud desktop and documents basically it's what iCloud Drive always should have been you've got some stuff on your desktop and it just automatically mirrors itself to an app on your phone it's exactly like Dropbox but you don't have to think about it because it's built right into the Mac and right into the iPhone well until you do Apple still charges 10 bucks a month for terabyte of storage or 3 bucks a month for 200 gigs and it's really easy to fill that storage up especially if you're backing up everything out of your Documents folder so another thing you can fill up all that space is all the files that have been backed up with a new feature called optimized Macs orange the way it works is it looks at when your hard drive is getting too full and takes all the photos and files that you haven't touched in a while deletes them from your local computer and backs them up to iCloud you can still get them whenever you want to but it means that you've got more space on your computer to do the work that you're doing right now so there's a bunch of other continuity features to talk about too if you have iOS 10 on your iPhone you can cut and paste from your phone to the Mac and vice versa if you have watch OS 3 on your Apple watch you can use it to unlock your Mac so you don't have to constantly type in your password beyond that continuity stuff there are a bunch of other app updates the biggest one is two photos so if we open up photos here you can see we've got albums for people and places at Apple can figure out those things on its own it also has this memory section which shows you a bunch of stuff that it's put together based on you know it's algorithms to make little albums sort of like Google photos does and in terms of editing photos there are some do editing features if you add it a live photo here you it will maintain itself as a live photo and you can of course name people here so this is me iTunes also got an update it's still kind of a mess there's like sidebar if you want it in a drop-down and so on but Apple music has these nice new big fonts and a playlist weekly playlist which is great so it's a little bit better here but overall going into iTunes still feels kind of like a children also there's tabs you know that there's tabs in Safari but you can also get tabs in pages there's new tabs you can also get tabs in maps there's a whole bunch of tabs basically any app that wants to make a tab can make a tab now because apparently tabs are how we work with desktops from now on I should remind you that this is just a Developer Preview so a lot of things will change there's a beta for the public coming in July and then the whole thing is going to be released everybody in September and I'm hoping that between now and then we're going to see Siri get a lot more features because I got to tell you she works great when she works but there's a lot of questions that she just doesn't understand you had one email message from James temple open it what up shall I open you just didn't get their digits arey if you're an iPhone user this is going to be a great update for you and if you're not Apple is making the case yet again that if you have a Mac you really want to have an iPhone because the two things just work way better together Siri is actually a lot more useful than spotlight now all those little aptitude it up all those little apt updates it up and if you're not I got to tell you I kind of tell you that the Donald Trump thing that's in my head now why am I talking like Donald Trump